DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY

The castaway isles, ancient forests, and Moken people of the Andaman Coast all remind us how Thailand used to be.

- Words and photographs by Chris Schalkx

I met a man on Koh Surin Tai, and he didn't know his age. A dozen wispy hairs curled from his chin, his eyelids drooped under the weight of decades spent reading horizons. He was a Moken, or a sea nomad. His Austronesian ancestors roamed the Andaman Sea for centuries, and stories of their liquid lives lingered in his mind like the salt on his skin. He remembered his early days: a childhood spent on a flotilla of kabang houseboats, living by the monsoon winds and changing tides. He remembered diving for shells and sea cucumbers, and bartering the loot for rice instead of money. He remembered swapping his floating home for a stilted hut made from bamboo and pandanus thatch well before the Thai government turned the Surin archipelago, adrift in the Andaman over 144 kilometres north of Phuket, into a national park in 1981. But when was he born, exactly? That, he forgot. Taad Klathalay and I sat on the wooden veranda of his home in a beachfront village of about 60 stilted huts cradled by the mountains that run down Koh Surin Tai’s spine. Long-tail boats with marigold garlands around their bows bobbed in the waves out front, while scrawny kittens scurried through the sand below the floor boards. The village, which has no address or name, is one of the last semi-traditional Moken settlements in Thailand, and is home to the lion's share of the approximately 800 Moken left in the country.