In 2004 our guide was in a sea cave with a group of Americans when the water started rising. He was paddling a canoe through the rock-enclosed lagoon that the tour passes through, and the tourists were photographing the limestone formations, and the water came up quickly and then went back down, pushed by the pressure wave of something happening outside that he could not see. One of the Americans said immediately that it felt like a tsunami. He didn’t know the word. He completed the cave section of the tour and paddled out into open water, where he saw capsized boats and bodies and, beyond them, the islands where he lived, changed in a way that is difficult to describe with precision in English and which he described in Thai to Mariana, who translated.
His wife died. Many of his colleagues died. The tours began again when the infrastructure was rebuilt, because that is what you do, because tourism is how the economy of the Andaman islands works and stopping would not bring anyone back and would only remove the income that the survivors needed to rebuild with. He tells the story now to the tourists on the canoe, precisely and without self-pity, and then continues the tour.
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed approximately 230,000 people across fourteen countries, making it the deadliest tsunami in recorded history. The wave was generated by a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the northern coast of Sumatra at just before eight in the morning on the twenty-sixth of December, a moment of almost no resistance because it was the morning after Christmas in a region full of Western tourists who were asleep or having breakfast, and because the warning systems that might have alerted the coastal populations to what was coming did not exist in the Indian Ocean in 2004, were funded and built only after the fact. Thailand lost around 8,000 people, the majority of them tourists and tourist-economy workers in Phuket and Krabi and Phi Phi. Every tourism worker in Phuket old enough to have been working in 2004 has a version of the guide’s story. The evacuation signs that now appear on every beach and road in the province, pointing uphill toward designated high ground, arrived after the people they might have saved were already gone.
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed approximately 230,000 people across fourteen countries, making it the deadliest tsunami in recorded history.
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