You won’t behold the sea until you turn your back on the shore.

I’m sitting in a kayak in a hidden cove somewhere in the Mergui Archipelago, off the Andaman coast of Myanmar (formerly Burma). The Mergui Archipelago comprises 800 islands within an area extending 200 miles up the west coast from Myanmar’s southernmost point and roughly 50 east-west miles, creating 10,000 square miles of primarily uninhabited island Eden (an area the size of Vermont, without barns). In the inhabited two percent are seasonal fisherman at work or in lean-tos, and the rare military boat. It’s an Andaman Sea paradise not having much to do with life on the mainland.

Since time immemorial, Mergui waters, along with the west-coast shores of Thailand and Malaysia, have been home to Moken sea gypsies—floating nomad families living on ancient-design roofed boats called kabangs, made from big hollowed-out trees. The Moken live-aboard-vessel construction uses canoelike carved hulls, wood and bamboo pegs, rattan rope, and thatched palm leaves for roofs and sails. Kabangs resemble mini Noah’s Arks. The ingenious outriggers with mounted roofs are balanced and light for their 20- to 40-foot-length, and endowed to safely carry a family of up to eight through vicious Indian Ocean storms.

The advanced naval technology of traditional Moken kabangs has mystified sea traders, pirates, and anthropologists through the centuries. Their gypsy creed explains how a detached nomadic tribe mastered boat building using techniques that metaphorically link culture and design. They travel by the stars. No longer at their habitual moorings, they are instead fleeing from ethnic cleansing, dynamite fishing, land resettlement, “education,” and this kayaker.

Moken philosophy focuses on pride in the face of scarcity. Kabangs symbolize the ownership of nothing—a formalized “letting go”— that uses identical scroll designs on the bow and stern to illustrate the digestion mouth-to-exit process that holds onto nothing permanently. This sapient design also announced to pirates through the centuries, “We have nothing to steal.”

During their long season at sea each year, those still living traditionally drift in groups of at least six boats, each housing one family usually of three generations. When a couple gets married, the community builds the newlyweds a boat, wherein they can start their own family. Children play either on or swimming around the boats. Women cook over an on-board fire, even when moored near a beach.

The Moken live most of their lives on the waves, making landfall only during monsoons or when elderly or sick. Some anthropologists believe the Moken were the pioneers of Southeast Asia who abandoned life on land when sea levels rose during the last Ice Age. But the modern world is catching up with them. This generation of sea gypsies living off the coast of Myanmar—no longer inaccessible to the mainland—are beginning to forsake ancient traditions that could be 10,000 years old. For now, they hang on to their pre-industrial utopia. Hopefully, we can learn from this group of self-sufficient nomads who are the masters of the sea . . . before they are totally absorbed into Myanmar and Thai societies.

Monsoons direct the lives of this self-determining people. From June to October, they build temporary land huts from bamboo and grass on remote beaches—high time to build and repair boats. During the 2004 tsumani that devastated the shorelines of the Indian Ocean, Burma was also flooded. Because Moken teaching hinges on ancestral storytelling, the Moken elders knew that the initial extraordinary low-tide retreat of the sea indicated that a tidal wave was imminent—most Moken families immediately retreated to higher ground and were spared.