Myanmar’s Andaman Paradise - Part 1
Thailand Tatler May 2002

‘Closed to the outside world for decades and therefore largely untouched by development, Myanmar’s pristine Mergui Archipelago is finally starting to get the recognition it deserves, as JAN IMRICH discovers for Thailand Tatler magazine’.

Little more than a one-hour flight from Bangkok is one of the world’s last remaining natural wonders: Myanmar’s Mergui Archipelago. Over 800 islands, all but a few dozen uninhabited, sit in the Andaman Sea. They are largely unspoiled and are surrounded by the cleanest waters I’ve ever seen. This is eco-tourism’s most exciting new hot area. The Mergui’s huge, almost untapped potential in the beach, adventure tourism and eco-tourism market has travellers and divers from all over the world excited and talking. It’s easy to see why: Imagine a world largely untouched since 1948 when the British were expelled from Burma. A world closed until 1997 to all but the Burmese military, a handful of Moken (sea gypsies), fishermen and sundry traders of sea cucumbers, rattan, shark fins and swallows’ nests. Featuring excellent diving – over a dozen world-class dive sites, like In-Through-the-Out-Door and Devil Rock have been identified already – Meyik’s islands, to give them their local name, have stunning limestone cliffs pockmarked with caves, many of which lead to enclosed tidal lagoons. These islands are ecological treasure troves filled with a diversity of wildlife and plants seldom seen anymore anywhere else in Asia... or the world.

The bigger islands’ hilly, green interiors contain excellent hiking through tall forests filled with hornbills, parakeets, gibbons, flying lemurs, barking deer, macaques, howler monkeys, leopards, boars, fruit bats and many, many other organisms. In fact, some naturalists speculate that Lampi Kyun, a national park, one of Meyik’s largest islands and perhaps the least disturbed natural ecosystem in the world, might conceal undiscovered animal species or even species extinct elsewhere in Asia, like the Sumatran rhinoceros. Carl Lemen, our dive master from SEAL, tells a hilarious, deeply emotional story of spotting, and then being chased while kayaking by two Asian elephants encountered as they emerged from the forest onto the beach at Lampi Kyunn

This spectacular universe is easily accessible to vacationing families and luxury travellers thanks to South East liveaboard’s, an adventure cruise and dive company, based in Phuket and operating out of Kawthong, Myanmar, just across the Pakchan from Ranong, Thailand. Their liveaboard’s are comfortable sailboats and trimarans, your home as you cruise through the Mergui.

Starting just offshore from the Myanmar town of Meyik, or Mergui as the British called it, this spectacular array of unsullied islands is set in clear, deep blue-green Andaman waters off the Meyik Peninsula, a thin, 480-km-long sliver of land that Myanmar shares with Thailand. The peninsula separates the Indian Ocean’s Andaman Sea to the west from the Gulf of Thailand to the east until it ends at Kawthong, some 300 km north of Phuket. This is an area rich in history: Hindus from the Indian kingdom of Coromandel ruled it in the 16th century before traders from Siam, Malaya, Arabia, Europe, China and elsewhere were drawn to it (despite the pirates who infested the Andaman Sea and the Malacca Straits further south) by its wealth and because Meyik was a gateway port to the Ayuthayan empire. Today, it stands as something many a stressed-out urbanite yearns for: a brand new world, quiet, no development, very few people, a chance to see the world as it must have looked a thousand years ago.

We woke on our first day after four hours of motoring from Kawthong’s noisy, gritty portside to find ourselves off 115 Island. (Confounded by finding so many islands, British surveyors gave up trying to name them all and simply gave many of them numbers.) We were almost blinded by the sheer white crescent beach in front of us, a vivid contrast to the blue-green waters all around – waters so clear we could easily see the sea bed a dozen metres below. The lush, gently rolling, blue-shrouded hills echoed to hornbills’ cries while macaque monkeys scavenged on the beach at low tide.

Once in our sea kayaks, we explored deep caves filled with thousands of swiftlets – a bird’s nest soup lover’s dream! Onshore, the sugar crystal beach was littered with huge clam shells and smoked wooden racks. “The Moken come here from time to time to harvest and dry sea cucumbers,” Nong, our Thai captain, explained. A few of the islands are home to sea gypsies, a nomadic seafaring people who live on their boats for six or more months of the year, sailing from island to island, landing only to trade sea cucumbers or shark fins with Chinese traders from Yangon or Yunnan. The sea gypsies are known as chao naam to Thais, sealong to Burmese, and Moken or maw ken – the drowned people – in their own self-deprecating tongue. Moken divers can reportedly reach depths of 60 metres with the aid of a stone belt around their waists and an old air hose held above the surface.