Tsunami Warning

29th March 2005: My phone went off. The vibrating alert made it skitter around the table, flashing in the dark. It was 1.30 in the morning. I didn’t recognise the number and I was exhausted from the day-long trip to get here to Koh Lanta, one of the Thai islands scattered off the Krabi coast. I pressed cancel to stop the call and lay my head back down, still half asleep. A few seconds later there was a banging at the door. “Sir, sir, you get up now, television say big earthquake, maybe tsunami. You bring everything, come now”. I sat up and muttered I understood, but the man was already going to the next beachfront bungalow. Still groggy from sleep but with adrenaline beginning to course through my system, I grabbed my bags, threw my just-unpacked stuff back into my big hold-all divebag and dragged it out the door, the enormity of what was happening beginning to seep into my comprehension. I admit with some shame that I wondered for a microsecond if this was a scam to get me to leave all my valuables behind; then as I walked up to the main road a couple of hundred metres further up along a dirt track, I saw scores of other people waiting by the roadside.

As I arrived, the Thais gently organised people to get onto a waiting tuktuk. There was no shouting or panic – everyone was very calm, like me probably still half asleep. The Thais were alert, even cheerful, even though they must have been even more apprehensive than us – this was, after all, their home and their livelihood under threat. As I approached the tuktuk, my phone went off again – the same unrecognised number: it was Rob calling from his girlfriend’s phone. Rob is my dive instructor friend who lives on Koh Lanta – we did our instructor course together last year and have been firm friends ever since. He was already on his motorbike racing down to my resort from his home to come and get me. Still stupified, I mumbled OK and then realised that it would be better for me to stick with the other people from the resort so that I wouldn’t be missing from a headcount later on. I tried to call Rob back to let him know but the phone network had gone into overload: there were too many calls going back and forth with everyone trying to get more information on each other’s whereabouts. Rob pulled in on his bike just as the tuktuk pulled out with me standing on the back platform. I waved at him helplessly, gestured I was OK – I felt dreadfully guilty for bringing him down here for nothing, leaving his girlfriend Tik alone, albeit temporarily. And as the truck moved off down the road, I realised I didn’t know anyone else on board. As I watched Rob shoot off back down the road, I suddenly felt immensely lonely.

The truck took us further down the main road, an unsurfaced dirt track on which every bike and car creates choking clouds of dust, until we turned off and headed upwards, the axles of the truck scraping stones on the steep hillside road that was in even worse condition. After a few minutes, we got to a house high up on the hill – there were quite a few other tourists up there too – there must have been around 60 or 70 of us altogether. Everyone sat around quietly, some next to the TV to hear what was going on, but there was little new information. I pulled out my book and read, trying to not even think about what might happen next. I had heard enough tsunami stories from the first time round to not need much imagination.

I wanted to call Lindy and let her know what was going on, to simply hear her voice for reassurance. But I realised she probably wouldn’t have heard about the earthquake because she’d be asleep and if I rang her gabbling all sorts of conjecture then I would only cause her worry and a lost night’s sleep. But then, what if something happened to me before I spoke to her again? This seemed overly dramatic, and I realised on reflection very little would happen to me as I would be up here on the hill. Food and water were more of a concern than anything else.

Then I got a text from Rob: “Mate I dont know where u r – r u OK 4 2nite? Just watching news with Tik predicting +wave in next 3hrs”. It was at this point it began to sink in that there really could be another tsunami. And now it had a deadline.

I knew Koh Lanta was naturally well-protected and had survived the last wave almost wholly intact – a big sandbar broke its power outside the main village Ban Sala Dan, causing only cosmetic flooding in riverfront shops and houses. Several beachfront resorts like mine had been damaged, and several people had tragically lost their lives. The island, though, was known as “Lucky Lanta” because it had escaped almost unscathed compared to its neighbour Koh Phi Phi, the Thai island made famous by the Leo DeCaprio movie The Beach. Phi Phi had taken the full brunt of the wave, leading to widescale damage. Already, though, four months later, tourists had begun returning to the island because the Thais had quickly patched things back together – the scars of the tsunami were still visible but it was no longer the disaster zone portrayed on television in the initial days after the tsunami. I wondered about my friend Joe in Khao Lak, still running his dive shop in the town which had been worst affected by the wave – the thought that he and his wife and kids might have to go through the trauma of another tsunami was too much to contemplate for long.

A while later, just as I was beginning to start feeling uncomfortable from squatting on my bag as a makeshift seat and thirsty as my water had run out, the Thais came out smiling from the TV room. “It’s OK. Can go home!” they said. We jumped on the tuktuk again and were taken back to our resorts. I texted Rob to ask if everything really was OK, but got no answer. I guessed he must be asleep, which was answer enough. I dragged my bag back to my wooden bungalow, a hundred metres back from the seafront, returning three hours after I’d left it. I was meant to be up in a couple more hours to go diving. I contemplated skipping the dives and catching up on my sleep – and then I figured sleeping was the last thing I should be doing.

Down in Ban Sala Dan later that morning, we finally got the whole story about the earthquake – how the epicentre had happened off Sumatra and a thousand or more had been killed in the islands lying off the mainland. I felt numb at the news. How often will this continue to happen now the tectonic plates of the earth seem to have radically shifted in the Andaman region? It’s a horrific thought that tsunami warnings might become part of everyday life from now on.

I had been deeply impressed with how organised and calm the Thais had been at evacuating us and simply dealing with the situation as quickly and effectively as they could. Clearly others didn’t feel the same. As I left my resort to catch a lift, there were several people already checking out, clearly spooked by the warning and in no mood to discuss the intricacies of earthquake tremor dissipation. I felt sad that the “better safe than sorry” approach of the Thais had scared all these people off – by doing the right thing, they had also put the spectre of the tsunami back in their minds.

I spent the rest of the week on Koh Lanta and the tsunami warning was quickly forgotten, by me and everyone else. I was out diving every day, stunned by the abundance of life around Lanta’s dive sites which have remained untouched by the tsunami. I met some great people that week through Rob too. My last day on Koh Lanta involved probably the best dive of my life. I don’t think there’s a moral to be drawn here; only the certitude of the randomness of life and what it can bring, good and bad.

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