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Into a Lost World: Exploring the Mergui Archipelago
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19156 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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8 / 2000 |
2,945 Words |
| Author
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Masha Nordbye
Masha Nordbye is a writer and TV documentary producer who has
traveled through more than one hundred countries. Her latest
book is Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Golden Ring (Odyssey). |
As we enter the new millennium, few regions of our planet remain as unexplored Edens. But off the coast of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, lies one such place--an extensive archipelago of over eight hundred uninhabited islands and islets scattered throughout the Andaman Sea. For over half a century the country has been isolated from the rest of the world by its political regime; and it was only in the last few years that the Mergui Archipelago, an area encompassing ten thousand square miles, was opened to outsiders. Here visitors have the unique opportunity to explore one of the last great pristine environments left on earth.
During the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, merchants, pirates, and adventurers undertook arduous trips through the Strait of Malacca to navigate between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. As trade grew between India, Siam (now Thailand), and China, ships figured a way to cut transport time in half by taking a more northerly route to the Isthmus of Kra (the narrow slice of land that connected Siam and Malaysia) and then transporting their cargo overland by elephant. By this time, the great kingdom of Siam had become a major trading junction and its southern city of Mergui a prosperous port and meeting point for the multitude of Asian caravans.
But even during Mergui's heyday the islands in the archipelago remained uninhabited, never being deemed fit for settlement or farming. Adding further to the islands' isolation, the British, who became the dominant sea power in the area, transferred their commercial centers farther south along the Malay peninsula by the nineteenth century. Because of these shifts and the advent of steamships and other faster methods of transportation, the once flourishing Mergui
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