Enal playing with his pet shark, from the Guardian’s feature on the Bajau sea nomads living in a tract of sea between the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia (via). I think this is pretty fantastic: some of them spend their entire lives in tiny boats, only walking on land a few times a year to trade. They’re expert divers, and most of them deliberately rupture their eardrums to aid their diving.
It never occurred to me that there might actually be people who live their entire lives in boats, nomads of the sea. Apart from the Bajau, there’s another small group of sea nomads called the Moken who live in Burma and Thailand — and as far as a cursory google tells me, that’s pretty much it. So a few thousand in the entire world. I wonder how many desert nomads there are left; you’d expect it to be easier to life off the sea than off land that is by definition barren.
Both the Moken and Bajau are sometimes referred to as “sea gypsies”; there’s a website about them — I have no idea if it’s accurate — which claims, among other things, that they predicted the 2004 tsunami that took hundreds of thousands of lives, the tsunami that none of the more technologically advanced cultures in southeast Asia saw coming.
Oct 8, 2010