Several people have been kind enough to ask after me and the welfare of my friends over here in Thailand in the aftermath of the tsunami. I thought I would try and write something coherent about them as a very small way of remembering the personal impact of the tsunami itself. This is, if you like, a series of tsunami stories with happy endings. As far as they can be. My experience here is obviously nothing compared to what so many thousands of the tsunami victims have endured since December 26th. I just wanted to write it down before I forgot how I felt over those days, that awful, jarring, and previously unfelt, sick feeling when those you care about are seemingly in danger and there’s nothing to do but wait to hear if they’re OK. Whatever I write is going to be inadequate, but I want to have at least tried to do so. Forgive me if it all starts sounding a bit overwrought.
I was in Borneo when the tsunami hit. Flipping on CNN in the afternoon on Boxing Day and then watching with disbelief as the initial reports came in of the devastation in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand. It’s one of those momentous events that you simply can’t take in, or perhaps, refuse to accept. As I mentioned in my post at the time on splinters, it became clear the following day that Phuket and the island of Koh Phi Phi had been severely affected. I had several friends living on Phi Phi and the neighbouring island of Koh Lanta working as dive instructors. Even more worryingly, several more instructor friends were working on a liveaboard dive boat that would have been out at the world-class diving site of the Similan Islands, guiding tourists on what should have been the Christmas dive trip of a lifetime. At the time, these were the friends I was most worried about, being 60 miles off the coast where the islands would provide scant refuge. I didn’t know then that the tsunami’s power only manifests itself when it hits the shoreline – out on the water, it would pass through without anyone even realising.
Frustratingly, but unsurprisingly, CNN mentioned nothing about Koh Lanta or the Similans at all. Stories of hundreds of scuba divers going missing off Phuket because they were in the water when the tsunami hit started to make me feel a little scared, despite obviously being in no physical danger myself. It’s a peculiar – and quite hideous – sensation, when you feel physically shaky on thinking thoughts like this. It’s obviously completely involuntary, and you want to be wholly in control to think clearly, but your mind is sending panicky jolts through your body.
The next couple of days were fretful. My cellphone had broken the week before so no one could text me and let me know if they were OK – email was the only option and it became clear from the news that Phi Phi’s infrastructure was completely destroyed. This made me very worried about Ayesha, Amy and her boyfriend Evya, three friends with whom I’d done my instructor training back on Koh Tao earlier in the year. Thankfully I finally heard from Ayesha a day or so after I’d mailed them, telling me that all three of them were OK as they had been underwater instructing when the tsunami hit. It was like diving in a washing machine apparently. Amy sent a cheery separate mail in which she cryptically said “think the stories in the papers are a bit exaggerated …saying that I was diving (which I was) and then got carried by the current, which is true, but I did not then end up on a roof because of this! Slightly twisted I think, and making me sound very heroic…but actually, we got our dive boat back to the island and then I entered the war zone on my own 2 feet, not carried by the tsunami. I was very lucky in this respect. So many people suffered so much worse.” – a quick search turned up this interview with her for the Cheshire Post. It’s hard to imagine what she must have been going through during that night without Evya. All three of them are now back on Koh Tao and working as dive instructors again at Ban’s Diving.
I still had heard nothing about Koh Lanta, the island next to Phi Phi and where my friends Rob, Moni and Greg were instructing as well. It’s where Lindy and I would’ve spent Christmas if everywhere hadn’t been booked out. The following day after hearing from Ayesha, Rob managed to get in touch to say the three of them were OK as well. Rob told me that they had all been on the boat when the tsunami came in – they’d been warned over the radio that it was coming. With a full boat of divers, Rob and the other instructors got everyone to fully inflate their BCDs (Buoyancy Control Devices) and stood on deck waiting to see what happened. As it was, the boat and the divers were all unharmed as the power of the wave did little to them. Waiting for it to pass by must have been so nerve-wracking. This made me feel better about the guys out on the liveaboard in the Similan islands – my visions of their boat being overturned receded. It turned out they had received radio warning as well and had felt little of the tsunami’s power, but all diving was cancelled and the arrival into Khao Lak’s harbour was a scene of absolute carnage. Rob said he’d been trying to text me constantly over the last three days, because he’d been worried about me because he thought I was still living in Khao Lak.
I blogged about Khao Lak back in November – a thriving resort town famed for its diving with lots of hotels directly on the beach. Watching CNN, Khao Lak’s name didn’t come up for a couple of days until it became apparent that the town was the worst affected place in all of Thailand. That made me feel sick with worry about my friend Joe and his family who live there. Every hotel on the beach, from luxury international resorts like the Sofitel to bamboo resorts in which their Thai owners had invested everything, was completely destroyed. The wave came 2 kilometres in shore, straight over the beach and up the hill, mercifully stopping short of the main road but destroying all the houses and shops in its path. They estimate there are at least 5000 dead there, and still many missing. The bodies are stacked in the grounds of the local Buddhist temples, but they have essentially been overwhelmed by the sheer logistics of the dealing with so many corpses.
Joe has been resident in Khao Lak for many years and runs the dive shop Similan Diving Safaris. He was driving his truck along the beach road when he saw the wave coming in. He actually stopped to go down to the beach to see if what he was seeing was really true. It didn’t take long to realise. He ran back to the car in which his two little girls were sitting and set off up the road that runs between the beach road and the main road running parallel further up. But he couldn’t drive up the road for the amount of people running up it. Before he knew it, the tsunami was upon him and the girls, crashing down around the car. Joe told me he must have blacked out, because the next thing he knew, he was still in the car, floating on top of the water around the rooftops of the giftshops. Thankfully his wife Nute was still in the dive shop up on the main road and so out of harm’s way. Joe’s house by the sea was completely destroyed and his car a write-off. But when he told me all this on the phone, he was only full of praise for how well people had pulled together and helped one another through this nightmare.
Two weeks on, Thailand is already recovering rapidly – in Phuket and Phi Phi at least. Khao Lak is so ruined that it’s difficult for people to know where to start. The international hotels have vowed to rebuild by the beginning of the high season again in November, but how well the Thais will be looked after by the government to raise the capital to start again remains to be seen. But as Joe said to me, “It might sound callous, but life goes on. People rely on tourism here for their living”. And he’s right. He’s already gone out to survey the reefs to see how much damage they have taken from the tsunami. There are teams of volunteer divers cleaning up debris along the coast from Phuket to Phi Phi. People are gradually finding ways, if not to forget the unforgettable, to work around it.
The international response to the tsunami has been outstanding and, with the growing complications of dealing with the absolute devastation in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, we can only hope that the money is translated into timely, effective aid that arrives in the right places. The raising of funds is only the beginning of this story and the only thing that bothers me is how well the international media and governments will pay attention to the post-tsunami ramifications of rebuilding. Will we hear anything six months about it from now? In a sense, giving money is simply not enough. It does not buy the right to become disinterested, to think we have done our bit. Our time and attention and genuine interest are equally as important in the longterm.
It’s easy for me to say this – the tsunami has had a drastic impact on the livelihoods of a lot of people I care about, and indirectly on myself too. So I have no choice about it – the after-effects of the tsunami here in Thailand will constantly be a background factor in day-to-day life and cause me to think about it often. As such, I hope to keep sporadic updates here about different stories from people about how they’re pulling it back together after the disaster.
In the meantime, I would urge all of you with holiday time coming up to come to Thailand! I know the above does not make for happy holiday thoughts. But Thailand is an undeniably spectacular country, the vast majority of which has not been touched by the tsunami and those areas which have been are rapidly re-organising, as mentioned above. Indeed, if you want peace and quiet and pristine beaches, now is the time to come. We should all avoid being overly sentimental about this huge tragedy and avoid placing the victims forever in the static status of being victims. They are people, just like me and you, and they have to carry on.
The dead are dead, but the living must go on living.
