JAKARTA, May 13 — After 36 hours adrift at sea, clinging to an imaginatively improvised float, the two Bangladeshi friends reached the shore of Indonesia’s far northwest coast alive to tell their remarkable tale.

The pair had been aboard a cramped boat carrying hundreds of desperate migrants to Malaysia when one of them, Habiburrahman, unable to withstand hunger pangs, tried to take some food, and was caught and thrown overboard by furious fellow passengers.

His companion, Saiful Islam, watched helplessly as Habiburrahman — his close friend since childhood — disappeared over the side, before he flung himself into the water after him.

The pair from Pabna, Bangladesh, are just two of an estimated  2,000 boat people from Myanmar and Bangladesh — including many ethnic Rohingya — who have swum ashore, been rescued or intercepted off Malaysia and Indonesia in recent days.

Migrant-rights advocates are warning that thousands more men, women and children are believed stuck at sea, exposed to disease, starvation, thirst and drowning as smugglers abandon their human cargoes following a Thai police crackdown that has disrupted people-smuggling routes.

Islam and Habiburrahman washed up at a beach in East Aceh, where astonished locals provided them with food and water.

They were speaking to AFP in Lhoksukon, where roughly 600 migrants from another boat have been held in a makeshift camp since arriving at Aceh at the weekend.

They were fortunate to make land. After they went overboard, their cries were ignored and the boat sailed on leaving the men, both aged 30, bobbing in the open ocean with nothing but their traditional clothing to help keep them afloat.

“We made the sarong I was wearing into a balloon,” Habiburrahman, a father of two who only provided one name, told AFP.

“We hung onto it and swam away, without any clear direction.”

They drank seawater as their situation became more desperate, scanning the featureless horizons for fishing boats.

But as the light faded on the second evening of their time adrift at sea, their spirits rose.

“At night, we saw a light,” Islam said, describing what turned out to be a tower in the far distance.

They managed to make shore but the fate of their fellow passengers is far from certain. The Indonesian navy towed the boat back out to sea yesterday, and it has not been seen since.

Hundreds of migrants on similar routes have already died in the last four months.

The pair’s experience with the people smuggling trade paints a vivid picture of the ordeal many go through pursuing better lives.

Many are fleeing religious and ethnic persecution in their homelands, while others are seeking greater economic opportunities elsewhere.

Habiburrahman had been told he could earn an impressive salary working in a rubber plantation in Malaysia, seven times what his friend Islam was earning back home.

The pair decided to contact Fazlul Rahman, a man they said was a known operator sending Bangladeshis illegally into Malaysia, and asked their families for the US$3,100 (RM11,130) fare.

“They promised the money would be handed over to Rahman when we arrived,” he said.

The men said they boarded a small boat with around a dozen others in early April after travelling from Dhaka to Chittagong.

Soon they were met by a larger vessel, which they boarded and waited a week until it had filled with around 300 others.

Setting sail, Habiburrahman believed they would reach Malaysia in five days. But out at sea a far larger boat carrying hundreds of Rohingya refugees arrived, creating a crush of bodies onboard.

“Group after group was transferred to that boat,” he said, adding some Rohingya claimed they had been at sea for two months.

“I overheard the conversations of the crew that the number of passengers had reached 900.”

That number far eclipses the estimates of Indonesia, which put the figure at 400 when it intercepted their vessel near Aceh.

Those still aboard will find no welcome if they reach Malaysia because Kuala Lumpur has joined Jakarta in vowing to turn back boats bearing waves of migrants.

The International Organisation for Migration, which is now helping Habiburrahman, Islam and hundreds of others who made land in Aceh, has warned turning back these vessels could be a death sentence for hundreds or thousands of people. — AFP