Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Spectacular Diving at Kadmat Island, India
Kadmat is one of the larger islands of Lakshadweep, 400 km off the west coast of India. It is 8 km long and 500 m wide.
The remoteness of Kadmat Island really gives you a feeling of "getting away from it all" - but this comes at a price, either in terms of money or time. Staying on Kadmat Island and paying for the dives are not expensive (in fact, comparatively cheap), but getting to Kadmat is.
The only flight into the Lakshadweep archipelago is from the city of Cochin which is in south India. There is only one flight a day (Monday through Saturday) and it takes two hours. These flights are cancelled every now and then for various reasons. If you do manage to fly to Lakshadweep, you have to take a 3- to 4-hour speedboat transfer to Kadmat.
A cheap alternative to the flight-speedboat option is taking an 18- to 24-hour ship journey from Cochin directly to Kadmat, though this is also fairly unreliable since (a) the ship schedule sometimes changes at the last minute and (b) the ships are very old and may be cancelled because of engine failure or things like that. If you do decide to go, build in a few days of delay-time.
On the upside, I faced almost all these problems in my recent trip to Kadmat - and I still think the trip was worth it. The diving was truly spectacular, and Kadmat had a wonderfully comfortable, mellow island feel to it. At one point there were only 3 of us on the whole resort. I only wish I could have stayed there longer!
The Lakshadweep islands have the same gorgeous marine life and great visibility as the Maldives, only for much cheaper. The dive centre I trained with - Lacadives - had a great student-to-teacher ratio - I was the only student! Lacadives is located in the Kadmat Resort. This is at the isolated South tip of the island. Kadmat is one of the few Lakshadweep islands which is open to foreign tourists.
by Trushna
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Labels: dive destination, India
