The Mergui Archipelago is an elusive
paradise, writes Eric Ellis
It was, by any conventional measure, a remarkable deal: 20 kilograms of freshly
caught crab, tuna and squid in exchange for, er, three cans of Coke.
Actually, it started out as just a single can until one of us - the sole
Melburnian, probably still guilt-ridden about John Batman's 1835 land swap-grab
with the local Aborigines in exchange for a few beads - insisted we triple what
the local fishermen had originally asked for their catch.
So as we paddled the surf skis back to our luxury $850-a-day yacht anchored nearby, we threw the fish-trading sea gypsies two extra cans of the Real Thing, which they seemed to covet more than cash. Then we gorged greedily on our booty.
Life's like that when you're cruising Burma's Mergui Archipelago. This gorgeous, 300-kilometre-long chain of mostly uninhabited islands in the country's tropical south has excellent claims to being "the world's last untouched paradise".
When boat-bound for a week sailing the Mergui, your captain - if he knows his stuff - will keep a close eye on the sea gypsies. A nomadic clan regarded by many ethnologists as Burma's original people, the Salon (as they are commonly known) or Moken (as they call themselves) make their living fishing amid the Mergui's 4000 islands. The Moken live on, by and from the sea; their timepiece is the sun, their alarm clock the tides.
Subsistence hunter-gatherers, they don't have much use for the outside world. But as any regular visitor to the Mergui would know, they have an innate sense of the best places to fish, the freshest sources of water, and the safest places to pull their rudimentary but perfectly seaworthy boats in for the evening. So visiting skippers will keep a weather eye out for the Moken's boats.
For passengers like us, tailing the locals means the bonus of showering with a Moken family under a gorgeous cascade of icy water that tumbled into our afternoon from a spring on a craggy islet. Or waking on a cloudless morning in a impossibly beautiful bay of the clearest water you'll ever swim in where the Moken, and your skipper, found sanctuary for the night. Or watching them dive 30 metres underwater, aided only by a belt of rocks, to pull in a catch of squid and lobster. Then refuse your greenbacks, baht and Burmese kyat to buy the catch, because the Moken have a taste for Coca-Cola and little use for money and the worldly items it provides.
Cruising the unexplored Mergui and beachcombing over its islands evokes a little of what it must have been like for seafarers such as Columbus and da Gama as they sailed off the map into the unknown. The Moken were, apart from a boat of diving Swedes, the only people we encountered in our week in the Mergui. One evening, as the Thai skipper of our Phuket-based boat pulled into another of those beautiful bays at dusk, I decided there was enough light left in this perfect day to take a pre-dinner snorkel and swim.
Armed with a torch, I swam to shore to admire the sunset in the fading light and do some island exploring. As I did, a group of Moken emerged from their jungle camp 50 metres down the shore to see what had disturbed their idyll. I waved to them and they waved back. I gave them my torch. They showed me where they drew water and bathed, in a spring which I shared with them.
In a sanitised, Aman-ised world of sumptuous Phuket spas, Balinese hedonism and gourmet cruises of the Whitsundays, there's a very good reason why the Mergui Archipelago remains a largely undeveloped marine wilderness. It is because the words most often associated with Burma aren't "luxury", "paradise" and "idyll" but "torture", "oppression" and "despots".
Burma, or Myanmar, as the military junta that runs the place prefers it to be known, is subject to one of the great moral debates for international travellers: to visit or not to visit.
Visiting means to savour the stunning sight of the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Bagan, where more than 3000 temples, pagodas and stupas - most older than a millennium - crowd onto a plain beside the Upper Irrawaddy River. Or places like Mandalay and Moulmein, rendered mythical by Kipling's tales of mysticism and colonial derring-do. Or one of the British Raj's great colonial capitals, gracious Rangoon, with its rambling architecture gathered around Inya Lake, watched over by the opulent Shwedagon temple, perhaps the greatest treasure in all of Buddhism.
But to visit Burma is also to provide financial succour to a regime of fear that imprisons political dissidents for decades and that refuses to acknowledge the result of elections that should have swept it from power in 1990.
Burma is one of the world's poorest and most desperate nations and needs foreign support of the type that an enlightened tourism industry can bring. Not visiting means keeping 50 million people, who have been largely locked away from the world for almost 50 years, excluded from any reasonable chance to emerge from their misery.
The problem is, aside from the occasional cottage industry, little of the meaningful tourism money in Burma filters down to the ordinary Burmese who need it most. Much of the tourism infrastructure - the hotels, airlines, the transport companies - is owned by, or in joint venture with, the junta's ministries. It's almost impossible to spend time in Burma and not make some general richer.
For many "ethical travellers", who often also happen to be more adventurous when choosing holiday destinations, nothing could be more abhorrent than a trip to Burma. So it remains one of the great elusive destinations. It has also largely escaped the ravages of mass tourism, which makes it a particularly appealing destination.
But now, thanks to a group of enterprising
entrepreneurs in neighbouring Thailand, it is possible to visit Burma and have
minimal economic contact with the junta. The downside is that the traveller is
limited to just one destination. But happily that one destination is one of the
country's most alluring: the Mergui Archipelago.
Knowing it possesses an untapped tourist treasure in the south, but having
neither the resources nor an internationally acceptable government to exploit
it, the Rangoon junta has begun allowing Mergui-only sorties into Burma.
Travellers can fly to Phuket and hire a privately owned, live-aboard Thai dive boat for, say, a week's cruise through the Mergui, four or five hours away to the north. The boat enters Burma at the border town of Kawthoung (the old British trading station of Victoria Point), where Burmese authorities issue passengers with a Mergui-only permit for a specific period, usually one or two weeks. The $US80 ($115) per passenger paid for the permit is the only financial contact tourists will have with the regime.
But the Burmese authorities take no chances with Mergui visitors. They hold all passports as a guarantee you won't travel elsewhere in the country, and place a Burmese "watcher" on board for the trip. That may sound sinister but, in our case, the watcher was a harmless local teenager who worked as a boat boy, tending the surf skis, dive gear and dragging in the ever-biting barracuda from lines trailing off the back of the boat.
The Thai involvement has its upsides in other areas, notably eating. Phuket is an established, high-quality resort community where competition is vigorous among boat and resort owners. They know what tourists want. Our boat had a crew of five - the captain, his understudy, a boat boy, a dive master and, probably the most valued of all, a cook who performed Thai and Western culinary miracles three times a day in a galley kitchen that was little more than a bench.
One of her many triumphs was preparing fresh sashimi from the tuna we'd obtained from the Moken (there was even wasabi). Another was the jumbo prawns and spicy crab barbecued in a sand-pit open fire on one of the myriad pretty islands.
Such are the choices one makes in the magical Mergui, if you do it the right way.