Good grief! Either I am following trouble around the world or trouble is following me! First a violent demonstration on a university campus in Istanbul…then the tsunami in Thailand…then the coup in Thailand…then the subway strike in New York City…then the teacher strike in Oaxaca and now this just as I am planning on returning this fall. Or maybe it’s just that there is always trouble all over the world!
Security in Bangkok To Be Tightened
Bangkok Post 2007-02-21
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After a flight from Bangkok on Bangkok Air, I have been enjoying my 26 year-old daughter-in-law on quiet Khlong Muang Beach in Krabi Province the last couple of weeks while my son Doug is in Oregon. Luk’s English is delightful and I hesitate to puncture her enthusiasm by correcting her but alas she must learn correct English. She often helps her friend Cie manage some resort bungalows up the street and they spend down time in the office with a pile of Thai kareoke CDs…singing their hearts out together…nearly always innocent and young romantic fantasies proclaiming lifelong love…tears falling when hearts are broken.
I am staying in the same bungalow that Doug and Luk were living in when the tsunami hit their sliding glass doors…15 feet from the water and even closer at high tide when tsunami detritus gets washed up each day. This morning I shivered when I sat up in bed to look out at the beach covered with dingy colored beach towels and empty plastic water bottles.
The owners upstairs are members of a delightful extended Muslim family…they speak no English but when mom comes downstairs with an offer to share their dinner…a big steaming bowl of homemade Tam Yam with freshly caught fish…a special treat here in Krabi…I bow deeply with hands folded and I give them no other words except kwop kum kha…thank you. I thoroughly enjoy their broad smiles in acceptance of my eager gratitude.
Luk and I are both trying to lose our “poom pooy” (fat) tummies (not that Luk has a fat stomach) so we often only eat omelets for breakfast and delicious broth soup with vegetables and pork for dinner made by a friendly Thai lady up the street. She doesn’t want to eat after 4pm…”it’s poom pooy to eat at night” she says. However, once in awhile I ride behind Luk on the motorbike to Au Nong Beach, 20 minutes down the coast, to splurge on something special …like the fresh hot cinnamon rolls with big juicy raisins at Lavinia…an Italian restaurant. Before heading back to beat the rain, we buy a couple newspapers that will eventually get peed on by Luk’s dog, Ting Tong. I check email and maybe buy a couple pirated DVD movies….Cinderella for her and Hotel Rwanda for me.
On another day we motorbike to a nearby moving market. I like to buy mangosteens, mangos and small ripe tomatoes from one of the Muslim vendors to munch on when I get hungry…passing up the small custards with difficulty. Luk likes the chili chicken satay on a stick.
For bigger excitement we sometimes take the songthaow, a small covered pick-up with two benches in the back facing each other, to Krabi Town where we can buy almost anything we want…even KFC and Swanson’s Green Tea Ice Cream. On my last trip, an elderly Thai silversmith on the street made me a necklace to enclose my tiny little wooden image of Buddah that was given to me by a monk during a blessing at a wat (temple) north of Bangkok.
Then it’s back to our quiet little beach where we are becoming part of the neighborhood…waving to familiar motorbike riders…buying water from the same little market each day…greeting Bum Pom, a lean young Muslim boatman who has been working on his long-tail boat under the bridge during this rainy season, his broad smile showing a missing front tooth…dreadlocks pulled into a ponytail hanging down his back.
After more than a month, it’s back to Bangkok.
Before we left Krabi, Bob and Doug both had to “stamp out” of the country at Ranong (on border of Burma) so they could get another 30 days in Thailand. We rented an SUV and drove over to Patong Beach on the west side of the island of Phuket where so many people lost their lives in the tsunami. You would never know anything horrible happened here…businesses up and running and tourists lying on the beach although in minimal numbers compared to before the disaster…but a lot of bare areas where store-houses once stood facing the beach.
Driving up the coast north to Ranong we passed through Khao Lak…a 50 mile stretch of beach that took the worst beating in Thailand. For miles there was nothing but bare bulldozed land…bulldozed in order to remove bodies that were trapped among the roots of Mangrove trees and under rubble. Much of the land here is flat from the beaches to the foothills inland so in places the devestation extended across the road and into the countryside for more than two kilometers. Halfway up a hillside we saw a wrecked coast guard ship sitting at a crazy angle that we understand will be preserved as part of a memorial to all who died here.
We passed a volunteer center that is accepting volunteers for a month at a time and for as long as a year…many of them young people who scrambled down from the backpacker streets in Bangkok…others flying in from the U.S. and Europe…many of them professionals in their fields. At the web site at http://www.tsunamivolunteer.net you can read heart-rending and life-changing message boards…many in English.
Bob and I have been here in Krabi Province of Thailand with Doug and Luk for three weeks now…a welcome respite after a month in smoggy noisy Bangkok where I had some dental work done and a 6 month routine check-up at Bumrungrad Hospital.
Bob left a couple days ago to do some hiking in Khao Sok National Park up north. I stayed here in my little 2nd story bungalow on lazy Ao Nang Beach watching the dark wiry young boat guys guide their long tailed boats to various karst islands and isolated beaches out in the deceivingly placid blue and green ocean and return again. Bob and I will either meet up in Bangkok or he will return here first…who knows what he will do. The breeze cools down at night until about noon…then air conditioning goes back on again.
Doug and Luk come over every morning (my place is 10 minutes up the road from their house) and we breakfast together. Then we all pile on the motorbike for a ride through the karsts and banana tree forests looking for a little fantasy house for me to rent…can get a house with tile floors, bathroom, hot water, kitchen facilities and bedroom and main room for about $200 a month if you are not on the water. A bottom floor bungalow on the water like Doug had before the tsunami is about $450 a month.
Weird to see inaugural celebrations on Fox News and then to drive by the Krabi Wat with hundreds of pictures of victims and piles of burial boxes.
An internet friend of mine who just married a Thai girl is staying on Patang Beach on Phuket Island where most of the damage was done. He said the beaches have been cleaned up…chairs and umbrellas are back up and the local businesses are begging for tourists. Reconstruction has already begun on some of the lost and damaged hotels. The second worst place in Thailand to get hit was Khoa Lak…just up north from here. They are still finding bodies in the Mangrove Forests and the village water well ended up with a car and 92 bodies in it. Several thousand bodies have not been found yet, many of them illegal immigrants from Burma. We hear they will not even try to rebuild at Khao Lak.
A month in Bangkok
On the morning of December 26, 2004, after a bowl of spicy Thai soup on the street outside my Bangkok hotel, I returned to my room and flipped on the satellite TV to find both CNN and BBC running astounding commentary and amateur video of the tsunami wave that had hit the Krabi coast earlier that morning. Son Doug and his wife Luk had been living on Khlong Muang beach 15 feet from the water in Krabi Province just SE of Phuket. The telephone circuits were all busy but after four tries and 30 minutes trying to reach them with my heart in my throat, Luk finally answered. What sweet voices that day!
About 10:30 that morning Doug and Luk had been in bed when they heard what they thought was a bomb. When he opened the curtains to the sliding glass doors, he instead found that it was the first wave of the tsunami that hit their glass doors facing the beach leaving the bungalow under water. They were lucky the doors were closed. Many lives were lost when water entered open doors and windows leaving people with no way to escape.
Doug said he immediately threw a bottle against the door of a sleeping couple behind their bungalow to wake them while Luk climbed screaming to the roof. Then when the first wave went back out, he and Luk scrambled to safety up the hill behind them.
When the 2nd wave washed detritus and some of their belongings back up on the beach, they made a little pile of stuff on the country road above the house. Doug had just sunk a lot of money into a cozy cafe/bar in front of his beachfront rental unit only to lose the whole investment…but not his life. He also luckily didn’t lose his new motorbike, that he retrieved as it was out swirling crazily in the 2nd wave.
They were able to quickly arrange for a friend with a pickup to take them and what was left of their belongings to a rental house farther inland on the road between Krabi Town and Ao Nang Beach and later to the island of Koh Samui.
About a week later, Bob appeared in Bangkok from wherever he was and he and I flew from Bangkok to Krabi Town…all of 6 people flying with us…not a good sign for the tourist industry here, I thought, as I stepped off into the humid tropical air. It felt very strange to be flying into the tsunami ravaged area on a colorful holiday plane. Son Doug and Luk, met us in the terminal…Luk, smiling, handed me a nicely wrapped gift. A friend that was in the Peace Corps in Thailand says the name “Luk” is an endearing name in Thai. She is a dear.
Krabi Province has about 500 people known to be lost so far to the tsunami. After spending a night in Krabi Town, a busy dusty town of about 18,000, Bob rented a motorbike and we moved about 30 kilometers up the coast to the beach town of Ao Nang.
On the way out of town we passed the Buddhist Wat that is providing space for a Krabi assistance and communication center under wide green awnings by the side of the road. Volunteers assist families looking for the missing on computer terminals. Color photos of the dead, disfigured and unrecognizable, and pictures of the missing cover rows of standing sheets of plywood. I was shocked and revolted by the appearance of drowned bodies. I had no idea they would swell like they do. Most of the photos of the dead attempt to show anything that may be identifiable by an intimate family member…a ring, a bracelet, a tatoo, a logo on a t-shirt…flowered undergarments…
Workers are still building several hundred wooden boxes that will be lowered with their contents into a mass grave in the cemetery beside the Wat. Driving along the roads in Krabi, here and there can be seen covered memorial areas with casket and flowers for funerals by some family members who have been able to identify their dead. We had been told that Krabi Province’s worst hit area is Khao Lak, farther north up the coast where the wave penetrated three kilomaters into the Mangrove forests and where people are still being found as debris is cleared. There are no plans to rebuild the area we are told.
The immediate crisis is over here in Krabi province. Smiling Thai people are some of the most positive people in the world and they are trying to make the best of a bad situation. They are not waiting for the wheels of international aid. Here in Ao Nang beaches are quickly being cleaned up…an attempt to salvage the devastated tourist high season. The local boat school is donating student workers and materials to repair about 50 damaged long-tail boats. A local company is donating time to desalinate long-tail motors. Boatmen are again taking what few tourists are left here out on diving expeditions and trips to outlying islands. Window glass is being replaced.
Patang Beach on Phuket Island had the most deaths and got the most publicity, but many beaches have been cleaned up already. It is indeed strange how one area could be hit hard and how the next area 10 feet away would not be damaged at all. Destroyed businesses and homeless families will get help.
But unfortunately, international coverage by CNN and BBC filmed the devastation to the exclusion of all the other areas which frightened away prospective tourists. On top of that, both Sweden and Denmark issued travel warnings so the tour companies have rescinded their travel insurance for those people…prompting travelers on two and three week holidays to return home. Restaurants and guesthouses here are empty. One restaurant owner told me that they have heard that some business owners will get some money to pay their rent but that still leaves them with little source of livlihood.
Koh Samui on the other side of the Thai peninsula, not hit by the wave, is packed at 100% capacity…only families getting hotel rooms and tents being set up on the beaches for backpackers. But here on the west side of Thailand, local expats and long term tourists are writing home and telling people if they really want to help now, to buy a plane ticket and come visit. If taking a vacation in SE Asia right now seems repugnant to you…as it did for us…think of the living here instead. The opposite side of the coin is the economic struggle of the survivors as they lose their source of income…60% of which comes from tourism. We are going to Phuket in a few days. Maybe the hospital there could use some help.
Laughingnomad 