TRAVELLING VARIOUS PLACES

Barren Island is located 135km northeast of the Andaman Islands capital city of Port Blair. surrounded by nothing but water for miles, this solitary sentinel keeps a silent watch over the Andaman Sea. The giant pinnacle’s massive foundations rest in the dark depths 2,250m below the surface. What mysterious creatures ply these silent, sunless waters is a matter of conjecture. But an exploration of Barren Island and its surrounding sea provides startling evidence that the island is anything but barren.We left for Barren Island in the wee hours of the night. Loaded with food, water and enough scuba diving equipment for two days of diving, our boat headed northeast through the dark sea. I watched the firework display of neon-green phosphorescent plankton that trailed in our wake like the tail of a shooting star in the night sky, and then fell asleep to the gentle rocking of the boat. Despite being almost 1,500km east of the Indian subcontinent, we were still on Indian Standard Time. Sunlight kissed the sky above us at 4.30 in the morning. We still had four hours of travel before we arrived, but the lone island was already visible, silhouetted against the pink horizon.The sight was a familiar one to me, this being my second visit to the giant recluse. A previous visit in 2006 saw Barren’s fumaroles emitting plumes of thick sulphurous smoke. In the pre-dawn light, the rim of the volcano had glowed red from burning ash. A gentle breeze had lifted the smoke to the north end of the island where it created a giant cloud that spewed its contents into the sea. On circling the island, we were forced to pass beneath this cloud, and our boat emerged from the rain drenched in thick black soot. The ash from the rain had stained the sea, reducing visibility in the water to nothing and thus rendering diving impossible. This time, however, the skies above Barren were clear, and my pulse quickened with anticipation.As we circled the 3km-long island to find a suitable spot to anchor it was difficult to ignore its stark beauty. The 2km-wide caldera, rising 350m above the sea, sits on the northern half of the island. Its sloping walls of dark-grey cinder are bare, shunning all forms of life. In places, steam rises from the ground in silent spirals reaching for the sky. On the eastern and southern sides of the island, trees and shrubs cling tenaciously to steep slopes that fall to the sea. Feral goats pepper this green hill scape, which, in combination with the sulphur -choked lunar desolation of the volcano, seems straight out of a Tolkien book. How these goats got here is a mystery, but it is popularly believed that in 1891 a steamer from Port Blair left them on this island. Apparently the British did this quite often, leaving livestock on islands where they feared they might be stranded in future. But these are fleeting thoughts and cursory observations made at the same time I was checking my scuba equipment. Tales of schooling hammerhead sharks and giant manta rays had whetted our appetite for this long-awaited opportunity, and we were eager to enter the water.