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  • Day 105

    Phuket

    March 29, 2018 in Thailand ⋅ ⛅ 88 °F

    The beach here in Phuket, Thailand looks beautiful. It could be any beach on the French Riviera, or in the Caribbean. But on December 26, 2004 this lovely beach became a killing zone. We know because we saw it on TV. An undersea earthquake off the coast produced a tsunami that drowned a total of some 240,000 people around all parts of the Indian Ocean.

    We all remember Phuket, the video of the “drawback” preceding the tsunami, the little boy running out to collect shells newly exposed, the water covering the child and washing him out to sea. We remember the horror that cut Christmas short that year. Today the tourists on our bus, me included, were busily snapping shots of the beach, trying to stand exactly where the camera took the shots on that horrible day. We asked our guide about the tsunami—“Did you lose any friends or relatives in the disaster?” He admitted that he had lost loved ones in the tragedy. But what our guide told us next surprised us. He said that the only reason attention was focused on our current location, Phuket, is that this is where the international press corps happened to be located: ensconced in the high-rise resorts here on the beach. The damage and death were far worse elsewhere. Tragic though it is, only 250 died in Phuket. Low-lying Phiphi island just southeast of Phuket was completely covered by the wave. Every structure and every person on the island were destroyed. The island was washed clean. Of everything. Around 5,000 people died there. Khao Lak just north of here lost about 3,000 people. But no reporters were there. The world never heard about these places.

    I learned only today, as I was preparing this post, that the epicenter of the earthquake was just off the coast of Aceh Province in Indonesia. I was surprised. We were actually there just last week, but it did not occur to any of us tourists to ask our guide about the tsunami‘s effect on Indonesia. He even made a passing reference to “the tsunami,” but no one asked him about it because we knew that the really bad stuff happened at Phuket. We had seen the video. There had been no news video from Indonesia in 2004.

    It was the deadliest tsunami in history and probably the third largest tsunami ever. The loss of human life here in Thailand was terrible—without question. Yet in Indonesia the death toll was 165,000. In Sri Lanka the death toll totaled over 35,000.

    But we remember Phuket.

    Because that’s where the news reporters were.
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