Thailand Adventure Phuket 2004
This is part 2 of the story An Adventure in Thailand.
This second trip in December of 2004 was to be the second turning point in our lives, even though we had not realised we had already had the first one on that first trip to Thailand. Of course we stayed at the same hotel on Patong beach and went to see the many friends we had made on the beach (hair braiding, henna tattooing and massaging). These people seemed to remember our names and our children and seemed to enjoy listening and talking to us. We found these people so nice due to the fact that they would always stop and talk, take care of my cameras (over £1000 worth) when we both wanted to swim at the same time and all they wanted was for us to have an enjoyable time on the beach and of course buy what they were selling to eat and drink or go home with a memento of braided hair, tattoo or massage. What we could not foresee as with many other holiday makers in Thailand was how in 2004 we would be caught up in the tsunami.
Well as we all know devastation befell parts of Thailand as well as other parts of the world. The Patong Merlin and many other hotels, shops and other people’s livelihoods and lives were washed into oblivion on that day. I count myself lucky that on that day I had for the first time not gone to the beach to take pictures, partly due to my wife rocking in bed in pain (that actually turned out to be a tremor to the impending tsunami that morning) and waiting for her to get ready to have breakfast or I may not be here typing this story.
We were lucky our friends came running in to the breakfast area and pulled us out of the way on that morning or we would have been another statistic of lost life. We saw over 100 bodies taken from the shopping mall next to the hotel, we had people die in the hotel, including the little boy who was washed into the hotel and did not survive even though my wife gave him CPR. So with many people including us being transported up the mountain to safety and then being relocated to another hotel I would guess it would be hard to imagine that it would not have a profound effect on us. Now it was time to leave and like everyone else who wanted to leave, but could not for a few days we decided to help out before we carried on our next leg of our journey with was to Australia and then Singapore.
Read Part 3 of an Adventure in Thailand
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