PUERTO PRINCESA, PHILIPPINES — The motley caravan of boats, their engines popping in staccato rhythm, headed out to sea sounding like a platoon of sputtering lawn mowers.
Painted bright red, turquoise and orange, they carried a dozen men wearing baseball caps and T-shirts fashioned as turbans to block the equatorial sun.
Johnny Aralaji perched on the pointed bow of one of the craft, his sun-creased face frowning in concentration. He was born on a boat like this. His family wandered, allowing the currents to lead them.
"The life of the sea is hard," said Aralaji, who was wearing a shirt decorated with palm trees and hula girls. "It's dangerous."
Now gray-haired and past 70, Aralaji is among the Philippines' dwindling population of Badjao, or sea gypsies. Itinerant, often-illiterate Muslim fishermen, they've been known in this part of the world as the Bedouin of the sea.
Many cling stubbornly to their traditional way of life: wandering the southern oceans on houseboats, following schools of fish and trying to outdistance danger.
But the life of these seafaring nomads is drying up.
Proud and hardworking, they're threatened by soaring costs for fuel and repairs, killer typhoons, pirates, religious rebels and the steady disappearance of fish.
Most Badjao here no longer live on their boats, instead taking up residence in thatch-roofed houses on bamboo stilts like this community on the island of Palawan, in the Philippines' southwest. But it seems they can't bear to be away from the water. Their communities extend 100 yards from the beach into the marshy coastal waters, connected by warrens of over-water pathways made of bamboo, wooden planks and overturned canoes.
They still go to sea in bancas, rickety craft with bamboo outrigging lashed together with wire and fishing line. They fashion their own hooks and lures. Small gas-powered motors and cellphones are their only modern conveniences.
On the water, times are tough. On land, they are worse. Throughout the Philippines, more than 200,000 Badjao remain marginalized, shunned as uneducated and incorrigible.
Non-Badjao children throw coins into the water and laugh as the fishermen scramble from their boats to compete for the handouts. Badjao who abandoned life at sea have ended up as street beggars in big cities such as Manila.
Some say the Badjao's years on the open water are numbered. Others believe the indigenous tribe that has peopled the Philippine seascape for more than 1,000 years will go on.
