The Mergui Archipelago is a scatter of some 800 islands off the far south of Myanmar, in the Andaman Sea, sealed to outsiders until 1997 and still almost untouched, where limestone and granite peaks rise straight from the sea under rainforest, white-sand coves go weeks without a footprint, and the Moken sea nomads have lived aboard hand-carved boats for centuries. For decades the government kept these waters closed, and it took a deal with Thai dive boats to open them; the reefs here are the same coral that draws crowds just across the border, and they see a fraction of the divers. At the centre of the archipelago lies Lampi, Myanmar's only marine national park, where forest, seagrass and reef shelter dugongs, hornbills and reef sharks, and a kayak slipped into its tea-dark mangrove creeks winds deep into the forest with kingfishers flicking between the roots. There are no roads and no hotels to speak of; you come by boat from Kawthaung and stay aboard for days, threading between forested islands and dropping anchor where you please.
The Moken are the archipelago's people. They have lived here for centuries aboard the kabang, a boat carved from a single trunk, with a calendar set by the tides, spearing fish on one held breath, and the sea has shaped them down to the eye: Moken children can see underwater roughly twice as sharply as European children, shrinking their pupils and reshaping their lenses without thinking. Their lore tells of the laboon, a wave stirred up by angry spirits that pulls the sea back from the shore before it comes, and in 2004 that story saved villages when the tsunami arrived. Grey reef sharks patrol the offshore pinnacles, and between February and May whale sharks and mantas pass through. Since the 2021 military coup the surrounding Tanintharyi region has been a conflict zone, and only a fraction of the old boats still sail. Fewer Moken children are born at sea with each passing year, and the archipelago that stayed empty for the world is emptying of them.