MAKING TRACKS FOR MERGUI
For years, I had heard whispers of lost Edens in the Andaman Sea, of tropical islands thick with jungle and fringed by turquoise waters, the only life on them wild, not human. It was a place where sea gypsies ruled the waves, and creatures from the deep thrived among splendid coral formations.
Only opened to tourism in the late 1990s, the Mergui (a.k.a Myeik) Archipelago sees only a trickle of visitors, most of whom arrive on dive boats or chartered cruises from Thailand. Little remains known of the chain’s 800 mostly uninhabited islands, scattered along 600 kilometers of coastline in southern Myanmar. Some are mere nubs of granite and limestone, spat out by tectonic convulsions, though the largest would dwarf Hong Kong Island. But change is afoot even here.
A chance, blurry-eyed meeting with Christopher Kingsley in a Qatari airport lounge last September brought the archipelago firmly to my attention. A keen diver, the Singapore-based American entrepreneur heard about the wonders of Mergui in the 1990s, though it wasn’t until 2007 that he finally visited. “I couldn’t believe how beautiful and untouched the area was,” he recalled. “The scale of the islands, no tourists,
