Tsunami, 10 years on: the sea nomads who survived the devastation

There was a particular stillness on the day the Indian Ocean tsunami came to Mo Ku Surin. It was a Sunday morning, 26 December 2004, and 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, 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, 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, the ocean was smooth and calm, he says, “like water in a tank”. When he saw the white crest of the wave approaching, it was so big he thought it was a ship. “My legs turned to jelly,” he recalls. He drove towards it, over and down, a huge 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, their boats tossed around like playthings. More than 230,000 people are estimated to have been killed by the waves, which reached up to 30m (100ft) high, devastating coastal communities in 14 countries.

The devastated Chong Khad beach, where the coral reef was swept away by the 2004 tsunami. Photograph: Vincent Yu/AP

Hook’s brother Ngoei was on the beach, near their home on Surin, going to collect honey. He noticed the tide receding and boats stuck in the sand, then returned to the village, a cluster of stilted huts at the water’s edge, to discuss these signs with the elders. Shortly afterwards, his family decided to evacuate. Within minutes, the wave had hit, its loud booming chasing them uphill. His eyes still widen at the memory.
Near the national park headquarters, the tribe’s chief, Salama, was shouting warnings to the park staff and tourists. “This is laboon,” he told them, “an ancient thing that has swallowed whole islands before.” When the first wave came, Salama faced the sea, asking the spirits to spare his people. His sister Misia, the tribe’s last shaman, was stripped naked by the wave; it took her clothes and jewellery as she clung to a strangler fig tree. The force of that wave and the sight of the next – monstrous, rolling in its wake – told them to run.

Knowledge of the laboon, or “seventh wave”, had been passed down for thousands of years through generations of Moken living intimately with the ocean. The Moken – “people immersed in water” – learn to swim before they can walk. Ngoei and Hook, both skilled freedivers, had been born on a boat and grown up at sea. They had heard stories of laboon around the fire; when it comes, they had been told, go to the mountains or head to deep water. For the animist Moken, laboon was sent by ancestor spirits to clear out the world’s evils. It would devour everything in its path before all was reborn. “A long time ago, there was a wave so big it covered all but the highest mountain,” Tad, a Surin elder, told his family. “Survivors gathered, each race of people, and were sent by a prophet to repopulate the world, and even the men could give birth at that special time.” Salama told of the laboon that saw only Moken survive, on a huge platform of vegetation adrift in the sea. There were as many stories of laboon in this oral culture as there were people to tell them.
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