Surviving the Tsunami

Sitting, watching, waiting. The adrenaline in my veins from the uphill run, the pounding of my heart in my chest, the wailing of the siren. I feel I am lucky to be alive.

Perched on a pile of boards and concrete bricks, in a half-constructed mansion, on the side of a mountain we sit and we wait. Looking down over the resorts, shopping malls and deserted streets we peer out into the ocean, watching and waiting. The silence is unnerving, broken only by the intermittent wailing of the siren from the deserted beach. What do we do next? The humidity, combined with the adrenaline pulsing through my veins, has produced a veritable fountain of sweat beads to form over my body. What do we do now? So we sit and watch and wait……

The date is the 11th April, 2012, the place Patong Beach, Phuket, Thailand. We start off the day having breakfast on the rooftop of our hotel like every other morning during the past two weeks of our holiday here. We plan out our day, starting at Karon Beach and heading into Patong for a day of shopping before we fly home the following morning.

Collecting all of our things for the day, we bundle the little one into the pram and head down the road towards the beach. Thumbing down a tuk-tuk, we clamber in the back and hold on for dear life as the little red machine whizzes its way along the windy road. With the wind in our hair and the ocean to our left, we reflect on what has been an awesome and relaxing holiday on the beach.

Ten minutes later we arrive in the busy streets of Patong Beach, ready to spend the day collecting some typical Thai souvenirs: A ceramic elephant, Singha beer singlet and woven picnic rug later we make our way through the seedy night quarter which is always quiet at this time of the morning. After a stroll along the black volcanic sand of the beach, we head back up the road towards the main shopping centre to get a bite to eat.

This is where it all began……
Needing coffee, I find a nice little place next to the water fountain display in the centre of the shopping centre, right next to the local McDonalds store. All is perfect, my daughter bouncing on my knee sucking on a marshmallow, my wife and I chatting about the past few weeks and how relaxed and rejuvenated we were feeling.

Suddenly, the serenity is broken as we hear people screaming. I look across the other side of the mall and see a large throng of local people sprinting for their lives towards the exit. I freeze. What is happening? More and more people join the exodus and other start running into shops screaming and yelling in the local Thai dialect. Fearing the worst, I grab my daughter and wife and we all run into the local McDonalds to seek shelter.

Has a terrorist or bombing attack occurred or maybe there was a gunman on the loose? We have no idea as we cower behind the counter of the store.

Abruptly, the store manager grabs me and turns me around. He looks me straight in the eye and yells…………….TSUNAMI…………….

It was then that we could hear the siren. The high, then low pitch of the wailing siren. We run like we have never ran before. Heading towards the exit we side step numerous belongings that people have dropped and left right where they had been sitting. Thongs kicked off so people could run faster, handbags dropped so people could run faster, prams discarded so people could run faster.

Not knowing where to go, we ran with the crowd.

Should we head up the stairs and get higher above the ground on another level of the mall or do we run towards the hills? How much time did we have? When would the Tsunami hit?
All of these questions were burning in my mind. My wife’s shrill and panicked voice awoke me from my thoughts. “Run, run” she screamed.

Pushing the pram with my daughter in it bouncing up and down we sprinted up the nearest road towards the closest hill. People had left their cars in the middle of the street and were running beside us. After a few hundred metres, I caught glimpse of another tourist, Craig, who was running up the same road. I asked him what was happening and he told me that an earthquake had occurred in the same location off Indonesia that had resulted in the infamous Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. Our urgency to get higher increased in intensity. As we ran up the road, Craig, who turned out to be an ex-pat living in Thailand, pointed out “this is the spot where the tsunami came to in 2004, we should be ok from this point forward.” People clambered over live powerlines in their quest to climb higher, others scaled the sides of building onto rooftops.

That was little reassurance to us so we kept running, higher and higher until we could go no more. Stopped only by the construction of this new building we were now sitting on, we sat and watched and waited. Joined by hundreds of locals and tourists alike, we all peered towards the ocean, waiting for the waves to arrive.

The heat was stifling; our little daughter was heating up. The locals decided to head down the hill to fetch water for people and returned a few minutes later, handing water to all the children. There were many other families from Australia there with us, panicked and left unsure about what was to occur next. Between the sporadic reports in broken English from the local people we tried to fathom what was happening. Reports would come in every 15 minutes or so as to when the waves would arrive. The arrival time went from 1 hour to 2 hours so we kept watching and waiting.

4 hours went by and there had been no tsunami. 5 hours and then 6. We watched the beautiful sunset as the sun dipped below the horizon and still we waited.

By this time, local people had begun to move back down the hillside into the streets below. Was it safe to do so? We were unsure. In this foreign country, we could not get an exact answer from a local person, so we waited some more.

Eventually, we climbed down from the top floor of the half-constructed mansion and crept down the hillside towards the road. We flagged down a tuk-tuk (and were lucky to get one so quickly with all of the people around) and headed back to Karon beach. Upon arrival at our hotel, we were greeted by our panicked hotel staff who had been searching for us all day. We were the last guests to be located and they were all so relieved we were showered with free offers of food and drinks.

By this time the little one was exhausted, as was I, so we hit the sack and thanked whoever would listen to have survived such a scary event. Something we will never forget.

The tsunami did eventually arrive, but at only ½ metre in size, did not cause any damage. For a people and country that were devastated by such a catastrophic event in 2004, the wail of the tsunami siren is not something that can be ignored.

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