The Tsunami
Trip Start
Mar 02, 2004
1
20
34
Trip End
Apr 02, 2005
Where I stayed
Ko Samui,
Thailand
Monday, January 3, 2005
A few hours later I heard about Phuket, Koh Phi Phi, Krabi, and the tsunami that had ripped these places apart. Places I had considered for my vacation, washed away by a wave that would have topped the palm trees at the hotel where I was staying on Samui. Three stories. And I was dropped by a three-foot wave. It's too much to wrap my head around.
A lot has been made of how slow the international reaction was, but even locally no one really had a bead on it until later, when people who were there started emailing friends or arriving with stories of people drowning in hotel rooms, bodies stuck in the mud, in trees, others just washed out to sea
View from the Golden Sands, Lamai
.The morning after the tsunami the buffet table at the Golden Sands is almost picked clean but everyone's attention is on a pair of televisions in the lobby tuned to CNN. At first it comes off like another media event, the kind of thing that plays the latest footage on a loop with a few talking heads and a ticker flashing along the bottom of the screen. But it's not Princess Diana, September 11th, or OJ. It's a massive natural disaster that's devastated an area just 200 kilometres away from where I'm standing.
And still somehow it doesn't sink in. Everyone is talking about it, but it's still unreal. It was background noise, just a rather disturbing muzak in the elevator I rode through my vacation. But it's strange to have an immediate personal connection to such an international tragedy.
If I'd chosen to go to Phuket I would probably have died there, given that my flight schedule, if I'd chosen Phuket over Samui, would have landed me on the Andaman coast long enough to have found a place and hit the beach, just like I did on Samui, when the wave hit.
I was so close, but as far from the danger as I would have been in Seoul. In fact, the farther away people were from the scene the better their understanding of the consequences. Maybe I was wearing blinkers, like so many others there in the gulf, so close but totally unscathed by one of the worse natural disasters in recent history.
It's only much later that I come to grips with what's happened, with the fact that if my plans had been different I might not be here to write this story. But then, it's the extraordinariness of such a disaster that obscures what really could have happened to me or anyone else on Samui, or anywhere for that matter. The tsunami is a worldwide phenomenon, six degrees of separation or less for many people in the world.
Those of you reading this know how close I was to the scene, but I had a better chance of being smoked by a car than dying in a natural disaster. The dead guy in the road coming back from the Full Moon party (and all the people talking about Phuket while riding without a helmet). The Irishman who had his face opened from forehead to jowl. The guy with half his ear bitten off. The cautionary tales that prove nothing can prepare you for the inevitability of death and destruction.
How did I take all this in? I didn't, at least not at first. When I finally check my email, two days after the tsunami, I have four worried messages in my in box, confirming my initial suspicion that it's not all fear and doubt. I send out a quick note to say I'm fine. The next time I check my mail, on the most beautiful beach I've ever walked on, I have 23 messages waiting for me. I'm floored by the reaction, the concern for my safety.
Back in Seoul, talking to my mom on the phone, I finally started to realize how much people were worked up about my safety, how something that barely registered to me at the time was making my friends and family frantic with worry. Even the family that runs my local video store was calling my house in a panic!
It's a humbling, warming sensation, something that, as much as it makes me feel loved, makes me thankful for the fact that I'm alive to appreciate it. There are times when I feel overwhelmed, when I know that this experience will stay with me for the rest of my life. I was never in danger of being washed away by the tsunami, but I was there, people were worried for my life, and I'd rather not experience anything like it again.
