The aquatic tribe

From: The Sunday Times (UK), November 20th 2005

The life aquatic

They can swim before they can walk, and have an extraordinary ability to see clearly underwater. But the mysterious Moken people of the Indian Ocean are unique in another way - they predicted the Asian tsunami. The photographer Andrew Testa went to meet them in their watery domain [to see the photographs, please buy the newsprint edition of The Sunday Times]. Report by Scott Athorne

When the tsunami struck southeast Asia on Boxing Day last year, leaving a quarter of a million dead, one tribe was unsurprised. More than that - they had been expecting it. The Moken, also known as 'sea gypsies', are a nomadic people living off the coasts of Burma and Thailand. They detected the danger before any western electronic aids, and saved hundreds of lives.

A people intimate with the ocean, the Moken live on hand-built boats for most of the year, apart from the monsoon months, and learn to swim before they learn to walk. A Moken legend tells of the 'laboon', a giant wave sent by angry ancestral spirits that eats people. Before it comes, the sea recedes, then the waters flood the Earth, destroy it and make it clean again. So when, last December, the sea began to recede, the Moken knew what to do. On Phi Phi island, off Thailand, in the crucial minutes before the disaster, their elders noticed unusual movements in the sea and urged Thai villagers and tourists to seek safety on a nearby hilltop, just before the largest of three waves flattened the low-lying island. Dozens of lives were saved. Further north, on South Surin island, it is thought about 200 Moken living on the beach escaped to the hills, all except a disabled boy left behind in the rush to higher ground.

The Moken are private people, apolitical, non-violent, generous and with few material possessions - there is no word for 'want' in their language. They have curly hair, bushy eyebrows and darker skin than the Thai or Burmese with whom they share the Mergui archipelago, some 800 islands scattered along 250 miles of the Andaman Sea, part of the Indian Ocean. Anthropologists believe they may have migrated from southern China 4,000 years ago.

These people also possess extraordinary visual powers. Research by Dr Anna Gislen, of Lund University in Sweden, shows that Moken children can see twice as well underwater as Europeans of the same age. 'They use their eyes to the limit,' she explains. 'When you or I open our eyes underwater, a reflex reaction limits our vision. Moken children learn to control this reflex and muscularly change the shape of the eye's lens so as to increase light refraction.' This allows them to dive totally unaided to depths of 75ft - without snorkels, flippers or air cylinders. They comb the sea floor for sea snails, oysters and mussels.

'It's an amazing sight,' says Andrew Testa, the British photographer who took these rare pictures of the tribe. 'In the water they reminded me of a bunch of otters or fish. They were unbelievably skilled. They are also very happy people - though their way of life is under threat.'

Ten years ago, some 2,500 Moken led a traditional seafaring life in this archipelago; now the figure is just 1,000. Alcohol and cigarettes are commonplace, and some displaced Moken women have turned to prostitution. In the past five years, five of the Moken living on one of the two Surin islands have died of Aids, among them the chief's son. On Phi Phi island, Moken live in squalor and have become a reluctant tourist attraction. They also face pressure to convert to Buddhism, Christianity or Islam, though most retain their animist beliefs.

The elders do their best to keep the old way of life alive, through song and dance and stories handed down through the generations. The legend of the laboon is just one. Unlike most tsunami survivors, the Moken do not question how something so terrible could happen. 'The wave is created by the spirit of the sea,' said Saleh Kalathalay, a spear fisherman. 'The big wave had not eaten anyone for a long time, and it wanted to taste them again.'