We are fine...We now live a long way from the sea...I guess the little blue house in Phuket, which was only about 100 metres from the beach has gone though!
The whole of the beachfront of Patong and Kalim looks entirely flattened with buses and boats in the trees
December 27
As it happens there were two, well three, good reasons for not living in Phuket! The most trivial was that there were too many tourists. More serious was that in due course…. ie 5 years… the water supply was going to give up and there would be real problems. And there was this that has happened. It is a bit like the San Andreas fault…everyone I knew thought it would happen..but when?
Phuket has a low lying coastal strip of about a kilometre as does Samui, then the land rises steeply. But all around-down into Krabi and Satun the strip is many kilos wide and mainly mangrove swamp. To the north there are long strips of low lying beach.
There are harrowing scenes on Thai TV of both Europeans and Thais clutching dead children.
The Thai story is that it is mainly foreigners who are dead. I doubt it. Of course at 10.00 am the beaches would have been filling up and people waking in hotels, but many people will have gone on diving and boat trips to Ko Phi Phi and Similan…but I should think the toll amongst those known as Chao Ley..Sea Gipsies must be enormous. They live in small wooden houses on stilts in villages along the beaches the whole way from N of Phuket to the Malysian border and beyond. There are few communications and what I see of the very few images of the tsunamis in Koh Lanta outside Krabi suggests enormous devastation.
We don’t quite understand why it was not worse in Phuket..failure to understand tsunamis, I suppose. We can only think that as Phuket is so close to Aceh the water did not have time to build up into huge waves.
There are graphic accounts of children on hotel balconies saying: “Daddy, Mummy, the sea has run away!” :Don’t be silly, darling, of course it hasn’t!”
“Oh my God, so it has!” Then 20 Metre walls of water.
Do you know, Antonia and I had been talking of going to Phuket or Samui for Christmas!
I was looking at the news at about 9.00 yesterday morning….and I said to K…If there has been that kind of earthquake there will be enormous waves….2 hours later!
Among the most bizarre pictures are those of Europeans running away from the sea as fast as they can and of Thais running towards it to see what is happening….such are the benefits of education!
This being Thailand I should think the true toll will never be known…stands at 400 or so this afternoon..more like 2000 I should think…and if the waves hit the coastline of Burma…we will certainly never know what happened there.
