Drifting with Burma's Sea Gypsies (Part 1)
Paddling with the Mergui Archipelago’s
Moken Boat Nomads
Blue Magazine March 2003

The Moken, enduring residents of the Andaman Sea's Mergui Archipelago, live over half the year on the waves, landing only during Monsoon season or when elderly or sick. Some anthropologists believe the Moken are the original Southeast Asians, who abandoned life on land when sea levels rose during the last ice age. But the modern world is catching up with them (and they with it). In this little known string of reefs and islands, sea kayaking among the Moken is a paddle through 10,000 years of history.

You can't understand the sea until you turn your back on the shore.

I’m sitting in a kayak in a hidden cove somewhere in the Mergui Archipelago in the Andaman sea. The Archipelago's 800 islands within an area extending 200 miles up the west coast from Burma’s southernmost point and roughly 50 east-west miles, creating 10,000 square miles of primarily uninhabited island Eden. An area the size of Vermont, without barns. The inhabited 2% are seasonal fisherman at work or in lean-tos and the rare military boat. It’s an Andaman Sea paradise.

Since time immemorial, Mergui waters, along with the west coast shores of Thailand and Malaysia, have been home to sea gypsies, floating nomad families living on ancient-design roofed boats made from big hollowed-out trees. Moken live-aboard vessel construction uses canoe-like carved hulls, wood and bamboo pegs, rattan rope, and thatched palm leaves for roofs and sails. Kabangs resemble mini Noah’s Arks. The ingenious outriggers with mounted roofs are balanced and light for their twenty-to-forty-foot-long stature and endowed to safely carry a family of up to eight through vicious Indian Ocean storms. No longer at their habitual moorings, they are instead fleeing from ethnic cleansing, dynamite fishing, land resettlement, “education,” and this kayaker.

Moken philosophy focuses on pride in the face of scarcity. Kabangs symbolize the ownership of nothing — a formalized “letting go” — that uses identical scroll designs on the bow and stern to illustrate the digestion mouth-to-exit process that holds onto nothing permanently. This sapient design also announced to pirates through the centuries, “We have nothing to steal.”

When a couple gets married, the community builds the newlyweds a boat, wherein they can start their own family. Children play either on or swimming around the boats. Women cook over an on-board fire, even when moored near a beach.

Monsoons direct the lives of this self-determining people. My friend and I paddle up next to a few families of Moken sea gypsies musing in their dugout canoes. Sitting with paddles across their knees, they wait for the tide to go out. It has taken us days to find these elusive people who are born, live, and die at sea. On land, when we approached them, the invitation to exchange confidences evaporated, but approaching in a kayak seemed to lend a bit of credibility.

A Moken woman sat by herself in a small boat, an impossibly beautiful princess. The shy younger children’s smiles could turn a barren landscape green. They don’t speak any mainland language, but one elderly man knew some Burmese. Our Burmese guide directed my question to the princess, whose answers were then translated. “How is the fishing?” “Fish scared away — now over there,” nodded the princess, paddling away.

I turned to my friend to jest about their sea-bound life being one way to avoid paying rent. This was unintentionally translated to the Moken family. The grandfather glanced our way, wincing at us with gentle, searching eyes, and spoke. The guide said something lost or found in translation, “Don’t rent space in your head to just anyone.”

The Moken are slowly dwindling as the world changes around them. But for as long as they last, they seem to be sublimely indifferent to all the despair going on in their country. The family floated away, enduring another military regime. The teenager turned around and lent one more Moken smile.

The Mergui (mur-guee) Archipelago is 800 islands within an area extending 200 miles up the west coast from Burma's southernmost point and roughly 50 east-west miles, creating 10,000 square miles of primarily uninhabited island Eden. An area the size of Vermont, without barns. The inhabited 2% are seasonal fisherman at work or in lean-tos and the rare military boat. It's an Andaman Sea paradise.

The Moken have Mongolian features, probably descending later from the Shan states in Burma's northeast. They may be our last link to the indigenous Southeast Asians who took refuge on boats when the end of the last ice age submerged the continent under 300 feet of water - 10,000 years ago. It was likely their fear of conversion to Islam - which spread into the region in the fourteenth century - that inspired them to remain offshore.

The fewer our wants, the nearer we resemble the gods. — Socrates