Lakshadweep

Lakshadweep does not let you wander in, and that is the first thing to love about it. India's smallest Union Territory, thirty-six islands scattered across the Arabian Sea, ten of them inhabited, all of them together adding up to barely thirty-two square kilometres of land guarding four hundred thousand square kilometres of sea, admits visitors only by permit, mostly through official packages, with tourist access limited to a handful of islands. The paperwork took me weeks and taught me patience; the reason for it took me one snorkel to understand. These are coral atolls, the only ones India has, the visible rims of ancient volcanic peaks long sunk beneath the sea, kept above water by nothing but the ongoing labour of living coral. The permit system is not bureaucracy. It is a velvet rope around something genuinely, physically fragile, holding the crowd to what the reef can survive.

I chose the sea route out, because a place this remote deserves to be arrived at slowly: the passenger ship from Kochi, a floating small town of returning islanders, sacks of onions, students coming home from mainland colleges, and one traveller from Andhra being adopted by a card game on D-deck. Fourteen to twenty hours, depending on the sea's mood. Somewhere in the night the swell changed its accent, and at dawn I came up on deck to my first atoll, a pencil line of palms on the horizon, and in front of it, announcing itself before the land did, a colour. The colour. The lagoon-turquoise that no photograph had prepared me for, because photographs cannot show you something that appears to be lit from below.