Lost island paradise re-emerges - Part 2
Bangkok Post (Thailand, 1998)

Lampi Island? In five years, this may be a name to rival that of Phuket or Koh Samui. Right now, there’s nothing there. Although Lampi is about the size of Phuket or Singapore, it’s virtually uninhabited except for a few sea nomads and a small military base. It’s covered with forest, home to all sorts of wildlife, including elephants, buffalo and those reported tigers. The fringing reefs are rich in marine life. Early in the century, the Mergui Gazetteer listed the following animals for the whole district: gibbons, flying lemur, jungle-dog, flying fox, civet, tiger, leopard, bear, elephant, boar, mouse-deer, sambhar, barking deer, wild cow, tapir, rhinoceros (single- and double horned), turtle, python and cobra.

Crocodiles were a continuing concern for foreign visitors. It-s uncertain what species remain, but all sorts of rare animal species potentially still inhabit these heavily forested and mountainous islands – no one goes back there, except perhaps for soldiers on exercise. The sea nomads, virtually the only other inhabitants, are very much people of the littoral zones, rarely venturing any distance back from the beaches.

And Lampi is just one of more than 800 islands in the Mergui Archipelago. If, only a year or two ago, you had asked people in the travel industry on Phuket about the Mergui Archipelago, you’d have probably met with blank incomprehension. Enter Mergui on a World Wide Web search engine, and the only thing you’d have pulled up is a couple of reference papers on oil exploration in the Andaman Sea.

What you would not have got were descriptions of over 800 islands extending 200 miles up the coast of Myanmar, densely forested islands that are all but uninhabited except for a very few Mawken, or Sea Gypsies, where you can travel day after day and see no sign of human habitation beyond one or two small local boats. Ashore, the beaches are unmarked by footprints. You get a little bit of rubbish at the high-water mark – bits of debris thrown up by the southwest monsoon waves – and the tracks of monkeys, leopards and lizards.

There’s amazing geological variety. You find hilly, heavily forested granite islands with rocky coastlines. You also get the steep-sided, forest-fringed limestone formations that characterize Krabi and Koh Phi Phi in Thailand, though these are most common just south of St. Matthew’s Island (these edible bird’s-nest collecting areas are off-limits to cruising) and farther north than Gaea has permission to cruise, at least as yet.

Other islands are composed of metamorphosed sedimentary rocks – hard, slate-like formations. You cruise past islands called South Hump, Cat and Kitten, SE Hump, NW Hump, Naked Its, evidently, is a typo, while Joe Island isn’t just any Joe Island – it’s a tortured little brown rock dragon; the wrong shape and color, it doesn’t fit in with the others. Nine Pins, meanwhile, a group of conical pinnacles with forest tops, sit on a flat stone platform.

The most remarkable thing about the Mergui Archipelago is that such an extraordinary natural resource could exist so close to such a major tourist area as Phuket and go largely unremarked for so long. Now this huge island group promises to become a top cruising and sport-diving destination, and the government is cautiously beginning to develop tourism in the area, with Asian investors leading the way.