I was happily chatting to Deryn on Facetime when it started dropping continuously so I suspected some increased internet traffic was slowing things down. Sure enough when I check the news, I see there has been a big earthquake off Indonesia, the same place that generated the huge tsunami here back in 2004. But I realised that if anything was to happen then there were several hours to go, any wave generated had a long way to travel. I hadn't felt anything but reports said that the tremors from the earthquake itself were felt in Bangkok. But just as I was musing on it all and checking the wires the official sirens went off here. The hotel I am in is about half a kilometre back from the beach but not much above sea level. The government loudspeakers told everyone to move immediately to higher ground, which is luckily never far away here in Krabi. There seemed no immediate panic at the hotel with the staff carrying on as normal. But one poor little eight year old Finnish girl was in floods of tears, bad timing, but they had just been to the tsunami museum. When the hotels own alarms also started going off I knew it was time to move. But to be on the safe side I packed a bag with all the essentials, gill jell, medicine bag, passport and money, iPad, iPod and phone, external power supply, water - oh and the bottle of duty free Bacardi..... And then went back for my mac, the skies had turned an ominous black colour.... So I joined the small stream of people going past the hotel, some running, some walking leisurely and went up the nearest hill, through another hotel. I got chatting to a group of young Brits who had just arrived and we decided to stop at another hotel at the top of the hill until we knew more. The hotel were really helpful and they had wifi so we were all trawling the net trying to find out what, if anything was going to happen. Some people looked really scared, but in truth we were never in real danger, we were quite high and far back from the beach, there was a mountain trail behind the hotel which had been cleared for such an eventuality, and we knew that if a wave was on the way we would have hours of warning. And frankly if the wave was so high as to reach where we were, there was probably a lot more to worry about than scrambling up a mountain trail. The hotel people, all of whom looked really concerned, but I guess they have lived through the real thing, were really good at telling us all they knew, showed us where the mountain track was so we settled down and waited, passing on any titbits of news anyone came across from the web or messages from home. But what was more frightening to me was the monumental thunderstorm that unleashed itself as we waited. It was a real monster and seemed directly overhead. We were all moved away from the windows.... It circled around for what seemed an age and of course precluded the special tsunami lookouts on a nearby high point from seeing the approach of anything.... The rain was so heavy you could see very little just yards in front of you. The power kept going on and off. As the storm calmed a bit it brought out a cloud of horrible looking storm bugs that the hotel had to keep brushing away as they formed a thick carpet on the floor, and the plague of frogs that followed to eat up said bugs only added to the already somewhat surreal situation. This was all beginning to feel a bit too biblical for my liking.....
So what to do in a situation like this, oh I know, get out the e reader and order a why why..... Well we weren't in England and no one offered to make a pot of tea! And watch the local people paying more attention than usual to the buddha altar in the reception, lots of water pouring going on. So we waited and waited, warnings lifted one minute only to be put back in place the next as the severe aftershock kicked in. Stories of Phuket airport closed, times when a wave would arrive and so on abounded. I realised how dependent we are on the internet when things like this happen, it was one thing getting conflicting reports but surely better than having no information at all. And apart from the short power outages due to the tremendous storm, the internet held up well.
It turned out that the hotel I had unwittingly ended up at, the Palm Terrace, was a sister hotel to mine, and they were using it as evacuation place, so they gave me a room. At that point, the tsunami warning had just been lifted but they said we should all stay there just to be on the safe side. It made sense and when the sirens went off again an hour or so later, I was pleased to be where I was, even though it was a false alarm.
So all in all a drama, and luckily not a crisis. Big thanks have to go to the Thai authorities whose warning system and plans worked to get everyone to a safe place, and to the Nagapura and Palm Terrace hotels for looking after everyone, guests and non guests alike, they welcomed anyone who stopped.
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