informage

I have been waiting for over a week for the opportunity to sit down and put together my thoughts on our experiences in Thailand, but now that I do have the time it seems like an odd thing to do. Most of me is focused getting into the Hong Kong experience, and I have been running around buying things and filling in forms and trying to fit into my tiny little 3mx2m niche in this crazy city (imagine London, except with much taller buildings and everyone speaks Chinese), so Thailand seems a long way away.

This may be because I want it to be far away, I want very much to move on.

There is also another feeling I have, something like shame, to be talking about this at all. It feels a bit like taking snapshots of the dead, or trying to paint myself a hero when somebody else was actually doing the dying. Survivor guilt is not unusual in a circumstance like this, and I think we all got a dose of it. And the sense of shame is magnified considerably by the feeling of being incredibly lucky, of being blessed, almost, to be alive. Yet there was no sense or order or method in the distribution of death, it was random. Death happened, and you were there or you weren't. So I feel like one of the chosen, as if I had been selected to be on the Ark when the flood came, but I feel absolutely undeserving and I also know that the choosing of me to be a survivor was arbitrary, meaningless, like a lotto ticket.

These feelings are a bit mixed up. Let me try and tell the story and maybe it will make more sense.

I woke up that morning to the sound of chugging diesel engines. We were on a yacht, the Jaya, and we had been popping around the most idyllic coastline imaginable. If you have seen the movie "The Beach", you can try imagining that, but add a few hundred islands of scenery like that, and imagine us sailing through them on a big old wooden barge of a yacht, a sturdy Ark, built from solid beams of hard Indonesian wood. Snorkeling, jumping off the ship into the ocean, exploring deserted islands, sleeping on the deck under the stars... we were having a very good time.

It had been strange Christmas, out there in the middle of the Andaman Sea with a boatload of Swedes, can of snow and a bottle of Thai rum. We had anchored on Christmas Day off an island called Ko Phi Phi Don, and had had gone ashore for some supplies � ice cream, beer, and candy for the two Swedish kids � and for me to send some update e-mails home from an internet cafe there. So when I woke up the next day to the chugging of the engines, we were on our way out of Ko Phi Phi Don, and on our way to her sister: Ko Phi Phi Lei. We wanted to get there early because this is the island on which "The Beach" actually was filmed, and its beauty is very quickly marred by the presence of hundreds of motor boats.

We made it there by 8AM and quickly headed into the water for some snorkeling. It was deeper water, and not as beautiful as the corals we had seen off Ko Phi Phi Don the previous day. I have to admit that the most colourful thing I saw down there that day was a school of Japanese tourists, in the most extraordinarily bright snorkeling gear, being towed along by a rope. The experience was also a little nerve-wracking, with the screws of motor boats mincing the water around us as the tourists pulled in. It felt a bit like leopard-crawling through a parking lot as it fills up on a Saturday morning, but it was a lot more beautiful.

Anyway, something made Joe and me decide to swim to the shore. Something makes him and me do strange things quite frequently, like a few days before we had nearly killed ourselves kayaking out to an island that looked a lot closer than it felt. So off we swam, dodging tourists and motor boats, until we got to The Beach and checked out the view. By then we had spent more time in the water than we had intended to, and we felt that the rest of the people must have returned to the boat and would be wanting to go by now. So we swam back, and the Jaya made her sedate way back towards Ko Phi Phi Don to pick up supplies.

On the way in to the bay, we started to notice some strange things. First, three major waves rocked the boat. We were in the back, reading, and noticed the waves as you would notice the sun covered by a cloud � we looked up and we sommer noticed it. It didn't seem particularly dangerous, it just seemed odd. "Weeee", we said, as the bow crashed and splashed through the swells. Then we noticed that a lot of boats were anchored outside the bay, out to sea, and that several motor boats were heading at high speed out of the bay. At this point we became aware that something was going on, and we wondered what it was.

Boatmen coming out started to signal to us, but none of the crew spoke Thai so we couldn't quite make out what it was they were saying. One pulled in close, showed us a young boy in the back of his boat, and motioned to the top of his skull. I thought perhaps the boy had been injured by one of those crazy speedboats in the bay. But this didn't tie in with all the boats being offshore. Someone mentioned a bomb, and that there had been some recent fighting in the area. But there was no smoke coming from the island and surely a bomb big enough to rock our boat would have made some smoke?

Then the strangest and most unsettling sign came: two moray eels, one after the other, came floating drunkenly past the Jaya. Moray eels stay on the seabed, tucked into the nooks and crannies of the coral with their ugly mugs sticking out, waiting for unsuspecting fish. In fact we had seen one the day before while we were snorkeling off this island. Why on earth would we see two of them, looking startled and lost, on the surface of the sea? Could it be some kind of bizarre current?

We began to feel fear. Anelka, the mother of the two Swedish boys, had a grim look about her � she knew the sea and knew that the wave had been highly unusual. Ron, the captain of the ship, took the dinghy off to find information, while we sat on the boat and waited. Life jackets were put on. Soon after Ron came back with the news that a tsunami had hit Ko Phi Phi, a strange kind of tropical hell broke loose in paradise. Boats started pulling up to the Jaya, mooring for long enough to unload shocked, wounded people.

One after the other, we helped them aboard and heard fragments of the story. One woman had been standing on the beach, photographing her husband, when he had simply disappeared. Ko Phi Phi Don consists of two large rocks joined by a narrow isthmus of flat sand. On this isthmus all the hotels and bars of the island are built. One elderly American couple had been on the far side of the isthmus when they saw the wave. They had tried to run but to no avail, the wave had caught them and driven them right over the island, from one beach to the other, and if they hadn't found a floating kayak they would have drowned. It occurred to me then that I would have been in the internet caf� on that isthmus if Joe and I hadn't taken that extra long swim that morning. I started to feel lucky, a strange, shameful kind of lucky, like someone who misses the plane and then finds out it crashed.

We had a seriously injured woman on board who needed to get to the hospital in Phuket, so we fired up the Jaya's diesels again and turned around for the four hour trip across the Andaman Sea. Shortly after we left, we heard word from the shore that another wave was on the way. We made phone calls home, wondering what they knew, whether they knew anything at all. At that time we didn't know that the thing was bigger than Ko Phi Phi. We were only just starting to imagine that some people might have died. Starved of information, we headed across the sea. We knew in our heads that the sea was the best place to be � a tsunami is only a wave near to the shore, out to sea it is just a bloody great swell � but in our hearts we didn't really know anything.

The first bit of news we got was from CNN on a cell phone. A wonder of modern technology, the little thing told us that 400 were dead in Sri Lanka, and 100 more in Thailand. An earthquake off Sumatra, it said. The seas, I remember, were eerily calm, almost glassy, on that trip to Phuket. But the wave never came, in the end, and we made it to Phuket without having to see again what a tsunami looks like.

We stayed at a luxury hotel that had been spared by being several metres up a rocky cliff, and the next few days were a strange blur. Hotel rooms with CNN tolling up the dead. Rumours of new waves, each one bigger than the last. Hotel bars, hotel pools. Survivors and their grazes and their stories. Everything in Thailand revolves around the beaches, everywhere are reminders of beaches that were destroyed. We watched the toll climb from 20,000 to 50,000 and up past 100,000, and wondered a bit more each day how we had sailed over this thing going "weeeee!" How had we missed it? We could have taken less time for our swim, but really that was an absurd thought, we could have done a thousand other things that would have put us directly in the way. If we hadn't decided to take the boat in the first place we would, almost certainly, have been sitting on the beach when it hit.

Eventually we couldn't take it any more. Trying to have a holiday doesn't really work in a disaster zone, you can't carry on a dinner party after the host has choked to death. So we returned to Singapore, and now I am in Hong Kong, dazzled by all this civilization and dazzled by where I was and what nearly, nearly happened. Everyone we met in Thailand after the wave has their What If story � if we hadn't done this or if we had done that � and all have their stories of where they were when it hit. A couple we met in the pool were scuba diving when suddenly a great big washing machine erupted around them. Another woman had seen it come in, she said it looked like someone had pulled the plug on the ocean, before it all came rushing back.

We weren't just lucky, we were very, very lucky. I suppose you could argue that we were unlucky to be in Thailand to start with, but the experience of such a close encounter is still the same � shock, luck, relief, shame. It makes you wonder, it really does.

And so that's the story, from my perspective. There are thousands just like it. 150,000 dead, now, and just as many wondering how on earth it missed ME.