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North Sentinel Island, located in the Bay of Bengal, is home to the unwelcoming and isolated Sentinelese people, who speak a unique language and live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Visitors are prohibited from coming within 3 nautical miles of the island, and a recent attempt at conversion ended in the death of a missionary.
Even the most intrepid traveler would do well to avoid North Sentinel Island, a remote island in the Bay of Bengal.
The locals are generally unwelcoming to visitors, and even if you make it safely to the island, you won’t know what to say: the Sentinelese speak a language unknown to the outside world and meant to be largely unrelated to anything spoken on the islands around them.
Considered the last pre-Neolithic people on Earth, the Sentinelese – believed to number between 50 and 150 – live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and usually want to be left alone. This shouldn’t be difficult to achieve, as it’s actually against the law to come within 3 nautical miles of North Sentinel Island.
If all of that isn’t enough to warn you, consider this: In 2018, missionary John Allen Chau paid some fishermen to tow him to the island. Her hope of converting the islanders to Christianity ended in his own death, only days after his arrival.
Read more about North Sentinel Island:
North Sentinel Island has an area of approximately 37 square miles (60 square km) and is more than 745 miles (1,200 km) from India, which has owned the island since 1947.
It wasn’t until 1980 that outsiders heard the language spoken by the Sentinelese, leading them to believe it was unique to the island.
Despite the devastating toll it took in nearby areas, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami did little damage to the Sentinelese, perhaps because they moved to higher ground before it hit.
