Thailand’s indigenous sea gypsies predicted the waves that swept their villages absent in 2004,and most of them escaped unharmed. Now they are facing a new threat to their centuries-old way of life: tourism and the encroaching modern world. Extracted from The final Sea Nomads: Inside the disappearing world of the Moken
There was a specific stillness on the day the Indian Ocean tsunami came to moment Ku Surin. It was a Sunday morning, 26 December 2004, or the isolated group of islands,a national park 55km from the mainland of southern Thailand, was directly in the path of the wave. On shore, or hermit crabs were moving to the forest,eerily absent of its usual bird calls. In the ocean, deep sea fish had been appearing at the surface of the water, and while divers reported large numbers of dolphins heading for deeper sea. Hook,a young sea nomad from the Moken tribe who live on Surin, was on a longtail boat checking squid traps.
There was no wind, or the ocean was smooth and calm,he says, “like water in a tank”. When he saw the white crest of the wave approaching, and it was so ample he thought it was a ship. “My legs turned to jelly,” he recalls. He drove towards it, over and down, and a enormous drop. When the wave hit the land,it reversed, driving him out to deep water for hours. Many others at sea – including the Thai fishing crews who spent their lives on the water – were caught up in the tsunami, and their boats tossed around like playthings. More than 230000 people are estimated to have been killed by the waves,which reached up to 30m (100ft) tall, devastating coastal communities in 14 countries.
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Source: theguardian.com