The Evolution of Diet: Diving for Dinner With the Sea Gypsies

February 2014

Water, water everywhere, lapping at your house. Your house is your boat. The ocean is your food source, and it’s the bluest kind of blue. You are a true Bajau.

I am on a search to find people who live almost exclusively of the food they get in the ocean. And after much debate, I have set my eyes on the Bajau, also known as Sea Gypsies. I am a real water baby, so this assignment is really exciting for me. I fell in love with the ocean early on. As a teenager living in rainy Normandy, my room was plastered with Hawaiian windsurfing posters; Robby Naish was my living god. Nowadays, whenever I am home in my adopted Turkish village on the Aegean Sea, I am glued to my WindGuru app—checking the wind forecast for ideal kitesurfing conditions. The feeling of freedom, far out in the ocean, is addictive. I always felt that my heart is out at sea and my head lost somewhere on a cold pass up in the Himalaya—due west of Nanga Parbat, to be precise.

By now, my editor Pamela Chen and I are getting a better grasp at what we are aiming at, as far as images go. Color themes are becoming apparent, emerging as a way to tie the images together. But I am also striving to photograph the human body in connection to the food that sustains it. I like this concept. Photographing the act of eating is not always very appetizing, and it’s almost too expected. I want something else …

It’s a strange bit of theatre. Tarumpit’s body is lying across his dugout canoe. One of his feet is tucked into a cool orange handmade fin which is slowly propelling him. His left arm, stretched out into the water, helps him to keep his balance. He is wearing an old diving mask. He pushes forward slowly, head half submerged, gauging the depth and scanning the bottom of the sea. He is on a hunt. He takes a breath, and I wonder if he has seen something. I am almost as bare as he is, trying to catch up in the water next to him.
My camera is heavily dressed though, snugly fitted into an underwater housing. It’s the first time I am doing underwater photography and I have borrowed my seven year-old son’s mask, much to his pride. I love mixing a physical exercise—swimming—with photography. Tarumpit leans up, takes off his shirt and grabs his spear. I check my camera settings nervously, holding on to his canoe. This is it … the first dive. He steps out and keeps his eyes firmly on the bottom. There he goes. I take a deep breath and follow behind.

His jeans, rippling in the water with every kick, match the blue landscape. Out of a hole glides an octopus. Suddenly, it is lifted off the bottom, a spear in its lower body. The tentacles touch Tarumpit’s feet. There is the connection I was looking for. I am shooting frantically, enveloped in a cloud of black ink. We swim back up for air. Tarumpit climbs in his canoe and decompresses his ears, leaning his head back, looking up.
On the way home, we pass a larger boat, a lepa-lepa. This is the original Bajau dwelling, the real deal I am told. Women give birth on the boat. Boys become men. They cook coral fish at the stern, over an open fire. They freedive to hunt fish and get scallops or sea cucumbers. At low tide on the full moon, they collect sea urchins. Their entire lives play out on their boats. I get on board and sit at the prow. Two teenagers, Alpaida and Asmania, join me. They have brought a tiny vanity case and giggle while I photograph them studying themselves in the mirror.
Most Bajau living on lepa-lepa are stateless. They navigate on the Sulu Sea, doing coastal sailing between islands of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Because of this lifestyle, they cannot get proper identification papers. If they get sick, hospitals on land won’t treat them and they might get arrested.

Tarumpit’s family home is a bamboo hut on stilts, a three-minute canoe ride from shore. There are 15 or so huts, scattered evenly. In the background, a volcano, covered in lush vegetation, stands proudly. At low tide, you can walk between these huts, the water up to your neck. There is a ballet of canoes going between houses, children chattering aboard—canoes parked in front of the houses, some half filled with water; canoes with men returning from morning hunts. We “park” and climb up the ladder.
In the quiet breeze, this house is a charming haven: the whispering waves, the creaking of the poles, the baby sleeping in a hammock hanging from the ceiling and Tarumpit, cleaning the octopus. The cracks in the wooden floor create lines of fluorescent blue. Sitting cross-legged, a boy drops a line through one of them. The lure is made out of a piece of flounder skin. He hooks an eel that twists around like a snake and somehow gets away, sliding back to freedom, into the ocean.
Next, Matthieu’s travels take him to the Karakoram Mountains in Pakistan, where he joins a group of women gathering firewood.

This is taken from a National Geographic Proof Post.