After the Tsunami

Story and Photos by Diane Edwards

Diane Edwards is the owner and operator of SeaScape Sailing. Normally, she's based at the island of Leros, in the Aegean Sea, but conducts sailing holidays in warmer climes in winter. She had planned holidays in Thailand this year, and, after the tsunami of 26th December 2004, was advised by her friends and contacts in Thailand that the greatest service she could do the Thai people was to go ahead as planned. Here's her report, from Phuket, in Thailand, where she arrived on the 10th January, 2005.

We arrived yesterday lunchtime, rented a jeep and set out on an island tour.Our first impressions are how amazingly "normal" everything seems.  Knowing the geography of the area, and the Thai people - as you all know, we were already optimistic that Phuket would be significantly better than the mass media have been portraying it.  

"Better" doesn't even begin to describe it.  If one had been disconnected from the media for the past 2 weeks, there would have been no clues whatsoever that anything was amiss on our taxi ride from the airport in the north, to Kata Beach in the south (apart from our taxi driver, who had lots to say) !  

As we drove along Kata beachfront, we saw the shops on the beach road all open for business as usual, and as far as we could see, undamaged. Our first view of any tsunami damage was our favourite little right-on-the-beach cafe, at the bottom of the hill where Kata Delight sits. There were dozens of people working on it, a new roof in progress... we talked to the family later in the day, they are all fine, and already doing lunches again from a makeshift kitchen.

The hotel itself (and all the staff) are all completely fine - apart from the place being abnormally quiet of course!

So after a quick wake-up dip in the pool, we got in our jeep, and set out for the beaches we'd seen on the news reports.  The hotel guys told us that the worst hit beaches were Patong (the major "touristy" beach) and Kamala, the next one north -  so off we went to see for ourselves.

Patong is the beach from which most of those shocking first pictures came - probably the only tsunami-hit area where there were so many tourists around with cameras to hand.  Even with our optimism, we were still expecting this particular area to be pretty wrecked for a couple of streets back  (though we suspected that stories of the water extending almost a kilometer inland were geographically unlikely!).

We can't know how it looked even last week; we can only report on "now" - and the "now" is that the beachfront is looking amazingly clean and organised already. Many of the buildings which were sitting right ON the beach are being completely demolished and rebuilt. Those across the road fared much better - who knows why some are still looking quite "as normal", and why some were taken out badly;  but even so, it is not a scene of total destruction AT ALL.  Again, if one did not know better, it would easy to imagine that there were just major renovations going on along the waterfront.  On average, it looked like about 70% of the buildings/shops/bars/hotels on the road opposite the beach are OK, many of them re-opened for business again already.

Go just one street back in Patong - and it is like stepping into some time warp where no tsunami happened. Everyone is open as usual, and it's super-busy ! - much to our surprise !!  It looked just like the packed-out Patong of old, with all the street vendors, the girlie bars...  the only major difference immediately noticeable to us was far fewer westerners than usual. 

We had lunch at a little plastic-table locals' place on Patong Beach.  The women there greeted us with lots of smiles and "sawadee's" (welcome!).  Later we bought coconuts from a beach vendor - we got a big "thumbs-up" sign from the guy, and an even bigger smile from him and his buddies sitting around when we told him that we'd be sending the photo to friends back home.

These reactions - and many others similar -  have quite put our minds at rest about one niggling doubt; that there might be some uncomfortable element of being "gawking tourists".  We'd read the opinions of some who thought it a ghoulish, stop-at-traffic-accident thing to even consider still going to Thailand; how thick-skinned us westeners must be to consider still basking on beaches when so many people have suffered such personal tragedies - all of which are valid points of view.  However.... they don't seem to be the locals' point of view.   We have not so far gotten ANY sense of resentment at our presence; in fact it has been absolutely, totally the opposite. These people are happy to see us, very happy.   They know that in many ways, they were the luckier ones..... so many in Khao Lak fared so much worse. 

They also know very well that even for those who lost nothing in the tsunami, that the secondary economic crisis could spell disaster for them -  the Thais we have spoken with have very much echoed our expat friends' frustrations at the mass media of late. The first person we encountered on our arrival  - the very talkative taxi driver ! - told us at great length; everyone equates Khao Lak with Phuket.  For them, it is as if some natural disaster happened in, for instance, Vancouver, yet everyone is being warned off going to Seattle.

So - as far as Phuket is concerned; statements that we have all read in the press that the island has "been devastated" are just wrong, plain and simply - wrong. There is no more or less risk of disease here than on Dec 25th; the vast majority of the island is just as it always was. There are no bodies in streets or on beaches, no change in the sanitation/water infrastructure, the beachfront damage is being repaired amazingly fast. 

This is the good news.  Now for the not-so-good.

The two areas of which the massive destruction reports ARE true are Phi Phi Don ("big" Phi Phi) and Khao Lak.   The latter is about 2.5hrs drive north of here, on the mainland.  It was the up-and-coming-Phuket-to-be  - many new upscale resorts, many, many tourists.  The majority of the deaths reported in Thailand were from this area.   Much as we can see the Phuket locals' frustration at the mass media  - we can also understand better now how these generalisations have come about.   Even we  - knowing the geography of the area - did not realise till now just how localised the tsunami effects were; how it picked out certain areas to devastate, others to leave almost untouched. 

Khao Lak and Phi Phi Don shared two unfortunate geographical similarities.  They both have north-west facing beaches with long, shallow sands stretching back for hundreds of metres, giving the tsunami so much more chance to build those horribly destructive wave heights.  For Phi Phi Don - add the fact that most of it was built on a flat sand-spit of land between two pinnacles - and you have a perfect path for such a wave to wash right over to one beach to the other side.

Khao Lak is out of bounds to visitors right now; we hear that relief organisations and the Thai military are there and doing a great job; we'll not be able to report directly (even if we wanted to .... which, in view of the gawking tourist comments! - we probably wouldn't anyway).  

We ARE hoping to get out to Phi Phi Don -  this is the home of Wolfgang's cook, Joy; she and her husband ran a dive shop there.  They and all their family are fine, but their shop/home is not. We've had several offers of donations, etc, from past sailors, and we are hoping to find a worthwhile project there to help support. We've been told that the government is throwing a lot of resources at the island to help them rebuild, and that they are even hoping for an "opening day" of Feb 1st -  on which they will offer free accommodation to encourage visitors back ! Wolfgang thinks this date is optimistic; but still.... hope is on the horizon to get tourists back this season.

I don't want to sound like I'm trying to minimise the awful destruction and the thousands of deaths that the tsunami caused here....that's the last thing I'd want to do. But - as the headline to the local newspaper said today "Life Goes On" .  If it were in any way either insensitive or unsafe for us to continue with our trips, we'd certainly not go ahead.  But from everything we see here -   it's quite the opposite. Going forward as planned is as close to a win-win as we can pull out of this awful tragedy -  for visitors and the locals.

An update on the current situation in Thailand can be obtained at http://www.image-asia.com/phuket_krabi.htm.

You can find out more about Diane and her operation by visiting www.seascape-sail.com.