New York Times [13th January 2005]

IN 22 years of using Bangkok’s airport, Don Muang, the busiest in Southeast Asia, I have never known it to be anything but crowded. On New Year’s Eve, five days after the tsunami that devastated Phuket and much of the rest of southern Thailand, it was empty.
I called friends from the airport, and found that nobody I knew had died; but everyone knew someone who was missing, from every walk of life: businessmen, prostitutes, dealers in marijuana, doctors, politicians. The tsunami made no social distinctions.
I was returning from Laos, where my family and I had spent the Christmas vacation by the banks of the Mekong, in the delightful town of Luang Prabang. When we heard the news, my first thought was, ”It could have been us.” I had originally planned to take us sailing in the Andaman Sea, off Phuket. What chance would we have had in a small sailboat when people drowned in their hotel rooms? We were saved by indolence: I decided to drink Laotian beer by the Mekong rather than face the hassle of sailing.
On the street in Laos, every other Westerner was saying the same two things: ”It happened at Christmas.” And, like me: ”It could have been us,” for many Westerners in Laos also make a stop in Phuket on their tour of Southeast Asia. Almost everyone at that moment was ascribing a karmic cause to the disaster. Phuket had been a peaceful fishing island before the West brought to it money, decadence, environmental vandalism, alcohol, drugs and prostitution. And disaster struck on one of the most important religious holidays in the West.

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