The Last Archipelago (Part 1)
Condĕ Nast Traveller – July 2002

THE MERGUI HAS SOME 800 ( LARGELY UNMAPPED ) ISLANDS, A POPULATION OF ELUSIVE SEA GYPSIES ( THE MOKEN ), AND, BECAUSE IT BELONGS TO REPRESSIVE MYANMAR, ALMOST NO VISITORS. AS THE JUNTA IN YANGON INCHES TOWARD POLITICAL REFORM, ROLF POTTS PLUMBS A FINAL FRONTIER

AS I GLIDE IN A KAYAK THROUGH A NARROW channel in the Mergui Archipelago, off the southern coast of Myanmar, I almost overlook the small clearing at the edge of Wa Ale Island’s tangled jungle. I’m scanning the trees for crab-eating macaques-the shy, brownish monkeys that haunt this shore in the evening-when, out of the corner of my eye, I notice the collapsed huts. Realizing that I’ve stumbled across an abandoned sea gypsy camp, I splash ashore to investigate.

In two days of kayaking among these remote islands, I’ve spotted sea eagles and tree pythons: paddled alongside smooth-coated sea otters and seen sand markings left by sea turtles and monitor lizards: glided through fluttery clouds of yellow butterflies and watched sunsets turn the Andaman Sea cotton candy pink - but I have yet to see any of the nomadic humans who’ve made these islands their home for the past few centuries.

These sea gypsies, the Moken , are one of the last peoples on earth to retain their prehistoric way of life, and one of the few to still be purely nomadic. Not only have they rejected many of the trappings of modernity, but they have, over the years, rejected agriculture, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and even net fishing. Spearing or foraging for their food from the sea, they live for most of the year on small hand made boats that ply the Mergui Archipelago, preferring isolation to interaction with their Burmese, Thai, Malaysian, and Indian neighbors. Because they don’t save for the future - and are neither violent nor greedy nor materialistic - the Moken have lived as victims for most of their history. Even the name they’ve given themselves evokes isolation and fatalism : Moken means “sea drowned.”

I hike into the clearing and pick through the abandoned Moken camp as carefully as if it were a crime scene. From the looks of it, the sea gypsies spent most of their time here resting and eating : Piles of seashells sit next to the blackened stones of fire pits : odd plastic candy wrappers flit about in the sand. Half-smoked cigarettes-leaf tobacco rolled in newsprint-line the edges of the collapsed huts, suggesting that the Moken spent a fair amount of time here waiting out rainstorms.

But what is remarkable about this sea gypsy garbage is that there so little of it. On the opposite side of Wa Ale Island, along beaches more exposed to the currents of the Indian Ocean, one can find all manner of refuse from distant civilizations: rejoice anti-dandruff shampoo bottles from Thailand: aerosol cans of Hit insect fogger from Indonesia : plastic bottles of Golden Mountain mineral water from the Myanmar mainland: empty cans of Full Cream Vitamin-Enriched Milk from New Zealand. That such detritus is the only evidence of the outside world in the Mergui Archipelago is something of a fluke, since this group of eight hundred islands borders two of Thailand’s most popular tourist areas. The Similan Islands, which are a geophysical extension of the Mergui Archipelago, see eighty dive boats a week during the tourist high season, and the island of Phuket, a few more hours to the south, hosts three million visitors a year. By contrast, the entire ten thousand-square-mile expanse of the Mergui has remained largely unvisited - mainly due to forty years of political isolation at the hands of successive Burmese governments.

Indeed, no other group of islands in such close proximity to a mass-tourism destination has remained so pristine and so isolated. But now that Myanmar’s military junta is showing tentative signs of openness, particularly with the dramatic May release of pro-democracy dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, the Mergui Archipelago stands to become one of the world’s most attractive-and most vulnerable emerging tourist areas.

WHEN THE DAYLIGHT BEGINS TO FADE, I paddle out of the channel and head for a small base camp on the south end of Wa Ale Island. I’ve been sleeping here for the past two nights, ever since I made the initial two-hour speedboat journey in from the Myanmar border checkpoint at Kawthoung. Operated by SEAL, a world class adventure-travel company, the camp is the only land-based tourist venture to be established since the archipelago was opened to dive boats in 1996. For now, it consists of little more than half a dozen nylon tents pitched in the grass behind a sandy beach. An open-air kitchen, a tree mounted shower, and a chemical toilet keep the place from feeling too primitive. Should kayak camps and adventure cruises in the archipelago prove successful, SEAL will expand this camp into a self- contained mini-resort, complete with open-walled thatched villas and air-conditioned sleeping salas.

As I settle in for a late dinner in the mess tent, Graham Frost, the easygoing thirty-eight-year-old Brit who owns SEAL, brings in an Admiralty chart of the islands. Since the sprawling archipelago has been accessible to outsiders for only five years, comprehensive information about it simply does not exist. Tomorrow morning, Frost will lead us northward in search of new destinations. Apart from what he has found on previous exploratory trips, the only clues we have to what awaits us come from shipping maps, colonial-era navigation books, and published journals from the merchants and missionaries who came here in the years before World War II.

“There’s an appeal in going to a place when you’re not sure what’s out there,” Frost says as he unrolls the chart. Indeed, just looking at the islands scattered on the map is enough to give me a buzz of anticipation. Because the region has been largely off-limits since before the advent of scuba diving electronic depth sounders, and global positioning satellites, many of its mysteries have yet to be solved. The wreck of the Sir Harvey Adamson, a British steamer that disappeared with 269 passengers and crew en route to the ancient trading town of Myeik in 1974, has never been found. A WWI-era Japanese airfield on Lampi Island has never been surveyed. The rocky bays of Tenasserim Island, which sheltered generations of pirates who preyed on ships bound for India, have never been systematically dived for scuttled ships or jettisoned caches of Ming porcelain (though local fishermen have been known to turn up such relics in their nets).

Since we can’t be too ambitious on a mere four day expedition, Frost settles on one major goal : a steep limestone island said to contain a saltwater lagoon that can be entered only through a cave at low tide. Called Elephant Island in old British travel accounts, it is not listed by name on our Admiralty chart. But the navigation book mentions a string of karsts near Pan Daung Island, and this is where we will center our search as we cruise north toward Myeik.

After Frost lays out the sundry details or the expedition, I walk out to the darkened beach. In what is becoming a nightly ritual for me, I lie down in the sand, soaking in a peculiar feeling of isolation : the world reduced to bright stars, silent jungle, and the soothing rumble of waves.