Recently I published an article on Spike about the west coast of Thailand, describing how it was completely safe for tourists to return there and that it’s not the disaster zone that’s been portrayed in the media. This was written after the my own first-hand experience of going back to Khao Lak, the worst affected town in Thailand by the tsunami, and realising that whilst the damage had been extensive, the cleanup operation had been a complete success and that the town was effectively open for business again. One problem: no tourists. The real tragedy for the Thais has just begun – with no tourists coming to the area, they cannot get their businesses back on their feet and try to return to normal, which is basically what everyone wants. You can read the article for more information about Thailand’s West Coast and why it’s safe to visit. You can email me direct if you have further questions.
Before I got to Khao Lak, though, my diary reminds me that I was quite apprehensive about what we’d find there. I had first visited Khao Lak almost exactly one year before as a tourist and then again for a month in November 2004 when I was looking for dive work; given the pictures from CNN which seemed to show nothing but total devastation, I was finding it hard to imagine what was left even though friends living there had told me on the phone that Khao Lak’s main road was virtually untouched. Obviously I completely believed them, but I still found it hard to dispel those TV pictures from my mind. Which goes to show their irrational hold on the imagination.
Once we were there, it was just as I remembered it – driving in on the main road – which is essentially Khao Lak’s only road – all the shops were still there, all fully intact and most open for business. The lack of tourists created a pleasant calm on the street and it was typically glorious Thai weather – bathed in heat and immense blue skies. We stayed at a beautiful hotel, the Khao Lak Sunset Resort, which had fantastic views over the ocean. It was difficult to believe that anything had happened here.
I blogged previously about my friend Joe’s escape from the tsunami. On the drive to the hotel, Lindy asked Joe about how his two little girls were coping with the shock of the tsunami. He said that they were lucky – because he was with them all the time and he managed to remain in control, they weren’t very scared. He said he got them to draw what they thought of that day, to help let it all out. He doesn’t want them to be scared to talk about it or to feel ashamed if they have bad dreams. Joe said all of this completely matter-of-fact, but I was really impressed by his presence of mind to get them to do that. It would never have occurred to me. One of those moments where I felt like a complete kid myself.
Catching up with friends over the next few days who had been here through the tsunami and its aftermath, a grim montage of eyewitness accounts emerged about events directly after the wave hit: there were hundreds of bodies scattered between the sea and the main road, many naked from force of the water ripping their clothes off; the dead who weren’t stripped had their pockets rifled for possessions. In the desperation of the hours directly after the tsunami, some felt they had lost so much they needed to loot the dead. In the few days before electricity was restored to the town, gangs of men roamed the street at night in pickup trucks, shining torches into houses to see if there was anything worth taking. Much of this has been blamed on the Burmese immigrants who worked here, with anti-Burmese sentiment stirred up as a result. Hundreds of Burmese are supposedly still living up in the hills around Khao Lak, too afraid to come down for fear of what might happen to them, without any help from their own government or the Thai authorities.
Looking round the town, I found it almost impossible to comprehend that it could have been transformed into such a hellish vision – and I should be grateful for being spared that. Khao Lak seemed just as it always was. True, Lindy and I’s walk to the beachfront was unsettling because the hotel we’d stayed in a year before had completely disappeared; but if you had not been to Khao Lak before, the beachfront would resemble little more than a building site. Not ideal for laying out your beachtowel at the moment – but not a chamber of horrors either. Within the next few months, the rebuilding will begin and this last physical scar of the tsunami will disappear as well.
How long it will take the next door town of Bang Niang to make such a recovery is less certain. Khao Lak town is situated on a rise up from the beach and this is what saved it – Bang Niang is on a flat plain, where the water came straight through all the buildings situated either side of the road which is about a kilometre back from the seafront. I spotted this iron gate that has been bent into this strangely beautiful symmetry – whether it was caused by the water or by hand, I don’t know.
The town is a much worse state than Khao Lak, but here again, people are getting on with their lives and slowly putting things back in order. A police boat sat stranded up by the bus station, pushed some two kilometres inland by the wave; I nearly fell off the bike when we first saw it. There are apparently plans to make it into a memorial for the tsunami victims.
Taking photos in these situations is undeniably ghoulish, mitigated slightly by my supposed journalist credentials, but not enough to make me feel comfortable. Still, a Canadian journalist I talked to told me that he had seen coachloads of Chinese tourists stopping at the Victim Identification Centre in Phuket – essentially a huge makeshift morgue – to have a look around. J.G. Ballard come to life.
After a few days in Khao Lak, we went out with Joe’s company, Similan Diving Safaris, on a liveaboard to the Similan Islands. Floating around in the ocean and exploring the amazing dive sites which have survived the tsunami relatively unscathed, the sense of the disaster receded again. Whilst at Koh Bon a manta ray soared through the water past our dive group, the first one that had been seen this year. It was a good omen and one to carry back to the shore at the end of our trip.
More on Khao Lak:
Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
