The Mergui Archipelago is a scatter of some 800 islands off the far south of Myanmar, and until 1997 almost no outsider was let in among them. Forested islands and hidden lagoons run down the Andaman Sea with no ports, no resorts and no crowds to steer for. You live aboard the boat that brought you for days, anchoring wherever the evening finds you, and dinner is whatever the water gave up that morning, cooked beside hulls hauled onto the sand. At the centre is Lampi, the country's only marine national park, where you slip a kayak into tea-dark creeks winding deep into the mangrove forest. The trees close overhead, kingfishers flick between the roots, and the only sound is your own paddle. The reefs are why it opened: Thai dive boats came in during the 1990s and found the coral that fills their own side of the border, with a fraction of the divers on it. Grey reef sharks patrol the pinnacles offshore; whale sharks and mantas come through from February to May.
The Moken have been living off these boats far longer. A family traditionally spent most of the year aboard a kabang, a hull carved from a single log, and came ashore mainly through the monsoon. The tides set the calendar, and they speared fish on a single held breath. The sea has shaped them down to the eye: Moken children see underwater about twice as sharply as European children, shrinking their pupils and adjusting their lenses to the blur. Their lore tells of the laboon, a giant wave raised by angry spirits, which pulls the sea far back from the shore before it arrives. On 26 December 2004 the elders saw the water drain off the reefs, recognised the sign, and got their villages and the tourists near them to high ground. Now fewer Moken are born at sea each year. Children are in school, families are in fixed villages, and the carving of a kabang is slipping out of living memory, so the boats still sleeping out among these islands are mostly the ones that carry visitors.