Diary of Destruction, 26.-30.12.2004
A personal account by Helsingin Sanomat editor-in-chief Heleena Savela, who arrived in Thailand minutes after the tsunami engulfed the west coast.
|
|
By Heleena Savela in Bangkok, Ao Nang, and Khao Lak
Sunday, 26.12.
BANGKOK, KRABI
Bangkok Airways Flight PG821 from the Thai capital to Krabi is scheduled to take off at 09:20, and there is not an empty seat on board. It is filled with holidaymakers.
Technical problems. The passengers are ordered out of the plane. After a half-hour hiatus, everyone is back in their seats. Now we can take it easy. The plane touches down at Krabi’s relatively new airport at 10:50.
The first surprise is waiting, or not waiting, outside the terminal. There are no taxis to be had anywhere.
In the arrivals hall, airport officials, police, and hotel greeters are scurrying here and there. Finally the news comes over the loudspeakers: the entire Krabi beach resort area has been closed. Something has happened. Just now. A few minutes ago.
One taxi does roll up, however, and the driver agrees to take us towards Ao Nang and the hotels on the Andaman Sea. The main roads west towards Ao Nang have been blocked off, and police patrols are out. A dirt track through a rubber plantation is still open.
In front of the Andaman Resort Hotel on Khlong Muang Beach, north of Ao Nang, we are met by a flow of exiting tourists, dragging their luggage behind them. They are British. People rush into the hotel lobby. A chain of tourist police prevents anyone from trying to get to the beach.
From the terrace restaurant we can see smashed long-tail boats, palms that have been ripped out of the ground by the roots, and the swimming pool looks like a garbage tip.
In the hotel foyer, BBC World’s 24-hour news channel finally explains what has happened: there has been a huge underwater earthquake off the north-western coast of Sumatra. The tsunami generated by the quake has swept over the Andaman Sea coast of Southern Thailand. People have been swamped and dragged out to sea.
My mobile phone beeps an SMS message at 11:57. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs all Finns missing in Phuket have been located.
No outsiders are able to get into the town centre of Ao Nang. A press card opens the way. My guide and driver is the local police chief, who has been called to the scene.
The vast power of the waves has thrown the sea-bed into the restaurants, stores, hotels, and taxi-stands along the beach boulevard. Boats lie smashed against terrace restaurants.
The Ao Nang Villa Resort is a beachfront hotel, just south of the main road out to Krabi. A group of Finnish tourists on an Aurinkomatkat holiday are booked in here, but there are no longer any Finns around. The word is that they have been evacuated out. The sea-water has penetrated through the entire ground floor area of the hotel.
Gradually a collection of confused, disbelieving people begin to gather down by the beach. Locals are crying and praying.
The people on the shoreline at Ao Nang are waiting for the return of the divers. More than 20 diving firms make trips daily to nearby islands and to Ko Phi Phi, around 30 kilometres south of here in the Andaman Sea.
As dusk begins to fall, the first of the divers’ vessels comes in sight. It stops as usual a couple of hundred metres from the shore. Since the long-tailed boats of the locals, used to ferry people back and forth to the bigger craft, now lie in pieces on the sand, the passengers have to swim and wade to shore in their clothes. They are pale and silent.
A middle-aged Swedish couple are in tears: "We are the only ones who are coming back alive from there."
Monday 27.12.
AO NANG BEACHFRONT
At 01.49 my mobile beeps again: According to the Embassy in Bangkok, several Finnish holidaymakers have been injured in Thailand.
In the morning, all the Internet terminals at the Sheraton Krabi Beach Resort on Khlong Muang Beach are in use, while the hotel staff are cleaning the pool as if it were any normal day. At the poolside restaurant, waiters hurry by with lunch dishes of pizza, spaghetti, and burgers.
A diving guide collects his gear from the beach. "We won’t be able to go diving for a day or two", he shrugs. A day or two? My guess is the guide isn’t telling all he knows.
Back in the Internet room, Pia Hytönen is in tears. She was out diving the previous day at the lagoon on Ko Hong, another small paradise island around 5 kilometres offshore, when the tsunami struck:
"There was nothing we could do except pray. The children certainly wouldn’t have been able to make it swimming to shore. I was holding in my arms a mother whose 18-month-old baby had been swept away by the wave."
My mobile rings. It is a colleague calling from Finland. She has people close to her staying on Khao Lak, north of Phuket Island, but she hasn’t been able to get in touch with them. The mother and daughter of the family are missing. The boy, around 20, has been to hospital and left the place in his swimming trunks and nothing else.
Rape Phulpo grieves over his lost boat by the hotel beach:
"I had saved for this boat for five years. Ten years now I’ve been carrying tourists. Now I have nothing with which to provide food for my family."
"I was heading out with a tourist couple to one of the islands. The sea was as calm as a millpond. A friend called me from Phuket about ten minutes before it happened, and he warned me about the wave. I took another look out to sea and I noticed a huge low wave approaching. As it came in closer, the water just drained away under the boat; it was as if the sea was just sucking all the water off the beach. I shouted to my two customers that they should jump out of the boat and run for their lives to the hotel. I followed them. It was a matter of seconds. The boat smashed up against the back of the beach, and there’s nothing left of it but a pile of planks."
Tuesday, 28.12.
AO NANG, PHANG-NGA, KHAO LAK
The beach boulevard at Ao Nang is swarming with policemen, with coastguard divers, soldiers, and rescue workers. A TV outside broadcast van and a clutch of cameras are set up near a group of army personnel carriers.
Local Thai mothers with their children stand around, along with wives, sisters, brothers. All are waiting for information on their relatives working out in the islands - Ko Phi Phi - and over at Rai Leh Beach just to the south of here. Word is that Rai Leh was worse hit than Ao Nang. A Swedish man is showing people a photograph of his missing wife. Another foreign tourist is looking for his young son.
Dutchman Jurre van Aspereen comes back from Rai Leh: "I saw dead people floating in the water. Nobody is doing anything about them. They’re going to stay there. There aren’t enough rescue people to cope here, everyone is over at Phi Phi."
Swede Robert Nobel says: "I was on an elephant safari yesterday. One of the drivers told me that Khao Lak is gone. All of it."
German Stefanie Traidrel has been searching for her boyfriend from the chaos of Krabi Hospital: "The rescued are there with gaping wounds and broken limbs. They’re just lying on the floors in a state of shock."
An English couple, Janet and David Makin, had jumped into a taxi and escaped the waves. They speak about what happened here the day after the tsunami came. "Even yesterday people were running off the beach in fear for their lives. They were afraid that one of the aftershocks we’ve had would generate another giant wave."
Nobody yet has any idea of the number who have drowned. A black inflatable boat comes to shore carrying a body wrapped in a white shroud, one end of which has been dyed red. People fall silent. The corpse is the first on this beach today; it is lifted onto a stretcher and carried to an ambulance
Locals, waiting for their own relatives to return, go and glance under the white sheet. They see long blonde hair, skin with the chill of death on it, features bloated by exposure to the salt water and sun.
The onlookers put their hands over their mouths and turn away.
At 13.26 the mobile stutters out another SMS message: Around 30,000 people are believed to have perished or disappeared in the disaster.
Tuula and Pekka Jauhinen from Vantaa are reunited in the lobby of the Krabi Heritage Hotel after being separated two days earlier by the arrival of the wave at the beachside pool of the Laguna Resort Hotel in Khao Lak.
At one and the same time they are joyful and deeply traumatised: "I have nothing left except my wristwatch. It stopped on Sunday at 10.30 a.m. That was the moment I was inundated by the oncoming water. The town was like Grozny with palms, like it had been hit by aerial bombardment: it seemed as if bits of buildings, cars, electricity pylons, refrigerators, furniture, TV-receivers, broken wooden boards, and bleeding people had been tossed hither and thither everywhere", says Tuula Jauhinen.
Pekka Jauhinen was able to get his cuts and bruises treated at Phang-Nga Hospital when he got a ride with some Swedes and Danes.
Outside Phang-Nga Hospital, the first thing you see is clothes, piled high. They are meant for the patients and out-patients, many of whom have been brought here completely naked.
At the reception desk I am shown lists of patients. Fourteen Finnish names come up among the 2,000 or so patients registered here.
None of them belongs to the mother and daughter sought by my colleague.
Photocopies of pictures of children have been taped to the windows: a blue-eyed boy of around two is looking for his parents; the nationality is not given. Ten-year-old German Sophia Michaela is looking for her mother and father...
The patients have been transferred as best can be arranged onto camp-beds, mattresses, and blankets on the floor. Some are on IV-drips, others are delirious, there are black bruises and gaping wounds on nearly all the faces and bodies. The room is so cramped that it is difficult for the nursing staff to get through to individual patients.
The bed occupied by Eija Kivi of Helsinki is in the basement. It is number 23. Her partner Hannu Salminen goes to fetch water, coffee, and food. Apart from a fractured knee, Kivi has lacerations on her back and chest, and bruises the size of a fist all over her body. She has some internal injuries that make it impossible to sit up.
Eija Kivi was brought here from the Khao Lak resort on the west coast.
"We were still asleep in our bungalow when the wave came in. We woke up to the fact that we were under water. Then the wave just swept us onwards. I was completely naked, I didn’t even have my contact lenses in. After the wave came through, our hotel, the Khoa Lak Paradise, just looked like matchwood", says Kivi.
It is dark in Khao Lak. At the end of the road along the beach stands a small army of policemen and soldiers, barring access.
Khao Lak was the most attractive of the "new" resorts on the Andaman Sea coast of Southern Thailand. A gently-sloping beach of powdery fine sand, stretching many kilometres in either direction, north and south.
The area has also been described as a paradise for divers wanting to explore some of the world’s best sites just off shore: there are live coral formations only 45 minutes away by long-tail boat, and the location also provides an excellent launching-point for longer scuba and snorkelling trips to the national marine park of the Similan Islands, renowned and revered worldwide among diving enthusiasts.
The mobile again, at 18.41: It is possible that not all the Finns currently missing will ever be found.
Khao Lak WAS all those things above. Now it is like stepping into a ghost town.
Candles flicker in the half-buildings still left standing, there is electricity only in the lobby areas of two hotels.
I am told the hotels here had a capacity of around 6,000 beds. The place was fully booked for Christmas.
One of the partially spared hotels is the Andaburi Resort on Nang Thong Beach. The fact that the hotel was not on the beach itself, but on higher ground close to the main street, is what preserved it when all around has been laid waste.
Wichak Sriwiroch tells me he is the only hotel manager in this area left alive.
Just three Germans are still staying here, while they wait for an evacuation flight home. Sriwiroch offers us food and beer on a table set with red napkins:
"Sunday morning was peaceful. The tourists had left for the beach. When the wave came, or rather in the moments beforehand when the water drained away, people ran down the beach after it. They laughed and looked happy. Children rushed forward to grab fish that were suddenly beached on dry land. The grown-ups took photos and videos."
"Suddenly the water came back a hundredfold. It swept off the beach everything that it did not bury in mud and sand: people, animals, trees, buildings, and vehicles. Then it tossed all the loose material it was carrying inside it, hundreds of metres back towards the hillside behind the resort. And when it went back, it sucked all the people and the things back with it. It had a greater power than a herd of stampeding wild elephants."
"There were - and there still are - crushed and broken bodies all over the beach, all over everywhere. The rescue workers have taken thousands out to hospitals and mortuaries yesterday and today. I’ve seen small children without any limbs, adults with their faces ripped apart, eyes that are nothing but sockets."
"The dead have been collected into groups and taken to refrigerated containers for later identification. All the inmates in the prisons around here have been ordered to make coffins, big coffins, so that the dead can be carried back home", says Sriwiroch.
He has not slept a minute since the disaster took place, some 60 hours ago.
Tobias Grybat, a German lawyer, goes over the events with his girlfriend Kathrin Witt and their friend Jorg Gebhardt as we sit at the hotel manager’s table.
"The most incredible thing is that I managed to find Kathrin. And that she’s perfectly alright. I’m totally overjoyed and yet totally shattered and blown away by all this. It was also very lucky that Jorg got off as luckily as he did and didn’t get more badly hurt. I really want to thank the local Thai people. Kathrin ran away to safety in the mangroves in her bikini and with nothing on her feet. A complete stranger, a Thai, came by, and he gave her his shoes. His only pair."
SMS again, at 21.16: The tour operator is advising all Finnish tourists to make their way to evacuation centres for airlifting home.
And again, this time at 02.02 on Wednesday morning: The number of dead in the Asian earthquake disaster is now feared to rise as high as 60,000.
Wednesday 29.12.
AO NANG
The mobile beeps once more, at 07.22: The caller challenges you to take part in the Finnish Red Cross fund-raising campaign on behalf of victims of the Asian earthquake and tsunami disaster.
The TV-cameras have disappeared from the Ao Nang beachfront. Shopkeepers are cleaning up their stores and putting goods out on display. Some tourists are buying water, beer, fruit, and sunblock.
Inflatable boats continue to bring white bundles containing victims from Ko Phi Phi to Krabi Hospital. The locals have given up their waiting vigil and there is nobody to be seen on the beach except a handful of girls in headscarves. They are from the local Muslim school, and have been ordered to clean the place up.
Another SMS comes in at 14.05: Foreign Ministry spokesman Yrjö Länsipuro says that the Finnish authorities are accepting the information relayed by Thai officials that 13 Finns have died in the country.
From the Krabi Heritage Hotel, popular with tour groups from Scandinavia, busloads of Swedish holidaymakers are heading for Phuket Airport.
The last Finnish bus from here leaves at 9 o’clock this evening. None of the Finnish package holiday guests wants to continue their vacation here. The second evacuation flight of the day arranged by the Foreign Ministry is scheduled to take off in the early hours of Thursday.
After darkness falls, the atmosphere in Ao Nang is rather bleak. Tuk-tuk scooter taxis try to drum up business with the few tourists that are around.
Alongside the main street, a number of hand-made signs have gone up:
"Missing People - Have you seen my wife? She disappeared from the beach at Chicken Island." [Ko Hua Khwan, an islet not far offshore]
"Swedish father desperately seeks his 3-year-old son. We were swimming at Ko Poda."
The mobile beeps at 21.29: There are thought to be as many as 80,000 dead in Indonesia alone.
One restaurant has kept its doors open into the evening. At around midnight they try to get a disco going, but nobody feels like dancing. A Thai girl massages the shoulders of a German man who is sipping a local beer.
A strange stench wafts up from the beach all the way to the street. This tells one that all is not quite as it was behind the scenes on the Ao Nang Beach strip.
Just before 2 in the morning, a call comes through from the travel agent to say that my tickets from Krabi to Bangkok and home are in order.
Thursday 30.12.
KRABI, BANGKOK
At 10.19 the phone offers the following piece of information: Foreign Ministry spokesman Yrjö Länsipuro to provide names of Phuket evacuation centres.
"The whole of Thailand will be at prayer at 7 p.m. this evening for the souls of the victims and for their relatives", says hotel manager Joseph Pramot Phul-Phokdhol at breakfast in the Andaman Holiday Resort. Only a few tourists are left in the hotel, which boasts more than 100 cottages, villas, and rooms.
The manager is worried what will become of his staff: "This year’s high season is over even before New Year. Normally it would go through to April. I cannot afford to pay wages without taking a loan from the bank. And where are the farmers going to sell their produce, and the fishermen their fish, and what are the boatmen going to do without the tourists?"
From the window of the taxi to the airport, I can see red, blue & white Thai flags hanging limply at half-staff.
At Krabi Airport, the security checks are agonisingly slow, as if they were consciously searching for bombs from the little luggage people are taking home. There is a first aid station set up in the departures hall.
On the wall are lists of the patients who have been taken to Krabi Hospital. There are around 800 names, roughly evenly split between Thais and farangs, or foreigners. Four of them are Finnish.
The relatives of my colleague are not among them here, either. She will get a message from Bangkok that warns her to prepare herself for the worst.
The mobile spits out another SMS, at 12.54: The National Bureau of Investigation is to publish a list of Finns still unaccounted for.
The list contains the names of the two women I have been asked to look for. There is also a classmate of mine from school, accompanied by the names of his wife and two of their children. Only the teenage boy managed to make it.
One more message comes in, timed at 17.22: Finnair to provide converted Boeing 757 for medivac flight for intensive-care patients.
In the evening,BBC World shows a piece from Krabi: of the 800 and more brought to the hospital there, some 300 are dead. Tall piles of coffins have been stacked up in the hospital courtyard. I get this feeling that all my holiday clothes should be sent forthwith to the laundry or the dry-cleaners. I need to wash this off me. I keep nervously washing my hands.
From the Krabi area, and in particular from the devastated Ko Phi Phi, 367 persons have been found dead, and 2,376 are injured. A further 1,913 are missing.
In Khao Lak the numbers are even more unspeakable: 1,583 dead, 5,573 injured, and 2,376 still missing. Phuket Island, too, has its share.
The television is running a live feed from New York, where UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is holding a press conference.
He says that at least 123,000 people have died in the catastrophe, and half a million are injured.
And the number of dead keeps growing.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 2.1.2005
Sunday, 26.12.
BANGKOK, KRABI
Bangkok Airways Flight PG821 from the Thai capital to Krabi is scheduled to take off at 09:20, and there is not an empty seat on board. It is filled with holidaymakers.
Technical problems. The passengers are ordered out of the plane. After a half-hour hiatus, everyone is back in their seats. Now we can take it easy. The plane touches down at Krabi’s relatively new airport at 10:50.
The first surprise is waiting, or not waiting, outside the terminal. There are no taxis to be had anywhere.
In the arrivals hall, airport officials, police, and hotel greeters are scurrying here and there. Finally the news comes over the loudspeakers: the entire Krabi beach resort area has been closed. Something has happened. Just now. A few minutes ago.
One taxi does roll up, however, and the driver agrees to take us towards Ao Nang and the hotels on the Andaman Sea. The main roads west towards Ao Nang have been blocked off, and police patrols are out. A dirt track through a rubber plantation is still open.
In front of the Andaman Resort Hotel on Khlong Muang Beach, north of Ao Nang, we are met by a flow of exiting tourists, dragging their luggage behind them. They are British. People rush into the hotel lobby. A chain of tourist police prevents anyone from trying to get to the beach.
From the terrace restaurant we can see smashed long-tail boats, palms that have been ripped out of the ground by the roots, and the swimming pool looks like a garbage tip.
In the hotel foyer, BBC World’s 24-hour news channel finally explains what has happened: there has been a huge underwater earthquake off the north-western coast of Sumatra. The tsunami generated by the quake has swept over the Andaman Sea coast of Southern Thailand. People have been swamped and dragged out to sea.
My mobile phone beeps an SMS message at 11:57. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs all Finns missing in Phuket have been located.
No outsiders are able to get into the town centre of Ao Nang. A press card opens the way. My guide and driver is the local police chief, who has been called to the scene.
The vast power of the waves has thrown the sea-bed into the restaurants, stores, hotels, and taxi-stands along the beach boulevard. Boats lie smashed against terrace restaurants.
The Ao Nang Villa Resort is a beachfront hotel, just south of the main road out to Krabi. A group of Finnish tourists on an Aurinkomatkat holiday are booked in here, but there are no longer any Finns around. The word is that they have been evacuated out. The sea-water has penetrated through the entire ground floor area of the hotel.
Gradually a collection of confused, disbelieving people begin to gather down by the beach. Locals are crying and praying.
The people on the shoreline at Ao Nang are waiting for the return of the divers. More than 20 diving firms make trips daily to nearby islands and to Ko Phi Phi, around 30 kilometres south of here in the Andaman Sea.
As dusk begins to fall, the first of the divers’ vessels comes in sight. It stops as usual a couple of hundred metres from the shore. Since the long-tailed boats of the locals, used to ferry people back and forth to the bigger craft, now lie in pieces on the sand, the passengers have to swim and wade to shore in their clothes. They are pale and silent.
A middle-aged Swedish couple are in tears: "We are the only ones who are coming back alive from there."
Monday 27.12.
AO NANG BEACHFRONT
At 01.49 my mobile beeps again: According to the Embassy in Bangkok, several Finnish holidaymakers have been injured in Thailand.
In the morning, all the Internet terminals at the Sheraton Krabi Beach Resort on Khlong Muang Beach are in use, while the hotel staff are cleaning the pool as if it were any normal day. At the poolside restaurant, waiters hurry by with lunch dishes of pizza, spaghetti, and burgers.
A diving guide collects his gear from the beach. "We won’t be able to go diving for a day or two", he shrugs. A day or two? My guess is the guide isn’t telling all he knows.
Back in the Internet room, Pia Hytönen is in tears. She was out diving the previous day at the lagoon on Ko Hong, another small paradise island around 5 kilometres offshore, when the tsunami struck:
"There was nothing we could do except pray. The children certainly wouldn’t have been able to make it swimming to shore. I was holding in my arms a mother whose 18-month-old baby had been swept away by the wave."
My mobile rings. It is a colleague calling from Finland. She has people close to her staying on Khao Lak, north of Phuket Island, but she hasn’t been able to get in touch with them. The mother and daughter of the family are missing. The boy, around 20, has been to hospital and left the place in his swimming trunks and nothing else.
Rape Phulpo grieves over his lost boat by the hotel beach:
"I had saved for this boat for five years. Ten years now I’ve been carrying tourists. Now I have nothing with which to provide food for my family."
"I was heading out with a tourist couple to one of the islands. The sea was as calm as a millpond. A friend called me from Phuket about ten minutes before it happened, and he warned me about the wave. I took another look out to sea and I noticed a huge low wave approaching. As it came in closer, the water just drained away under the boat; it was as if the sea was just sucking all the water off the beach. I shouted to my two customers that they should jump out of the boat and run for their lives to the hotel. I followed them. It was a matter of seconds. The boat smashed up against the back of the beach, and there’s nothing left of it but a pile of planks."
Tuesday, 28.12.
AO NANG, PHANG-NGA, KHAO LAK
The beach boulevard at Ao Nang is swarming with policemen, with coastguard divers, soldiers, and rescue workers. A TV outside broadcast van and a clutch of cameras are set up near a group of army personnel carriers.
Local Thai mothers with their children stand around, along with wives, sisters, brothers. All are waiting for information on their relatives working out in the islands - Ko Phi Phi - and over at Rai Leh Beach just to the south of here. Word is that Rai Leh was worse hit than Ao Nang. A Swedish man is showing people a photograph of his missing wife. Another foreign tourist is looking for his young son.
Dutchman Jurre van Aspereen comes back from Rai Leh: "I saw dead people floating in the water. Nobody is doing anything about them. They’re going to stay there. There aren’t enough rescue people to cope here, everyone is over at Phi Phi."
Swede Robert Nobel says: "I was on an elephant safari yesterday. One of the drivers told me that Khao Lak is gone. All of it."
German Stefanie Traidrel has been searching for her boyfriend from the chaos of Krabi Hospital: "The rescued are there with gaping wounds and broken limbs. They’re just lying on the floors in a state of shock."
An English couple, Janet and David Makin, had jumped into a taxi and escaped the waves. They speak about what happened here the day after the tsunami came. "Even yesterday people were running off the beach in fear for their lives. They were afraid that one of the aftershocks we’ve had would generate another giant wave."
Nobody yet has any idea of the number who have drowned. A black inflatable boat comes to shore carrying a body wrapped in a white shroud, one end of which has been dyed red. People fall silent. The corpse is the first on this beach today; it is lifted onto a stretcher and carried to an ambulance
Locals, waiting for their own relatives to return, go and glance under the white sheet. They see long blonde hair, skin with the chill of death on it, features bloated by exposure to the salt water and sun.
The onlookers put their hands over their mouths and turn away.
At 13.26 the mobile stutters out another SMS message: Around 30,000 people are believed to have perished or disappeared in the disaster.
Tuula and Pekka Jauhinen from Vantaa are reunited in the lobby of the Krabi Heritage Hotel after being separated two days earlier by the arrival of the wave at the beachside pool of the Laguna Resort Hotel in Khao Lak.
At one and the same time they are joyful and deeply traumatised: "I have nothing left except my wristwatch. It stopped on Sunday at 10.30 a.m. That was the moment I was inundated by the oncoming water. The town was like Grozny with palms, like it had been hit by aerial bombardment: it seemed as if bits of buildings, cars, electricity pylons, refrigerators, furniture, TV-receivers, broken wooden boards, and bleeding people had been tossed hither and thither everywhere", says Tuula Jauhinen.
Pekka Jauhinen was able to get his cuts and bruises treated at Phang-Nga Hospital when he got a ride with some Swedes and Danes.
Outside Phang-Nga Hospital, the first thing you see is clothes, piled high. They are meant for the patients and out-patients, many of whom have been brought here completely naked.
At the reception desk I am shown lists of patients. Fourteen Finnish names come up among the 2,000 or so patients registered here.
None of them belongs to the mother and daughter sought by my colleague.
Photocopies of pictures of children have been taped to the windows: a blue-eyed boy of around two is looking for his parents; the nationality is not given. Ten-year-old German Sophia Michaela is looking for her mother and father...
The patients have been transferred as best can be arranged onto camp-beds, mattresses, and blankets on the floor. Some are on IV-drips, others are delirious, there are black bruises and gaping wounds on nearly all the faces and bodies. The room is so cramped that it is difficult for the nursing staff to get through to individual patients.
The bed occupied by Eija Kivi of Helsinki is in the basement. It is number 23. Her partner Hannu Salminen goes to fetch water, coffee, and food. Apart from a fractured knee, Kivi has lacerations on her back and chest, and bruises the size of a fist all over her body. She has some internal injuries that make it impossible to sit up.
Eija Kivi was brought here from the Khao Lak resort on the west coast.
"We were still asleep in our bungalow when the wave came in. We woke up to the fact that we were under water. Then the wave just swept us onwards. I was completely naked, I didn’t even have my contact lenses in. After the wave came through, our hotel, the Khoa Lak Paradise, just looked like matchwood", says Kivi.
It is dark in Khao Lak. At the end of the road along the beach stands a small army of policemen and soldiers, barring access.
Khao Lak was the most attractive of the "new" resorts on the Andaman Sea coast of Southern Thailand. A gently-sloping beach of powdery fine sand, stretching many kilometres in either direction, north and south.
The area has also been described as a paradise for divers wanting to explore some of the world’s best sites just off shore: there are live coral formations only 45 minutes away by long-tail boat, and the location also provides an excellent launching-point for longer scuba and snorkelling trips to the national marine park of the Similan Islands, renowned and revered worldwide among diving enthusiasts.
The mobile again, at 18.41: It is possible that not all the Finns currently missing will ever be found.
Khao Lak WAS all those things above. Now it is like stepping into a ghost town.
Candles flicker in the half-buildings still left standing, there is electricity only in the lobby areas of two hotels.
I am told the hotels here had a capacity of around 6,000 beds. The place was fully booked for Christmas.
One of the partially spared hotels is the Andaburi Resort on Nang Thong Beach. The fact that the hotel was not on the beach itself, but on higher ground close to the main street, is what preserved it when all around has been laid waste.
Wichak Sriwiroch tells me he is the only hotel manager in this area left alive.
Just three Germans are still staying here, while they wait for an evacuation flight home. Sriwiroch offers us food and beer on a table set with red napkins:
"Sunday morning was peaceful. The tourists had left for the beach. When the wave came, or rather in the moments beforehand when the water drained away, people ran down the beach after it. They laughed and looked happy. Children rushed forward to grab fish that were suddenly beached on dry land. The grown-ups took photos and videos."
"Suddenly the water came back a hundredfold. It swept off the beach everything that it did not bury in mud and sand: people, animals, trees, buildings, and vehicles. Then it tossed all the loose material it was carrying inside it, hundreds of metres back towards the hillside behind the resort. And when it went back, it sucked all the people and the things back with it. It had a greater power than a herd of stampeding wild elephants."
"There were - and there still are - crushed and broken bodies all over the beach, all over everywhere. The rescue workers have taken thousands out to hospitals and mortuaries yesterday and today. I’ve seen small children without any limbs, adults with their faces ripped apart, eyes that are nothing but sockets."
"The dead have been collected into groups and taken to refrigerated containers for later identification. All the inmates in the prisons around here have been ordered to make coffins, big coffins, so that the dead can be carried back home", says Sriwiroch.
He has not slept a minute since the disaster took place, some 60 hours ago.
Tobias Grybat, a German lawyer, goes over the events with his girlfriend Kathrin Witt and their friend Jorg Gebhardt as we sit at the hotel manager’s table.
"The most incredible thing is that I managed to find Kathrin. And that she’s perfectly alright. I’m totally overjoyed and yet totally shattered and blown away by all this. It was also very lucky that Jorg got off as luckily as he did and didn’t get more badly hurt. I really want to thank the local Thai people. Kathrin ran away to safety in the mangroves in her bikini and with nothing on her feet. A complete stranger, a Thai, came by, and he gave her his shoes. His only pair."
SMS again, at 21.16: The tour operator is advising all Finnish tourists to make their way to evacuation centres for airlifting home.
And again, this time at 02.02 on Wednesday morning: The number of dead in the Asian earthquake disaster is now feared to rise as high as 60,000.
Wednesday 29.12.
AO NANG
The mobile beeps once more, at 07.22: The caller challenges you to take part in the Finnish Red Cross fund-raising campaign on behalf of victims of the Asian earthquake and tsunami disaster.
The TV-cameras have disappeared from the Ao Nang beachfront. Shopkeepers are cleaning up their stores and putting goods out on display. Some tourists are buying water, beer, fruit, and sunblock.
Inflatable boats continue to bring white bundles containing victims from Ko Phi Phi to Krabi Hospital. The locals have given up their waiting vigil and there is nobody to be seen on the beach except a handful of girls in headscarves. They are from the local Muslim school, and have been ordered to clean the place up.
Another SMS comes in at 14.05: Foreign Ministry spokesman Yrjö Länsipuro says that the Finnish authorities are accepting the information relayed by Thai officials that 13 Finns have died in the country.
From the Krabi Heritage Hotel, popular with tour groups from Scandinavia, busloads of Swedish holidaymakers are heading for Phuket Airport.
The last Finnish bus from here leaves at 9 o’clock this evening. None of the Finnish package holiday guests wants to continue their vacation here. The second evacuation flight of the day arranged by the Foreign Ministry is scheduled to take off in the early hours of Thursday.
After darkness falls, the atmosphere in Ao Nang is rather bleak. Tuk-tuk scooter taxis try to drum up business with the few tourists that are around.
Alongside the main street, a number of hand-made signs have gone up:
"Missing People - Have you seen my wife? She disappeared from the beach at Chicken Island." [Ko Hua Khwan, an islet not far offshore]
"Swedish father desperately seeks his 3-year-old son. We were swimming at Ko Poda."
The mobile beeps at 21.29: There are thought to be as many as 80,000 dead in Indonesia alone.
One restaurant has kept its doors open into the evening. At around midnight they try to get a disco going, but nobody feels like dancing. A Thai girl massages the shoulders of a German man who is sipping a local beer.
A strange stench wafts up from the beach all the way to the street. This tells one that all is not quite as it was behind the scenes on the Ao Nang Beach strip.
Just before 2 in the morning, a call comes through from the travel agent to say that my tickets from Krabi to Bangkok and home are in order.
Thursday 30.12.
KRABI, BANGKOK
At 10.19 the phone offers the following piece of information: Foreign Ministry spokesman Yrjö Länsipuro to provide names of Phuket evacuation centres.
"The whole of Thailand will be at prayer at 7 p.m. this evening for the souls of the victims and for their relatives", says hotel manager Joseph Pramot Phul-Phokdhol at breakfast in the Andaman Holiday Resort. Only a few tourists are left in the hotel, which boasts more than 100 cottages, villas, and rooms.
The manager is worried what will become of his staff: "This year’s high season is over even before New Year. Normally it would go through to April. I cannot afford to pay wages without taking a loan from the bank. And where are the farmers going to sell their produce, and the fishermen their fish, and what are the boatmen going to do without the tourists?"
From the window of the taxi to the airport, I can see red, blue & white Thai flags hanging limply at half-staff.
At Krabi Airport, the security checks are agonisingly slow, as if they were consciously searching for bombs from the little luggage people are taking home. There is a first aid station set up in the departures hall.
On the wall are lists of the patients who have been taken to Krabi Hospital. There are around 800 names, roughly evenly split between Thais and farangs, or foreigners. Four of them are Finnish.
The relatives of my colleague are not among them here, either. She will get a message from Bangkok that warns her to prepare herself for the worst.
The mobile spits out another SMS, at 12.54: The National Bureau of Investigation is to publish a list of Finns still unaccounted for.
The list contains the names of the two women I have been asked to look for. There is also a classmate of mine from school, accompanied by the names of his wife and two of their children. Only the teenage boy managed to make it.
One more message comes in, timed at 17.22: Finnair to provide converted Boeing 757 for medivac flight for intensive-care patients.
In the evening,
From the Krabi area, and in particular from the devastated Ko Phi Phi, 367 persons have been found dead, and 2,376 are injured. A further 1,913 are missing.
In Khao Lak the numbers are even more unspeakable: 1,583 dead, 5,573 injured, and 2,376 still missing. Phuket Island, too, has its share.
The television is running a live feed from New York, where UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is holding a press conference.
He says that at least 123,000 people have died in the catastrophe, and half a million are injured.
And the number of dead keeps growing.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 2.1.2005
HELEENA SAVELA / Helsingin Sanomat
heleena.savela@sanoma.fi