Going South - Tsunami Experience

Upon leaving Chaing Mai, we traveled by train and bus for about 20 hrs to arrive in a place called Ranong on the west coast of Thailand. After that we spent time on an island off that same coast - the island's name was Ko Phayam. From there we went to the province and town of Phuket and visited several beaches. We are now in Krabi (pop 25,000) and will be taking an overnight bus tonight to Bangkok where we will stay for a couple of days before leaving Thailand for New Zealand on Saturday, Feb. 26. We hope to provide more details of the above places but for now we want to tell you about our experience of the last few days.

On our bus trip to the south we started to see some of the devastation caused by the tsunami. There is an area called Koh Lak that we passed through. Much of this area is a national park. The wave came in about 3km in places there. There were lots of trucks and bull dozers working and much of the rubble and debris had been removed. What we saw from the bus was vast areas of nothing but palm trees with the ground underneath cleared and bulldozed. We know that there used to be buildings and people living there. The bodies of people still needing to be identified are being kept in a wat in the area of Koh Lak.

Further south on the beaches that we visited we saw minimal damage although there was some work being done around the waterfronts and obvious damage to fishing vessels. We started to hear about how the local people are suffering from a shortage of tourists. This is the "high" season for Thailand's tourist trade and where the local people normally were selling lots of food, souveniers, lodgings, massages, beach chairs, tours, etc. they were seeing a severe loss of business. The infrastructure in the majority of places was intact. One problem is that Thais and Asians who make up the majority of the tourist travelers in the south are worried about the spirits of the dead people who have still not been found. Some Buddhist ceremonies are taking places to release these spirits but the worries continue to effect the numbers of tourists who have changed plans.

Seeing/hearing of some of the work that needed doing in a few areas and hearing a little about ongoing volunteer efforts we began to consider offering our help near some of the places we planned to visit, but we were unable to find any further information on volunteering except for a few posters in Phuket at a guesthouse. We went to the web to see if we could find more information but came up blank. We concluded that there was nothing for us to do and more or less gave up on the idea.

Next we stayed for a couple of days at some bungalows in a national park called Hat Nappharat Thara near Krabi. Although the bungalows were on the mainland, we had to travel to them by long-tail boat. We had had some other experiences with this common mode of travel in the south and it's lots of fun. It's basically a fishing boat but the local people use them to transport tourists and supplies. While we were at these bungalows we got talking to a woman from BC who described a one-day tour she did to some of the surrounding islands including Phi Phi. Phi Phi is a famous island (actually 2 islands - Phi Phi Don and Phi Phi Ley) in these parts. The Phi Phi Islands are also part of the same national park where we were staying on the mainland. Phi Phi Ley is not inhabited although there are day trips there. All the development and homes are on Phi Phi Don mostly in one small area. Phi Phi Don is divided into two parts by a narrow spit of land (.5km wide) with a lovely bay (white sand, emerald water) on each side.

So, we decided to take the same day trip. We spent the entire day on a medium sized "ferry-type" boat. It was a wonderful day. The scenery we saw from the boat was truely spectacular. Krabi is covered in these karst (limestone) formations which are 200m+ high and sticking straight up out of the sea and on land. Some of them look like giant penises (we are discussing about whether to call them penises or phallic symbols). We also passed by Chicken Island which has a formation that does look like a chicken's head at some angles.

We visited Maya Bay which is on Phi Phi Ley and famous for being the location of a movie called "The Beach" with Leonardo Di Caprio. We snorkeled in this same Maya Bay and saw the most wonderful fishes. We believe that we found Nemo! S/He was swimming right in front of us and although we tried to touch him/her she/he kept swimming out of reach. We also saw some wonderful coral here.

We also stoppped at the Phi Phi Don pier on this trip to drop off a couple of young people and it was then that we heard about the possibility of volunteering on Phi Phi Don. We also stopped at another island (Bamboo) to do some further swimming and snorkeling but the waves were very high by then and we had to give up and get back in the boat.

So we had a chat and decided that we would not do some of the other things we had planned for the south and instead we would take a couple of days and go to Phi Phi Don to lend a hand. We traveled the 1.5 hrs out to the island by the regular ferry (not so comfortable as the tour boat) and arrived at the volunteer station after passing through the main village street. You could walk through the street but all the businesses we passed were still full of debris from the tsunami, although many of the second stories were still intact but you could see through the first story straight out to the beach. The narrowest section of the island was a graveyard - on the island they call it ground zero. It was several acres covered in piles of rubble and garbage and nothing else except for a few trees and a couple of multi-story hotels on the edges. Neither of these were in operation due to the lack of any kind of infrastructure - water, electricity, roads, etc. It was very hard for us to see and we can't even imagine what it must be like to live there with this devastation around you everyday. The shear enormity of the clean up is hard to imagine and although there are some cranes and barges taking stuff away to the mainland it isn't much for the size of the problem.

Anyway, we were there to do our little bit and so we pitched in to do what we could in the couple of days we had. There is a little bar called Carlitos which is the centre of the volunteer operations. The owner appeared to be European, had been on Phi Phi for 10 years and was very familiar with the local scene. His establishment had been spared any structure damage and was open for business although most of the business was volunteer organization.

We were assigned to help clear a passage through a narrow street in the main commercial area of the village - it was just about a block long. When we started there was a pile about 8ft high of everything from furniture to clothes, books, pictures, metal roofing material, plywood, lumber, glass, sanitary pads, broken concrete and tile, dishes, toilets, rats, fridges, computers and one huge pile of sand. It smelled like a dump. We had a few wheelbarrels, some shovels (no spades), a few dust masks and work gloves. Luckily we had had the presence of mind to bring our sneakers, some of the volunteers and local Thai people were working in flip flops. This was where the one nurse who was available to give tetanus shots came in real handy! You may be wondering why they didn't just bring in a bulldozer to plow a passage through this street. That was our question. It turns out that the reason individuals are going through this piece by piece is because we were looking for photos, passports, IDs, bones, hair, human remains of any kind. This is because there are still so many people missing. Both the local people and the foreign volunteers want to see if they can find evidence to confirm the death of some of this missing. The day we were there there were police from Norway working with the volunteers on the beach area. First the volunteers were raking the sand and then the police were using dogs to sniff for bones. It was all rather surreal to realize how much of this work is still to be done. It recalled to us the Swiss air disaster outside of Halifax or in New York at the twin towers and how long it takes to finish the work of identification.

But by noon the next day the street we worked on was cleared so that the businesses could get into their shops and begin the indoor clean up. It was incredible to see how much could be done moving things piece by piece. From here the recycling people were sorting through the piles to see what could be salvaged - engines, wood, pipe, metal, household goods.

Many of these businesses will probably never open again - some of the owners are dead or their family members are dead and the tourist trade on this island is virtually dead. Nobody had insurance and many do not have deeds for the land on which their businesses sit. The government has not be good at giving compensation and the issues are complex. The local government and the national government have different ideas about what should be done - one option is that Phi Phi be left as a day trip only. Many local people feel that the government just wants them to be destitute so that they will give up and leave and then the government and big business will come in with high-class resorts for the rich owners to get richer. There has just been a national election in Thailand and the prime minister and his government were returned to power by a huge margin. Thaksin who is the prime minister, is among the top 20 richest people in the world. Enough said about local economies and big developers getting a leg up.

On our second day of volunteering, we were assigned to washing dishes! The clean up moves from clearing streets one by one to helping businesses re-open. It is considered important for local businesses to open up ASAP so that the government will find it difficult to expropriate the land.

We washed dishes for a small restaurant (probably 6 tables - 12'x20') where the owner was plannning to open up again. He was a Thai and according to rumour one of the best cooks on the island. The washing up was much easier than the street cleaning. Unfortunately there was no water nearby and so we carried the dishes, pots and pans, utensils and chairs to the beach and washed them in the ocean. Everything was covered in sand which had turned almost to cement so it tooked lots of work to scrub the "cement" off. We were working with a couple of Irish fellows and a young British woman. It was fun. After this we washed shelves in the restaurant while others painted. Perhaps we will return some day to have lunch at the Papaya Restaurant!

We bought a couple of T-shirts. You might want to visit these sites to read more about what is happening on Phi Phi.

PHI PHI - Rising Above the Waves (http://www.phiphifriends.org.uk)
Help International Phi Phi (http://www.hiphiphi.com/)

David bought a necklace (a craft purchase) recovered from the tsunami. He thinks it is his first necklace since he wore a "worry" stone back in the '70s.

All in all, it was an interesting experience and one we will remember as a special part of this trip. We may have spent more time if we had learned earlier about these volunteer initiatives. Many of the young volunteers went for a day and are still there weeks later. It is sad to think that the government is doing so little for the people who really need the help but the issue is probably much more complex than we can know from our limited experience. Once we are back in the land of easy Internet access perhaps we will follow up to understand better the dynamics of the local situation vis-a-vis the tsunami and it's aftermath.

Bye for now...we leave this afternoon by bus to Bangkok. We will be three days in Bangkok and then we fly to NZ on Royal Brunei Airlines. We land in Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital city of Brunei on our way to Auckland. This country is on the island of Borneo which it shares with Malaysia and Indonesia. It took us a while to figure out where we would be landing when the travel agent said "Bandar Seri Begawan"!