PHUKET, Thailand (29 Dec 2004) -- You know the zones of death by the smell. It is a grim, jaw-clenching stench that makes you sad but glad that you are not the poor soul in that white body bag with the black zipper being carried from a basement grocery store to the bed of a pickup truck three days after a tsunami trapped you there. The rescue workers wear the white surgical masks, but they do nothing to cover the smell, and you think of the guy who had popped in to the pharmacy downstairs for a toothbrush he had forgotten to pack for his Christmas holiday in a beach town on an island in Thailand. Who could have told him that he would find his ultimate destiny in the basement of a shopping mall on Patong Beach? You remember the cross dresser at the checkout counter who sings to you, rehearsing for his - or is it her? - night job at the drag show cabaret, and you wonder whether his work schedule includes Sunday mornings when a tidal wave hits. You walk 100 yards farther down the street, and there it is again, that smell, and white-masked rescue workers are hauling out another corpse from the Sea Pearl Hotel. Funny, you never knew there was a basement to the place. Not funny at all of course, but this is what becomes the norm after you have been through the extraordinary, and you survived. Again, farther down the beach road, officially called Thaweewong Road, even though no one does call it that, there is that smell. They have already pulled bodies from Baan Boa Resort's underground parking garage, but it is easy to tell, simply from the smell, there will surely be more to find, if only they can get those smashed cars out of there. "The smell of decay coming from the water is just awful, isn't it?" said John White, who owns Sea Dream guesthouse next-door to Baan Boa and who spent the day Wednesday cleaning out the soggy shell of his first-floor lobby. Austin Williams is a dive center manager. He ran the dive center on Wednesday in a sweat-soaked T-shirt. Although the office was far enough off the beach not to be affected from Sunday's tidal waves, his apartment was on the beach, above a popular bar named Komma's, and he did not yet have the chance to retrieve his belongings. Williams reported that the company's live-aboard scuba-diving boats, which travel to the Mergui Archipelago in nearby Burma and the Similan Islands off Thailand in the Andaman Sea, were all intact and their passengers and crews safe. Business was surreally normal at the dive center, with a Russian couple stopping by as Williams spoke to book a daylong dive trip on Thursday. Yana Safonova and Yuri Nyrkov's flight arrived just three hours after the first tidal waves hit. Their vacation is a charter package, and they have no means to return to Moscow until the return flight on Jan. 6. "We don't want to go home, anyway," Nyrkov said, adding that the hotel in which they are staying is high above the ocean. Williams let them know that diving conditions had changed as a result of the tidal waves. The water, he said, is four degrees cooler, as deep, cold ocean water had displaced the tropical warmth typical in the area. Aside from that and reduced visibility, Williams assured them in his native English accent that the diving would be top-notch. | | "They're doing the right thing in some respects," Williams said after they had left and he had booked them for a day's diving and sold them two masks and snorkels, "because they're supporting the economy." He said the live-aboard business has had "a few, but surprisingly few" cancellations as a result of the catastrophe. Thailand is one of the most popular places in the world to learn to dive. The tropical reefs that contain such creatures as clownfish, made famous by the film, "Finding Nemo," draw scuba divers from all over the world. But for divers in the water at the time of a tsunami racing across the open ocean, it was a bewildering experience. Stephanie Adam, a native of France who lives in Shanghai, China, was separated from her boyfriend and dive buddy, Andre Herrmann, a German who also lives in Shanghai, while diving off Phi Phi Island, which was wiped out by the wave. In more than 60 feet of water, the visibility was suddenly reduced to nil, and the group she was in became separated, having to safely ascend slowly and alone. It was not until later the divers discovered how lucky they had been to feel the effects of the wave far enough from land to be safe. On one dive boat, the divers had a closer call. They were diving at a depth of more than 90 feet and then suddenly found themselves at 12 feet, and then back down to 60 feet in a matter of seconds. To a scuba diver, who breathes compressed air under pressure, such changes in depth can cause a lung or eardrum to burst, but the divers apparently were unharmed. When the first wave passed another dive boat, the divemaster was in the process of briefing the 12 scuba divers aboard before they jumped into the water. "We were just moored on one of the buoys when a ripping current came, and just in the nick of time, with full power, we were able to make it out to sea," he said. As he did so, his cell phone alerted him of a text message from a Thai associate. The man reported that nine members of his family were missing. While these few stories of overwhelming tragedy and miraculous luck were being related, the cleanup process marched forward in coastal areas, providing at times moments of humor, signs of man's resilience, that in the end will certainly prevail over the dark smell of death that now plagues the streets near the coast. On the bed of a dump truck carrying debris from one hotel in Patong sat an American helping in the cleanup on a ruined vinyl recliner. At the truck's passing, a group of girls from a Thai massage parlor in an area of town that was unaffected by the waves came running to the curb. "Ooooh!" they laughed and waved. "They throw away farang!" they cried, using their term for a westerner. SOURCE - Scripps Howard News Service |
