The Tsunami - 20 Years on.

Age 26 – A Tsunami

It's 20 years since the Tsunami today. I wanted to share an excerpt from my book about that time. It's a heavy read but it puts into perspective the impact of this event. I was lucky, I wasn't there, I flew into the disaster zone a few days afterwards but it affected the lives of so many people I knew. Thinking of them today...

An excerpt from ‘A Thousand Wasted Sundays’ By Victoria Vanstone

‘White lace and promishesss. I kishhh for luck and I’m ooon my waaay.’

I was half-cut, standing with my elbow leaning on the top of a piano on holiday in Australia with my family. I sang The Carpenters. It was Boxing Day and I’d downed a few flutes of Bucks Fizz for breakfast. The TV was on in the background, but it was drowned out by a very tuneless version of ‘We’ve Only Just Begun.’ My Dad walked over and interrupted my rendition.

‘There’s been an earthquake. I think it’s Thailand, Vicky. Come and look at the news.’

Images of Koh Phi Phi filled the TV screen. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.

‘There’s been a tsunami, Vic. It looks like where you live.’

Everything slowed down. I sat in the lounge with my eyes transfixed. It was where I lived, it was where my beach bar was, and where my boyfriend was …

Everybody gathered round. We watched in stillness. The death toll on the side of the screen flicked from the hundreds to the thousands. People came and went from the room, brought me drinks and food on trays. But it sat untouched next to me on the wooden floor.

It took me a while to comprehend the extent of what had happened. A tsunami. A wave. It seemed unreal. I had no idea what to do. Should I go there? Fly into the disaster zone?

I couldn’t think straight. I went upstairs and grabbed my little pocket phone book and ran my finger down a list of names. I called some numbers. A flat tone hummed in my ear. No connection. Phone lines were down.

I sat on the floor with the phone off its hook next to me, trying to come to terms with the fact that all my friends, and my boyfriend, were probably dead.

‘I have to go there,’ I said. ‘I have to see if I can find him.’

I’d moved to Thailand after completing my work visa in Australia and had met Jai walking along the beach one late afternoon. I was studying to be a foreign language teacher in the tourist hub of Patong and was heading home when a smiling face caught my attention.

‘Hello, my teacher,’ he said.

‘Oh, hello.’ I said as I walked past.

The next day, he was there again, smiling.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello again.’

‘Beer for you?’

I sat with him on a concrete block.

We didn’t say much. We just sat.

‘Chok dee.’

‘Yes, cheers,’ I said back.

I couldn’t help but fall in love. He was charming, with his dreads that almost dragged along the ground and a smile so big it almost split his face in two. The little bag, slung over his shoulder, carried his only belongings, cigarettes, a tatty wallet containing ID and one extra pair of board shorts.

‘I Lub you Wic,’ he said after our first kiss. That was it. I had myself a lovely Thai boyfriend.

We moved to an island near the town of Krabi together where we opened a bar on an abandoned squid boat. It was perfect. I spent my days swinging in a hammock and my nights surrounded by travellers and alcohol. Having my own bar felt like being Tom Thumb and being plonked in the drinks cabinet of my youth, only now I could help myself with no fear of getting into trouble. I was strung out all the time. The hostess with the mostest, with a smiling Rasta man by my side.

I loved island life. I ate freshly caught crab with the sea gypsy community, I read dog-eared books discarded by long gone travellers, and snorkelled in the clear blue ocean.

Each morning, with a stonking hangover, I made my way to a communal concrete slab next to the well where groups of inquisitive Muslim women gathered. They stood in a huddle, expertly scrubbing their bodies with soap and powdering themselves with talc, while managing to hide their bodies under long colourful sarongs. Holding my bucket of cold water, I stood there awkwardly, not sure how to wash with a sheet wrapped around my body.

I did a dodgy knot at the top and bent over to collect some water. Without fail, my sarong hit the floor each time I reached up and poured the freezing water over my head. The women giggled with delight, they never got bored of seeing my pasty white body and the silly face I pulled as I bent over and picked up the sarong.

They let out a communal groan when an older lady came over and taught me a special way of tying it on … but on occasion I dropped the sarong on purpose to give the ladies a laugh. Naked little kids pointed at my white bottom in hysterics, so I sidled away like a crab clutching my shampoo bottle, laughing with my sodden flip-flops slapping against the concrete.

I fished for my lunch from the shoreline with a hook, a piece of string and a stick. I felt like Huckleberry Finn. There were funny people coming and going and I had a stoned, smiling boyfriend. I could have stayed there forever, but Mother Nature got in my way.

‘My boyfriend is dead, and I can’t do anything about it,’ I said to my Dad.

‘Maybe you should go?’ he said.

‘We will follow in a few days.’

They guessed I would be seeing some awful things and going to lots of funerals and decided to come, risk their own lives, to be there for me.

According to the news, flights had started taking aid to the worst hit areas, so people were going there. I made the decision to go back to Thailand and try to find Jai. I was scared, but knew I had to go.

I waited until the aftershocks had passed and called the airline. I explained my situation and they reserved me a seat on the next flight. I think the lady on the other end of the phone could hear the worry in my voice.

‘I need to get there. My boyfriend is missing.’

Most people were flying out of the disaster rather than into the thick of it. She took my name and never asked for payment.

I hugged my worried family and headed to the airport. I felt numb, but everyone was very British about the whole thing.

‘Chin up old girl,’ I repeated to myself.

‘Worse things happen at sea.’

Not the best mantra under the circumstances.

The flight that morning was like nothing I had experienced before. There was total silence on board. For the two hours from Singapore to Thailand a terrible stillness filled the small space. There was nothing to say. My fellow passengers had traumatised, haunted expressions frozen upon their faces. If eyes met, they instantly filled with tears.

We were all on that plane for the same reason, to find if loved ones were dead or alive.

It was too blunt to fathom. We were too scared to discuss the possibilities of what lay ahead. Most people sat with heads down, clasping hard onto the arm rests. Some prayed and some sat staring at the seat in front. In my seat, as I put my passport in the holder in the back of the chair, I caught the eye of the lady on the other side of the aisle. I felt sadness heaving up from within as we locked eyes. She reached over and took my hand. Our support for each other dangled in the aisle, joined together in a mutual fear of the unknown.

I whispered to her,

‘It will be okay.’

She nodded. We both knew it wouldn’t.

We squeezed tighter and didn’t let go until the flight attendant came down the aisle and broke us apart with the offer of a cold drink.

Just before the plane landed the lady took my hand again.

‘Good luck,’ she said.

‘Yes, good luck,’ I whispered quietly back.

That afternoon was one of the most surreal and saddest experiences of my life. Every single person on that plane knew they were landing in a nightmare. The total hopelessness and anguish etched on everyone’s faces was hard to describe. We helped one another get bags from the over-head lockers with polite thanks and tender smiles, a gracious moment of normality before we entered the disaster zone.

I disembarked and walked through the arrival gate.

There were hundreds of people waiting, but there was no noise. No movement. I watched on as people around me tried to make out who was there to meet them.

I stared as people counted heads.

One, two, three … eyes flitting from face to face.

Who was here and who’d not made it?

A simple head count determined how this was going to go.

Numbers. Missing people. Faces disappeared from families.

Some were missing children, others were without wives or parents, and many stood alone.

One man kneeled on the floor with his son next to him. They shook their heads in despair. I heard the younger man say,

‘They’re gone.’

I looked away, embarrassed to be part of this intimate moment, the incomprehensible moment he discovered most of his family were dead.

My eyes darted to where some people convened. They embraced hard. Others shook hands, having been met by strangers with bad news. Sobs and wails echoed throughout the small airport. I watched, sat on my suitcase, and waited for a bus, witnessing entire lives change before me. I saw hope transform into sorrow as a few words shattered lives.

‘She didn’t make it.’

‘I held on, but I lost him.’

‘I can’t find her.’

It was a hopeless place to be. As the bus pulled up, the lady who’d held my hand, carried a toddler in her arms, smiling.

She squeezed that child with all her strength, and I knew she was one of the lucky ones.

I acknowledged her with a weak thumbs up and flung my bag onto the bus. I watched from my window as families slowly walked towards the exit, walking towards the worst day of their lives.

I headed into town to join in the search.

I got off near the market where cheerful food vendors usually sold meals off the back of ramshackle motorbikes. But instead, lining the streets, were hundreds and hundreds of coffins.

Men knelt over, tools in hand, nailing planks together, sawing at big panels of wood. Dust sprayed across the road, the sound of hammering and revs of electric power tools ricocheting off buildings. The streets became like a workshop. Busy serious men worked hard, getting this essential yet unfamiliar job done. A factory line of workers passed the empty coffins down the hill to be stacked. I followed the trail until a wall towered over me. Thousands of finished coffins, stood like a huge wooden mountain. The pile was taller than the buildings around me. There were so many, all waiting to be filled.

I was handed a face mask by one of the men. I wasn’t sure if it was to stop inhaling all the fumes from the machinery or because of the dust in the air. I put it in my pocket and walked towards the harbour. As I approached, hundreds of people gathered. They huddled in small groups, I presumed to meet friends from boats returning from the islands.

A ferry chugged along the in-let, a gust of warm wind blew into my face, carrying with it an intense smell, not a smell I had encountered before. It took me a moment to comprehend what it was …

Death.

It draped over me in the humid air like a dense fog. The smell was putrid and rotten, it made me wretch. I turned my face away from the breeze, but it got stronger as the boat got nearer. I realised what my mask was for and put it on, covering my mouth and nose, but there was no way that thin plastic veil was going to block out the stench that encircled me.

I kept my gaze in the opposite direction of the approaching boat. All I saw were the faces of the waiting people, pale and ghostly. As the boat docked people turned away, quickly. The deathly odour entwined with the smell of the boat’s engine. My intrigue overtook my fear and I turned back to look. The boat sat heavy in the water, its cargo weighing down the huge vessel. I heard someone shouting in Thai, ropes were thrown and tied to land. There was a small commotion as some locals approached the men on board. They had a discussion, then called others over to make a line. They did it with calmness, it felt like noise couldn’t penetrate the stink. With the boiling midday sun bearing down on my face I watched them unload.

At first, I thought it was rubbish bags, tonnes of waste bought in by the wave, but it was piles of dead people, all lumped on top of one another. One by one the bodies were passed from the boat to awaiting open-backed trucks. The men carried each body, holding one arm and one leg each, lifting the corpses through the mob of onlookers. They did so with respect and with care.

People clambered to get a glimpse, tourists, locals alike, to see if it was their husband, child, or friend, scanning the bodies for any scar or tattoo, anything they could distinguish to confirm identities, but the bodies were bloated and distorted from being in the water. They looked inhuman and unrecognisable. People were there craving for answers, turned their heads, covered their noses and mouths with handkerchiefs, and looked distraught, as they held onto supportive partners.

What amazed me about the moment was the complete silence, it was the only way we could mutually pay our respects to these lost lives; we all connected without speaking. Eyes were screaming, ‘Please don’t let it be my child.’ Words were left unsaid.

I saw relief at times, as people were handed photographs by officials of survivors awaiting reunions in hospitals, but further up the line as the bodies passed, I knew someone recognised the little pink shorts or the colour of a shirt as one of their own. There were quiet sobs and low mumbles.

‘No, no, please no,’ people said as they walked alongside the bodies, accompanying them to a place of rest.

There must have been one thousand people waiting for the boat. What I knew as a hectic market square teeming with activity, had become a makeshift morgue. A never-ending amount of dead bodies, big, small, Thai and European were carried from water to land.

Hands rested on shoulders and tears were wiped from cheeks by strangers. I heard chants of monks in the nearby temple. It was terrible and peaceful all at once. For an hour I watched this awful scene unfold. I was numb, I couldn’t contemplate what I saw was real. I walked away when the second and third boat pulled up at the port.

I drifted back up the hill into town and continued the search for my friends. Most of them turned up at local haunts over the following days, with stories of how they had survived. Some friends held onto trees as water flooded over them. My friend Emma held on with one arm around a palm tree and another hand gripped on tight to her fake Louis Vuitton suitcase. It was all that she could think of doing as the wave crashed onto the sand.

My friend Thierry managed to scramble up a tree and watch in disbelief as the resort he’d finished building the week before, was decimated below him. Not every story was of survival. There were never-ending tales of loss, waiting and not knowing, hoping and then not finding.

I didn’t know what to do. Communication lines were all down, boats were busy helping with the clean-up, nothing was running as normal, but I had to get to my little island. I persuaded a fisherman to take me. Thais are superstitious, scared of the spirits of the dead coming to haunt them, so many stayed in the mountains for weeks afterwards, too frightened to travel on the unpredictable ocean where so many lives had ended. I was lucky to find a brave local willing to help me.

Just before I jumped aboard, someone shouted my name. I saw a friend, who said my boyfriend was spotted. A military boat did an inspection of the island and saw him walking near our bar.

He was alive. I felt utter relief.

I headed over to the island perched on the front of a long-tail boat. As we approached the engine cut and as the boat noiselessly glided towards the land, I saw the space where our bar once stood.

The FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition) had lived up to its name. There was nothing left. It was as if every page out of War and Peace was torn, each page torn into a million tiny pieces, then thrown up in the air, shredded, and spread over a vast area of land. I hopped onto the sand and straight away spotted my Marks & Spencer’s bra hanging from a tree. As I plucked it from the branches there was a tap on my shoulder.

‘Hello Vic.’

I was reunited with Jai.

‘I’m so glad you’re ok. I was worried I’d lost you.’

‘Don’t worry, Wic. I found a  big bag of Marijuana in wave. I stay in the mountains, smoke for one week. No problem.’

I laughed. His big smile and ridiculous story cheered me up. We walked along the beach holding hands. He told me he’d run inland with the wave at his ankles after waking the people sleeping in bungalows, shouting, ‘Water coming, run.’  Some managed to scramble onto the back of trucks, others legged it as the wave destroyed everything behind them. It was a close one. I felt lucky to still have him after seeing so much suffering back at the port. We wandered around in the clutter and debris, picking at things that were left over from our lives before the wave. I found some water-stained photos, broken CDs, and books with pages bulging from their covers having soaked all the water. A few bottles of spirits, comfortably planted in the sand, were salvageable.

I plucked up a bottle of vodka from the ground, cracked the seal, turned the twist off cap. On a washed-up log amongst the rubble, we took turns swigging the strong liquor until it was finished. The alcohol eased some weight from my heart. We stared at the horizon as the sun disappeared over a calm Andaman Sea. As we sat, hundreds of single flip-flops washed up at our feet.