The day before the day
It is Christmas day, December 25th 2004.
We are sitting on the beach in Koh Lanta, Thailand, having dinner while watching a group of children laughing while they perform a Christmas dance show.
The night was warm, the food delicious, and life was pretty much as good as it could be.
The following day everything was about to be turned upside down…
December 26
The following morning, December 26th, was a Sunday.
We were living in a bungalow about 50 meters from the Klong Khong Beach. The sun was shining and we walked down to the beach restaurant to get some breakfast.
It was around 9.30 AM and some tourists had already made their way down to the beach.
In a last minute decision we had decided to have a relaxed day on the beach instead of going on a day-trip to the Emerald Cave. Our breakfast was served and we enjoyed the peacefulness and the sound of the waves.
The water dissapeared
Suddenly we noticed how the ocean started to change. The water receded further and further out into the ocean and it did not take long until the beach had become 200-300 meters longer.
Strangely enough, I started to talk about the power of nature. I even mentioned how tsunamis worked as I had seen a documentary about it a couple of months earlier. But I could not possibly fathom that this was such a thing.
Instead I was convinced that it had something to do with the full moon and strong tides.
In retrospect, it should have raised some major concerns when we saw some fishes that were flopping in the wet sand. The water had dissapeared so fast that the fish did not even have the time to swim away.
Muslim community
Most people on Koh Lanta are Thai Muslim’s.
Soon people started gathering by the beach. An elder man started praying towards the sea.
We definitely started to understand something was wrong when a Thai man, the owner of the bungalows, said that he had never seen anything like this during the 20 years he had lived here.
White line
Together we stood there and watched. The sea was calm, the sun was shining. Almost a perfect day in paradise.
Then, a thin white line over the horizon. It grew larger and larger. The line was not by any means huge or intimidating, and it moved slowly towards land.
The strange thing was that it was one long, long wave. And it stretched as far across the horizon as wecould see.
When it came closer we still did not move. This was not because of fear, it was because we never thought this was dangerous.
Pure power
The first wave that hit the beach was not that big, but it was tremendously strong. And it did not stop where the shoreline used to be, where a wave normally stop.
The strangest thing was not that the wave was so strong that it pushed big chunks of corals in front of it. The most fascinating part was that the ocean looked like it was upset.
It is a bit hard to explain, but the ocean had turned dark brown and small waves were everywhere moving in all directions. It looked much like the ocean was boiling.
I got my camera and started shooting pictures.
Bigger
Then the second wave came, and it was bigger, and stronger.
We quickly started to move away from the beach.
This wave was so powerful that it pushed a big boat up towards the beach. Some of the locals started crying. It was obvious that something very unusal was happening and it started to scare the hell out of us.
When we saw the third wave we immediately turned around and started running.
Five seconds later we heard a big crash from the surf. As I turned around I could see the bamboo hut, that used to be a massage studio next to the restaurant, being lift up in the air by the wave. It was immediately smashed into pieces.
By now the wave was about 30 meters behind us.
We were just running past our bungalow when the rising water behind us suddenly halted. Still to this day I think about how this happened as we were right in the way of the waves. And as seen in the video below, from the exact same beach, we must have been extremely, extremely lucky…
Irrational decisions
I screamed to Fariba to run inside the bungalow and get our passports. A very stupid decision of course, but stress obviously does that to people.
She hurried inside and got the passports. We then kept running towards the main street where we stopped to catch our breath.
We looked back towards the beach, with our hearts pumping fast. Survival mode had kicked in and we started seeing things in tunnel vision perspective. There is not much I remember of this exact moment.
I do remember that we managed to stop a small truck and the driver let us up on the truck bed. Some other tourists also managed to squeeze in.
Up on higher grounds
The driver then took us up the hill and let us of as soon as we got up to higher grounds that felt safe.
There was a shed there, where a few Thai people had gathered around an old tv with a bad picture.
They watched the live news and the initial reports, they told us, was that a big wave had hit some islands. One of the islands was probably Phi Phi, and there seemed to have been some people who had died.
By now we must have been in some kind of shock, and time and space got a bit blurry.
I recall that a German hippie girl was sitting next to me on the ground. She asked me if I would mind lending her my shorts as she had no underwear on. I still can not recall why I had two pairs of shorts with me, but I did, and she got one pair and put them on.
Rumors
A while later, I have no idea how much time that had passed, the people watching the tv said to us that more and bigger waves were coming in. We had to get higher.
It felt crazy, and terrifying, because we were already at least hundred meters above sea level.
But nothing could make us take chances right now and soon we found another driver who drove us to the other side of the island.
Along the way we met a lot of people, tourists and locals. Many of them with a special look in their eyes, the distant look that people get when they have witnessed something terrifying.
The café under the stars
We got up as high as we possible could I think, to a hill top café. There we stayed the whole night overlooking the calm ocean.
It all felt very surreal, what had really happened?
As there was no internet where we were, and no tv either, we only got limited information of what had happened. Basically, we knew nothing. Of course we had a feeling that it was bad, but in reality, it was much much worse than that.
Where to go
Neither of us felt any rush to leave the next morning.
We did not want to be anywhere near the sea. It felt unpredictable and unsafe.
Still, we finally decided heading back to the beach and take a look.
We got a ride with a passing car and were dropped of at the same spot where we stopped the truck that helped us the day before.
We walked back to our bungalow. Everything was the way we left it, and there seemed to have been no more big waves as the bungalows closest to the beach were still standing intact.
No more tourists
We went down to the beach and found the owner standing there with an empty gaze.
This was it, there would be no more tourists. And the restaurant and big parts of the beachfront buildings were destroyed. We felt terrible for him.
Our feelings were everywhere, “We have to go”, “No, we have to stay and help clean this mess up…”
Someone then said that they had heard on the news that new waves might be on the way. We got frightened of course, and decided to leave the island.
We packed our stuff together in a rush and said goodbye to the owner. He said that he was sorry for all that had happened, like it was his fault. It felt heartbreaking to leave him.
Amazing people
I was scared. Scared that an aftershock would send yet an other tsunami our way.
First, we could not find a boat to take us to the mainland. But after a while we got a ride with a small motor boat. It barely even had room for our big backpacks.
I can not remember how, but somehow we managed to get invited onto a bus full of Thai school children. It was us, and a bus full of students. They were happy and sang songs. And we sang along, completely surreal in retrospect.
We got a ride with them all the way to Krabi.
Krabi
In Krabi we passed the ocean front and we could see through the bus windows how boats came in from the ocean. There were medics, locals, and tourists down on the beach. It was not a feeling of chaos, people were concentrated doing whatever they were doing. And then there was that look in peoples eyes egain.
It is still a blur, but I think there was body bags lying on the shore. Maybe that is just something I have imagined after watching pictures on the television, but I am pretty sure it was not.
Call home
We needed to try to contact our families back home, as they might have heard something about what had happened and probably were worried.
We still had no clue about the magnitude of the disaster though. There were no smartphones during this time and we had been cut of from the media world for two days.
It turned out that the media coverage in Sweden had been a bit different to the one we had experienced. The outside world had gotten all the information, and we knew almost nothing.
So the first phone call home therefore turned out to be a very emotional one. Our parents had been awake day and night and had not heard anything from us for two whole days.
We started to grasp what had happened, they wanted us to come home. That was never really an option.
Guilt
I felt guilty, as people many times do when they survive something and others do not.
We wanted to help but how could we do that? Who should we contact?
I contacted the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs (the State Department) in an attempt to offer som local help. The department must have had their worst moment in history, as it turned out that a huge amount of Swedish nationals had been affected. Instead of wanting any help they suggested that we should head back home again.
And as much as we wanted to do something, just as much we wanted to get the hell out of there. We wanted to go back to the paradise feeling we had two days ago.
Our feelings were all over the place and I had a very bad consciense for the next couple of days.
That depressing feeling gradually faded away and instead we decided to keep on going as we had been the lucky ones. We stuck to our initial travel plan and three days later we had travelled east across the mainland to the island of Koh Samui. They had been completely unaffected by the tsunami and it was almost bizarre to see how normal life here seemed to be. Even so, it was a very welcome change of atmosphere.
Why was Koh Lanta not hit worse?
Many times have I wondered why we were so lucky and others were not.
One key reason was that Koh Lanta had a different geography than other more effected areas.
When looking at a map you can see that Koh Lanta is situated close to the Phi Phi Islands. The Phi Phi was hit devastatingly hard, and had more than 850 confirmed deaths and at least 1200 people missing. A large number of casualties on Phi Phi were also washed out into the sea and were never found again.
On Phi Phi islands 70% of the buildings got destroyed, so it is somewhat of a miracle that Koh Lanta was not affected equally. There the death toll stayed at about 10 people.
But, the long sloping beaches and reeves outside Koh Lanta meant that the energy and the hegiht of the waves were reduces before they hit the island. That fact most likely saved our lives that day.
There is not really much to add to our own story during those days and I will leave it like that. We were extremely lucky, many others were not. We still have not been back, but someday we definitely will.
Facts
Beneath are some facts from that day, December 25th 2004, that in an instant changed the lives of so many people.
The 9,1 magnitude earthquake, which occurred outside the coast of Western Sumatra in Indonesia, triggered the tsunami that was estimated to be the equivalent of 2300 Hiroshima bombs. The earthquake was the strongest since 1964 and the third strongest since 1900. It lasted nearly 10 minutes.
When the day was over 14 different countries had been hit by the tsunami, killing around 225 000 people. About 500 000 people were injured and around two million people had lost their homes.
As there were no tsunami warning systems at that time most people in the affected areas had no clue of what was coming. Tsunami scientists that were aware of what was happening had no possibility to warn people as there was no plan how authorities should act in the event of a tsunami.
TWS
Nowadays the world is better prepared as there are tsunami warning systems (TWS) placed in the oceans.
The tsunami wave travelled silently across the ocean and lasted up to 8 hours, affecting countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and the Maldives. Other countries further away, like the Seychelles, Yemen, Madagascar and Somalia, were also hit.
Indonesia had by far the most casualties with 131 028 confirmed deaths and some 37 000 people missing.
15-30 meter (49-98 ft) high waves hit the city of Banda Aceh with disastrous effects.
Thailand had 5 395 confirmed deaths and 2 817 people missing.
Thailand is a very popular travel destination for Swedes. Therefore the country was likely to have been the most affected country outside the disaster areas themselves.
543 Swedish tourists lost their lives that day. Most of them were staying on the west coast of Thailand.
