AO NANG, Thailand - It would simply be wrong to regurgitate the old cliche and
say that my life passed before my eyes as the great tsunami of 2004 pulled me
into its embrace. In fact, my first thought was the fate of my camera, the
intended use of which was the reason I had gotten so close to the wave in the
first place. My second thought was about the skin being peeled from my body as
I bounced along what, seconds before, had been a gravel road and now was a
tidal estuary. And then: "Where are my shoes?"
It was to be a day of cliches, and on this life-passing-before-the-eyes thing,
it is worth noting that in such situations time does tend to compress itself,
and small details embed themselves in the memory, even one such as mine that
seems to function less reliably with each passing year.
Another cliche is that tragedy brings out both the best and worst in people.
Again, there was some evidence for this belief. When I asked a somewhat
inebriated Australian if he had heard any estimates about when the power would
be turned back on, he snarled, "People have died here today. I think we can put
up with no electricity for a while. Understand me?" Well, excuse me.
Turns out the Aussie had been standing on the shore, not far from where I lost
my shoes and around the same time, watching an acquaintance struggle to get his
boat inland. It grounded on a sandbar when the wave troughed, and when it
surged back up, the man was gone forever. Confronted with the fragility of
life, forced to contemplate his own mortality, perhaps the Australian had
understandably been annoyed by a stranger's trivial question about electricity.
Or maybe he was just a jerk.
There were, too, the usual tales of "heroism". And as always one wonders what
"heroism" is - some people instinctively come to strangers' aid in an
emergency, others do not. If one does what comes naturally, without thinking,
is he a "hero"? Or is the person who preserves his own life first so that he
can go back to his family
who needs him, rather than sacrificing himself for a foreign tourist who had no
genuine need to be in such peril in the first place, the real hero?
For many of the locals in Ao Nang, a small tourist resort town in Krabi
province just east of the island of Phuket, the challenge had nothing to do
with hauling hapless tourists out of the raging seas, but simply with
fulfilling their obligation to serve the customers in the hotels, restaurants
and shops. Supplies quickly became difficult to get. Staff had fled, some in
fear but most to see to loved ones in less sheltered places on the coast than
Ao Nang. The proprietor of Mother's House restaurant told her customers, "I do
not have much food, the only beer I have is Chang. But if you buy your own
outside, you are welcome to bring it here and sit at my tables."
At another small outdoor Thai restaurant, my colleagues and I - fellow Asia
Times Online employee Martin Young and a mutual friend currently with The
Standard newspaper in Hong Kong - waited for our order. And waited. And waited.
We watched the few remaining staff of the place struggle to serve their
customers. We, and nearly all the other customers, understood they were doing
their best.
But not the "ugly farang" (foreigner).
You've seen people like this. They treat like dirt serving staff, shop clerks,
any "inferior". They are paying for service, and they want service now, tsunami
or no tsunami.
The one we saw even looked the part. She was a dowager type, with dyed red hair
and too-tight jeans that seemed to squeeze even her face into a grotesquerie.
Every few minutes she would march toward the kitchen to growl her complaints
about the slowness, about the courses coming in the wrong order, about the
quality of the food once it finally arrived. We watched with a combination of
contempt for her, of sympathy for the staff, and of amusement subtly shared via
nods and smiles with our Thai hosts.
One was reminded that in Thailand, unlike so many other places in these
enlightened times when profit is God, that the first word in the phrase
"hospitality industry" is the more important of the two. Even in the worst of
times. Even with "ugly farangs". But again, one suspects these are
built-in qualities, made neither better nor worse by natural disasters.
We ourselves, although on vacation on this occasion, were part of another
industry that played a crucial role in this huge event. At one point, we were
dining in a large seafood restaurant when a stampede of frightened tourists
emptied the place. Apparently it was sparked by a rumor that there had been an
aftershock and another wave was headed toward the town; folks were fleeing for
high ground or the safety of a nearby hotel. We ran too - but in the opposite
direction, against the stampede, toward the alleged wave, driven by the
same instinct, perhaps, that had sucked us into the news business in the first
place, yet at the same time able to reason that the chances of another tsunami
as big as or bigger than the one we had already survived was so remote as to be
not worth discussing.
Probably the main cliche marking this tragedy of the century (so far) is "life
goes on". Ao Nang was not hit nearly as badly as nearby Phuket, Phi Phi island
or Phang Nga, or even other centers in Krabi province itself, but the wave made
an awful mess. A small river near our hotel had been thrown into reverse by the
wave and vacuumed three or four dozen boats into its mouth, and they smashed
themselves to pieces against a bridge. "One of them was a three-deck passenger
boat," a local expat told us. "There isn't a trace of it now."
The beach road was strewn with debris. The wave had washed over it, smashing
into bars and restaurants on the other side of the road and hauling the
wreckage back toward the sea. Maneuvering down
the road in the aftermath was the closest my Honda Accord has been to
off-roading.
And yet, a mere two days later, except for the pile of boats stacked up against
the bridge, which were still being removed by cranes and carted away by army
tank transporters, the town was nearly spotless. The beaches and streets had
been cleaned up by local government workers and volunteers, fed and otherwise
encouraged by local businesses; most of the buildings had been mopped up and
repaired and resupplied. The staff had returned. My two companions even went
scuba diving as soon as the waters had cleared sufficiently. New Year's Eve was
like any other, just about.
But that story didn't make the news. Our friends and families, in Thailand and
overseas, knew only what they saw on television: an endless stream of
horrifying pictures of devastation. While we calmly lolled in swimming pools or
sipped drinks on the cleaned-up beach, they were hammering out frantic e-mails
or fighting with jammed phone lines. A worried e-pal in the Canadian province
of Ontario, surprised to get a quick reply to her plea to know about my
well-being, wrote back, "I had heard the Internet was down all over Thailand."
One cannot help wondering how long it will take the Thai government's public
relations people to realize how many potential tourists assume that the whole
country is in ruins, at least the beach resorts, when in fact only its
relatively small Andaman coast was affected.
And so, life goes on. And yet, there are all those what ifs...
Had the eons-long forces that resulted in that tectonic shift off Sumatra taken
a mere day longer, we would likely have been out on a boat exploring the
beautiful and soon-to-be-deadly Krabi coast, not sitting in our hotel dining
room eating brunch, when the first warning came. Or, we could easily not have
been in Ao Nang at all but in Phuket or Phi Phi; both had been discussed during
planning for the Christmas holiday.
Life goes on, for some of us. But not for others. And the line between us is
imperceptibly, arbitrarily, unpredictably small.
David Simmons is an Asia Times Online staffer based in Hua Hin, Thailand.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
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