Back In Khao Lak
Published on 29 April 2005 by Christina Kellberg
Source : http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=1059&a=409096
The place was almost unknown. There was rain forest, unspoiled beach, silence. There were no hotels, no bars, no neon lights. It was called Khao Lak.
Ten years ago two German backpackers came here. they were called Hans and Gerhard and fell passionately in love with Khao Lak and a Thai girl each. They built a few simple bungalows, renting them to compatriots who, like themselves, were seeking silence in a place untouched by tourists.
The residents scarcely suspected what was to come. Who would have imagined that in just a couple of years Khao Lak should be transformed into a paradisical place of luxury for mainly well-to-do Swedes? For almost fifteen years tin had been Khao Lak's great fortune. Ships would be far out at sea pumping up this precious mineral. Their lights would gleam in long rows on the horizon.
In 1993, however, tin ran out. People made for Phuket trying to find a job. Unemployment was high and men sat playing cards under the trees. The land in Khao Lak cost next to nothing. But who would buy land at a godforsaken place where there were no jobs?
Mr Lek dared to. He bought some land, building the first "Swedish-hotel".
Kong, qualified in catering, started working as a waitress at the hotel that the two Germans had built.
Mai, married to Douglas from the USA, created “Mai’s peaceful place", in contrast to all the posh establishments that sprang up on the beach, miles and miles long.
Ria from Denmark fell in love with Joe, a Thai, and leaving her tour leader job, she and Joe set up The Viking Restaurant in the centre of Khao Lak. Kai, a tailor, moved here to lead a quiet life with his family unlike Pattong beach in Phuket.
Mr Lek
Originally his name is Yanyong Khorpetch, but people call him Lek. This man has quicksilver in his body and every idea seems to be a possibility, also when those around him think he is crazy. They said he was nuts when he decided to build a hotel in Khao Lak. He had no experience of tourism, he didn’t know anything about Sweden. Nor did he know there were thousands of Swedes who were longing to get away from big cities, looking for peace and quiet and beautiful scenery.
People would say: "We’ve got nothing to sell here in Khao Lak. No sex. No business. Nothing." They didn’t know we have rain forest, animals, sun and sea; that people want something different from what there is in Phuket, says Mr Lek.
Accordingly, in 1995 he was the owner of a piece of land, which he had bought cheap, and within a year The Hotel Laguna was all ready, with fifty-six rooms, situated in an altogether forgotten place next to a drowsy village.
Until then Mr Lek had run a pig-farm and a prawn-breeding and it was this skill he brought along when opening the hotel.
Yes, he earnestly does mean that the experience from there was the road to success.
”There’s no difference. People and animals react in the same way. As long as they’re fed and treated well they’re in good mood”. At the same time Swedish charter companies started looking for new tourist resorts. They noticed that more and more travellers wanted to get away from neon lights and bars. They were looking for the tranquillity of a beach bungalow, going to sleep to the sound of the sea.
Spies from travel agencies walked in backpackers’ footsteps, hunting up their treasures which they turned into new places for a holiday.
In late 1997 Mr Lek signed a contract with Fritidsresor, a Swedish travel company, and soon the first Swedish tourists arrived, mostly middle-aged couples and families with children.
Mr Lek extended, constructed new buildings; still another hotel, employing people in the neighbourhood. He had plans for the future. ”Before the tsunami I bought some land on three islands off Khao Lak, where I was going to build an exclusive little establishment for about 10 to 20 people. There are no cars there, it’s even more quiet than Khao Lak. And there are unique birds, big nosehorn birds.”
Kong
She is called Kong by everybody, tiny Wandee Kongpan.
”Oh dear, ten years ago there was nothing here. Nobody had heard of Khao Lak. Everything was just pure natural scenery. I used to work at the hotel here.”
”Ever since I was a child I have wanted to work with tourists. I want foreigners to have a good impression of Thailand. And when I went to school in Phuket I thought the life of Pattong beach seem so nice and happy, which made me want to work there. I wanted to be a catering manager at some hotel.”
When she was 25 she married and had a son who is 6 today.
”But my husband didn’t understand that I had to work overtime when there were many guests in the restaurant.”
Now she has been divorced for several years and is living with her son at her parents’ house 30 km south of Khao Lak.
Kong says that a Swedish tourist with a lot of money once told her that he liked her very much.
”He thought he could buy me. But everything can’t be bought with money.”
About a year ago the La Flora, an exclusive hotel, was about to open here in Khao Lak and Kong got a job as the staff manager of the restaurant.
Mai and Douglas
The story of Mai and Douglas is like a romance. It’s about two people with completely different backgrounds and from different continents who find one another in a café.
But it’s also the story about two people realizing their dreams, each in their own way.
Mai was a single parent with two little kids. She had thrown out her husband, who was an addict, and had managed to get out of her village and gone to Chiang Mai, a bigger town in the north of Thailand. There she got a job at a hotel.
From early dawn she ran the coffee-bar, slaving away, feeling uncomfortable. That’s where Douglas Fairweather, a PR-man from Colorado, saw her for the first time. He drank one cup of coffee after another and got to know Mai.
Douglas had long been divorced, his children were grown-up. Within him there lay dormant a long-cherished dream. He wanted to create his own paradise on a primordial, tropical beach.
A few weeks before we go to Khao Lak he tells me in a mail from the USA that their flirt turned into a wedding in 1987, and that a few years later he was granted an early retirement pension.
Now they started to look for a place in Thailand where they could both make their dreams come true. He wanted to live on a deserted beach. She wanted to create a home marked by her ideas about beauty.
They travelled about in the south of Thailand, towards Lake Andaman, the border sea of the Indian Ocean. They rounded a hill. Then Douglas saw the coast of Khao Lak for the first time.
"The sight of it took my breath away". They bought a piece of land and built a house. But there was no electricity and a generator pumped up water for the shower.
Douglas and Mai were the first to build anything on the beach of Khao Lak.
In the morning, as Douglas walked down to the edge of the water, there were no foosteps in the sand, no sounds but those of the birds’ cheerful conversation and the breathing of the gentle waves.
Gradually more and more hotels spread along the southern part of the beach and by 1997 electricity had extended to the northern part, where Mai and Douglas lived.
Now the number of hotels grew larger and larger along the beach. Trees were sawed down, bushes cleared away. They were in the way for the new establishments. "Mai never sawed down any trees. She opened up holes in the buildings so that trees and bushes could live as before we came there, and that sea-eagles could go on living there, as nature had intended."
Mai thought that many of the hotels on the beach were showy and she disliked the fact that Nature had to submit. She could create something better, she meant, an alternative to what she regarded as superficial and philistine. She would offer guests a peaceful place, which so many people were looking for. She created Mai’s Quiet Zone.
"I had to abandon my dream about a private paradise, but I didn’t want to deny Mai her talent, which had been hidden until then. And little by little I got to loving to bask in the glory reflected from her."
Mai started to build bungalows, going about it in her own way, adjusting them to Nature; tending the wild orchids, planting, replanting, hanging up swings in the giant branches that bent down over the beach. “The guests said that Mai’s bungalows were built with love."
Douglas went to Takua Pa, the town a bit to the north, to teach English, or he sat in the shade at Mai’s Quiet Zone, smoking pipe or reading the Bangkok Post.
Mai’s children, Sara, her daughter and Sanan, her son, eventually started going to the university, but every vacation they helped her mother to take care of the guests. One hotel after another were erected along the beach and Mai feared that what once attracted people to go Khao Lak was running the risk of coming to nothing.
Together with some other hotel owners she set up informal rules, implying that no motor-boats or parachuters were allowed to break the silence.
Nor were deck-chairs allowed on the creamy yellow beach, nor were houses allowed to be built higher than the highest palm-tree.
"When we were approaching year 2005 some of us felt that this charasteristic was becoming erased. Maybe the tsunami will make entrepreneurs in Khao Lak rediscover the roots of this area", writes Douglas Fairweather.
On Boxing Day, December 26, 2004, Mai ran down to the beach to call in her guests, among others several Swedes. When the first wave came she held one of the guests by the hand and together they tried to cling to a palm.
Tailor Kai
Mr Weeraphong Koomsaard is called Kai, which means chicken. Once upon a time his grandma had a chicken-farm, but when Weeraphong first saw the light all her chickens died. So the boy got the pet-name of Kai.
Ten years ago Kai studied book-keeping and English at the university of Bangkok. Every morning he caught the bus from his home in Phuket to Bangkok, and the main road passed through Khao Lak.
When the bus arrived here the sun had just risen, the air was brisk and they saw paradise, he says. Every time the bus stopped on the hill, so they could watch the beach and the straight pillared halls of rubber trees. To the right of them towered the mountains and the rain forest. For forty years his family had sewn clothes at home for Indian tailors, who earlier had been predominent in the trade.
He wanted a company of his own and in 1998 he and his wife’s family started a tailor’s shop in Pattong Beach in Phuket. Five years ago he settled in Khao Lak since his mother-in-law had met a landowner. He wondered if they wanted a piece of land right in the centre of the village.
Then there were only three buildings here along this road, there were no street-lamps, hardly any tourists. People found their way in the black night by means of oil-lamps.
”I heard that the owner of the Hotel Laguna, Mr Lek, had other guests than those who came to Pattong. They liked the calm here, they had more money and they stayed longer.”
The first year there were three tailors in Khao Lak, one at the Laguna, Kai’s tailor’s shop Bauman and another one on the opposite side of the road. In one year they grew to ten. After two years they were more than 30. When the tsunami came they were fully 50. Four of those were owned by Kai’s family, and he had 50 employees.
That day, on the morning of December 26, he was on his way to a welcome meeting that the travel agency of Apollo was going to hold for newly arrived guests at the the Viking restaurant. There he would show material, patterns and tell what it cost to have a suit or a dress made.
He never got there. When people started screaming he was standing with a Swedish couple in his shop near the beach. She had ordered a dress in orange silk, he a dark-grey suit.
Danish Ria
Ria Junge had never known what is was all about. Her women-friends would fall head over ears in love. Herself, she had never felt that way, had never understood what they were talking about. But seven years ago it happened.
Ria was a guide in Phuket and was about to open a welcome meeting for newly arrived guests. It was held at a restaurant, owned by Joe Netboot. She was 21, he ten years older.
”To me all Thai men seemed small and feminine. Now Joe was standing there, oh yes, I'll show him to you! So different.”
After a week Joe said he wanted to get married and have children with her.
Rita took her time, moved about as a tour leader, and every Monday at half past eight Joe called.
One year and a half after their first meeting Ria went back to Phuket to find out what it had been, that thing she had felt, and what she felt now.
”It felt just as strong”, she says in perfect Swedish.
She speaks with a Norrbotten Swedish dialect. During the time that she worked as a tour leader in Greece she lived and worked together with Sara, a Swedish girl from Boden, a small northern town. When Ria was working with Apollo in Phuket, Khao Lak was miles from anywhere. She and others were wondering what business Fritidsresor had way out in the jungle, now that they started running services there.
Only a couple of years later Ria and Joe Netboot moved out here. They had married and little Sophia was on her way. The wanted to get away from Phuket, which was swarming with restaurants.
Khao Lak was small and snug. Here there was no restaurant that could serve anything but Thai food, so Joe and Ria started the Viking restaurant. When the number of tourists increased, they opened another one.
On Christmas Eve, 2004, all the guides and relatives who had come down here, gathered at the Viking restaurant that is nearest to the sea. They had bought a nice plastic Christmas tree and the father of one of the guides acted as Santa Claus. They were eating and having a good time until the small hours of the morning and Ria got very tired, She had just learnt that she was pregnant.
December 26, 2004
This morning was beautiful and warm. Sun from a clear blue sky. A day like any day during the dry period. Except for the La Flora Hotel. The Thai princess Ubolratana is paying a visit together with her adult son Poom and they are staying at the La Flora Hotel.
The hotel is teeming with security people and outside, at a short distance out at sea, there are two patrol boats guarding the distinguished guests.
Kong, the waitress, walks about serving coffee and tea to the breakfast guests. Earlier in the morning at eight, the tailor Kai had felt that his house vibrated. He had never before felt anything like that. Then he saw on television that there was an earthquake out in the Indian Ocean and that a few building in the south of Thailand had been damaged.
No, he was not afraid. Didn’t think any more about it but took his car just before ten o’clock and went to the shop he’s got down by the sea, near Ria’s restaurant the Viking and not far from The La Flora Hotel.
The Swedish couple were coming to try on the clothes they had ordered. After that he was going to Apollo’s welcome meeting at the Viking.
At eight o’clock in the morning Ria and her mother, who was visitng her daughter for Christmas, woke up. They felt that the ground trembled and were wondering if it was an earthquake. Ria asked her neighbour, who is a dentist, if they had felt anything. No.
Ria also calls Joe, who is up at their property in the rain forest. He is calm as usual. Only wants her to check if there are any cracks on the house. No, can’t see any.
Ria is late for her morning chores and at about a quarter past ten she phones down to the guide Elin to tell her this.
Elin is supposed to open a welcome meeting at eleven at the Viking and usually arrives there half an hour before the meeting begins.
It’s Petra who answers Elin’s telephone. Elin is engaged with another phone call. A colleague has phoned from a hotel in Phuket telling that the hotel was taking in a lot of water.
A little while later Ria hears people shouting and hooting out on the road and she thinks it’s got something to do with the princess’s visit to the La Flora.
Time is now half past ten and then Kong is supposed to close the breakfst room at the La Flora. Suddenly she sees that the sea recedes, it disappears, far, far out, and she sees corals and cliffs and fish.
Then she sees something coming from the left, from the promontary, with froth. She hears a high sound. Like a howling wind. The long-tailed boats bounce, shoved about by the water.
Kong realizes something is wrong. She hears the word catastrophe. He is frightened. The boss tells her: "Keep taking care of the guests!"
She watches the sea intently. Then she puts down her tray and starts running.
Back home in tailor Kai’s house the dog and the cat have been acting strangely. The cat had carried her kittens to the the first floor. The dog has entered the house, trembling and lain down in a corner.
Down in the shop tailor Kai hears the same shouting from the road that Ria hears. A raid, he thinks. The police chasing illegal Burmese workers.
At the same time he hears somebody shout: "The water is coming!" What water, he wonders. It’s sunshine, nice weather.
The guide Elin has arrived on her moped shouting to Ria, who stands in her underwear on on the balcony. There’s water all over the office!"
Ria thinks it’s a tidal wave. She remembers thinking exactly this, and she told this to her mother, but she doesn’t know how she could know. She scrambles some clothes together, runs down with her daughter Sophia, her mother and Joe’s sister. Doesn’t find the car keys, runs back up to the flat, finds the keys, runs down. Then her mother and Sophia are gone. Somebody says they left with the waiter on his motorbike.
TAILOR KAI, four of his staff in his shop and the Swedish couple have got into Kai’s car. His only thought is to save his four-year-old daughter and his pregnant wife. He must save them.
But on the main road he can’t turn right, down to the village. The water stops him. He runs into Elin, who screams and shivers, and picks her up in the car. She’s barefoot, has thrown away her high-heeled shoes.
The water that chases them is black. They go up to the temple, which the water can’t reach. There he lets off those who he’s got in the car, he parks the car and starts walking down towards the village. He must save his wife and daughter. "I’m a bad man who can’t save his family", he thinks. Again and again this thought comes to his mind. He knew they were on the ground floor when the wave came came.
Back home in the house are his wife and his daughter. When the wave sweeps in over Khao Lak, north and south, Kai’s wife hears a heavy sound, like a bomb. She has no idea what it is. When she runs out with her daughter into the street there’s a heavy smell of sea. She is pregnant and her sense of smell is strengthened.
She, her daughter and a few of the staff get into their minibus and set off towards the mountains.
Tailor Kai can’t get down to the village, tries, but is forced back to the temple. There he runs into the cook from the Viking who wonders whether he’s seen Ria and her daughter. No, he hasn’t seen them.
He doesn’t even know where his own family is. "I’m a bad man who can’t even save my family".
The cook has taken care of a Swedish girl of eight. She’s wounded in the face and can’t walk. Kat says to the girl: "We will find your Mum and Dad!" The girl does nothing but cry. He carries her down to a house near his shop. Catches sight of two women who turn out to be Swedes. They say they recognize the girl, that they stay at the same hotel as they do. They take care of the little one.
Kai must come home, home to his wife and daughter. "Have you seen my wife and daughter?" He asks everybody he sees.
When the waitress has dropped her tray she runs to a building nearby, up on the roof of the second floor. About ten people huddle there, among others a Swedish family with a son and a daughter. On the roof of a building stands the princess.
The wave licks the roof-ridge where Kong and the others are standing. Down below they see cars floating. One of the two patrol boats, which has guarded the princess and her son, are thrown with the water across the fields. Bores itself down into the mud on the other side of the road, many hundreds of metres further away.
UP AT MAI’S QUIET ZONE Mai runs down to the beach to call in the guests who have taken the first morning swim. She shouts to a cleaner that he must get Elfriede, one of the guests, out of her room. Then she takes Elfriede by the hand, runs up to a palm and together they try to cling to it.
When the big tsunami smashes in with great force across the beach Mai and Elfriede are swept away. Douglas, who is on the deck above the kitchen, is flung úp to the prawn-breeding Green Village and loses his strong glasses. The entire Mai’s Quiet Zone is smashed to pieces. Mai and many of the guests are washed away. Seven of them are relatives of hers. A few guests survive.
Mr Lek from the Laguna Hotel was on his way together with his wife and two daughters. Just before eleven o’clock one of his staff calls saying: "The hotel is falling down!"
”I didn’t understand what it was all about and I said: "We’ll build it up again!" But he turned the car and drove back.
When he gets into Khao Lak people lie dead on the road, he counts at least ten. Trees have been thrown down. The hotels are gone. Ria is sitting up by the waterfalls in the mountains crying: "Sophia! Sophia!" For hours she yells out her daughter’s name. She thinks about the little one who is growing in her belly. She hasn’t had the time to feel happy.
By two o´clock tailor Kai manages to get down to the village and discovers that the midddle part of the little village centre is quite intact. The tsunami has passed on either side. The family’s house is still standing, undamaged. And it’s locked.
A relative can tell that his wife, daughter and some of the staff got into a minibus and went to the mountains.
He walks towards the mountains. Meets customers, unknown people, people only dressed in bikinis. Injured. They’re asking for their families. If anybody had a cellphone left, you couldn’t phone. The cellulars had also died.
After several hours Joe reached the waterfall, where Ria was sitting together with a lot of others. He told that Sophia and Ria’s mother were alive and that they were safe and sound up at their property in the mountains. Ria didn’t believe him. He looked so strange when he said this.
Afterwards she realized that he had got a shock. He had been picking up dead and injured people, taken them in his car, transported them up to his property up in the mountains.
Tailor Kai kept walking, to the mountains, to find his wife and daughter.
At a quarter to four they found one another.
Kong’s mother went looking for her daughter in the hospitals, but she was unhurt and had taken refuge in the little town of Takua Pa, north of Khao Lak.
The day after the tsunami she could get back and went down to La Flora to look for her motorbike, which she had bought on credit and which was the only way for her to go up and down to her job. She found it. It was crushed.
Today Kong helps out with the rebuilding of La Flora. It’s in full swing and the hotel will reopen in August.
Kong is planting flowers, calculating what can be used out of what is left and what new things they have to buy. She earns about fifty crowns (around 5£) a day, paying instalments on her ruined motorbike and just wants everything to be as was before the tsunami.
She dreams about being able to pay for her son’s schooling, she would like him to be a physician. She wants to help her aging parents and she hopes to be the catering manager of a hotel some day.
”There are no such women.”
And the spirits?
”I shudder when I think about them. I’m wearing an amulet around my neck to protect me from evil spirits and I go to the temple to sacriface water, fruit and food for the dead. I say their names, try to keep them in a good mood.”
She says that ghosts, the spirits of the dead appear in the evening and she doesn’t want to see them, because this brings bad luck.
DANISH RIA DOESN’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE after the tsunami, so that’s why Joe, Sophia and she sleep in the same bed. Every night she wakes up and lie sleepless for a while.
Joe is convinced that Khao Lak in just a few years will have resurrected as an attractive paradise for tourists. Now that the rain period is on its way, then the salt will be washed away, and what is now brown will turn to green again, and everything will start growing again, he says.
Himself he is planting fruit-trees on their property in the forest and he wants to build bungalows, which they will sell to foreigners.
Ria says she has no idea what their lives will be like in five years. Their lives were spared, but they lost a lot of money.
”We’ve been working hard to build a future and we said "After Christmas we’ll have a lot of time for each other." “I haven’t seen much of Joe since then.”
MR LEK IS TOILING ALONG FOR THE FUTURE in Khao Lak. He is heading the reconstruction, he has gathered the hotel owners and has inspired them new hope. Today half of the owners want to restore the ruined hotels.
When they hesitate, fearing that the tourists won’t come back, Mr Lek says: "Think of the staff, who are out of work. Think of all the people we’ve been doing business with, those who sell vegetables and meat and who can’t sell their goods. Remember what it was like here in Khao Lak during the lean years, when people were just sitting playing cards."
"Mai’s Quiet Zone was totally Mai’s creation and now it’s gone. I only contributed money" her husband Douglas Fairweather writes in one of his e-mails.
"Without Mai it’s impossible to imagine that what was so unique and personal, everything that was carried out with such great love, will ever rise again."
He writes that Mai’s children, his stepchildren, have no possibility to build it up again. The daughter Sara, 22, has three years left at the university. The son Sanan, 26, hads just started an art gallery in Khao Lak, but that has come to nothing.
"Myself I’m 70 and will be back in the US in a few days. I have four middle-aged children to welcome me, they’ll give me love and care as long as I need it. And I will need it, because Mai’s Quiet Zone was the total amount of my financial means."
TAILOR KAI moved back with his family to Phuket and also took his staff there.
But in October he will open a shop in Khao Lak again. He’s back where he started five years ago. When the tsunami came Kai and his shops had a great many orders for clothes, suits and dresses that were supposed to be finished before the guests left. He keeps them in his store-room and he has mailed all his customers. Asking where to send them. Some of them answered. But many of them he hasn’t heard from.
”The clothes are still here with us”, he says.
What do you think about the future?
”We lost many of those we loved. But we want to remember them. The boat that lies up there, which guarded the princess and her son, will be turned into a monument. It will remind us of our dead and we will be able to go there to remember. A great many people will have some kind of relationship with Khao Lak.”
”And the scenery and the silence in Khao Lak is still there.” I'm walking on the beach and I see the traces of the annihilating tsunami. Here there are distorted steel frames and bars, bits of planks and uprooted trees. Shoes have been gathered in big heaps. Small shoes. Big shoes. The remains of a skirt from H&M with a washing instruction. Lorries, excavators and cement mixers are clearing up and rebuilding.
As I approach one of the hotels of seductive names like The Blue Sea, The Magic Lagoon, The Paradise, small commemorative places of rememberance appear.
Here relatives and friends have placed bunches of orchids, built circles of shells, put letters. To a palm-tree a picture of a Swedish family is taped and enclosed in plastic. Daddy, Mummy and two blonde daughters of 3 to 5. Beside the father there is a big, white suitcase, a small suitcase and a little rucksack. On a piece of paper it is written: "Beloved Camilla, Christian. Hedda and Frida. Be seeing you again, we know, in our hearts."
Every time I walk along the beach I meet a woman of my own age. Sometimes she sits on a stone. Sometimes she wanders slowly along the beach. She is crying..
At Mr Lek’s second hotel there are the remains of a bungalow. Only parts of the bathroom are left. Outside there are three photos, one of a young girl, another of a young man, another of a woman. Next to the photos someone has planted a red violet bougaineville.
An eleven-year-old boy, Linus, wrote them a letter. It says: "Now you rest in the palace of Heaven, but still maybe not. Maybe you flew off and turned into an angelical animal, we’ll never know" Below his lines he drew a horse and a tennis racket.
One of the last evenings that we are in Khao Lak village I spot a piece of paper in a clothes shop. A Swedish man and two Swedish women issuing a reward of one million bath to anyone who can help them find any member of their families alive.
Here there are pictures of a mother and her two daughters, three and six years old. Here there are pictures of a father and two sons, eight and nine years old. And a picture of little Johannes, two years old.
A man and a woman still hold a slant of hope of finding their children, husband and wife. A mother seeks her little son.
In the note, among other things, it says: "Johannes Adamsson was last seen on a tree in Pakarang together with a six-year-old Danish girl a few hours after the tsunami. It is told that he was rescued to a boat. We have a reason to believe that he was alive and unhurt, but maybe in a shock.
Who rescued the Danish girl?
Who rescued Johannes?
Who is taking care of Johannes today?
Johannes Adamsson is blond with dark eyebrows. He knows his first name and his surname, his mother’s name Sara and his father’s name, Christer."
Sara Adamsson, little Johannes’s mother, walks about in the vicinity, week after week, looking for her son.
Three times she has re-booked her return ticket to Sweden. She has already had her husband cremated down here.
I’M SITTING ON SOME STEPS of the shop when a woman suddenly says: "Could you spare me a minute?"
"I heard from the woman in the shop that you were reading our note. The man there, Kent, he’s my husband and the boys, John and Henry, are our sons."
Her name is Maria Ekdahl and lost her husband and her two sons in the tsunami.
On December 26, she went for a snorkel swim to Similan Islands. When she came back the entire of The Blue Village was level with the ground. Her husband and sons were gone. Now she is down here to look for them and she has found Kent. She has just taken part in a ceremony at the temple, where he has been cremated and she has created a commemorative place there.
Now Maria Ekdahl will go home with her urn. But she doesn’t know where her sons are. They haven’t been identified yet. I wonder how she will survive.
”Me and Bob, the one who lost his wife and two daughters and who is also in the note you read — we support one another.”
”We survive by means of one another.”
"I appreciate my memories, in a bittersweet way, and I’m happy to share them in this way.
"But in her womb new life is growing.
”Nobody wants to be here in the evening. The guards are here because they have to.”
When the water recedes Kong and the others run to a still higher building, stay there for an hour and then run up to the main road and towards the waterfalls in the forest.
Ria and Joe’s sister jump into the car, drive up to the main road. Before turning to the left and into it, she sees a wall of water. It almost reaches the lamps of the street-lighting.
When the tsunami swept through charming La Flor, then Kong was able save her life. But since then she lives with her ghost and her anxiety. She is afraid of the spirits of the dead.
