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Outside Magazine, March 2005
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There Can't Be a Word for This
The catastrophic Christmas tsunami hit Thailand's climbing meccas hard. Railae Beach resident SAM LIGHTNER JR. reports on the nightmares and miracles of the aftermath—and on the Thais and expats rebuilding their slice of paradise.

By Sam Lightner Jr.

THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS is the very peak of the peak season at the world-famous beaches along Thailand's southwest coast, and Phi Phi Town—the dense village of dive operators, coffeehouses, hotels, bootleg-DVD vendors, and climbing shops on the island of Koh Phi Phi—was packed. Lying roughly 28 miles southeast of the resort-filled island of Phuket in the Andaman Sea, Koh Phi Phi was bustling with as many as 4,000 visitors and locals.

Phi Phi Town sits more or less at sea level, a jumble of wooden shops, bamboo shacks, and brick bungalows crowded on a thin isthmus of sand that separates Dalam Bay, to the north, and Tonsai Bay, the island's main entry, to the south. Any view of the ocean itself is cut off by two massifs of 300-million-year-old limestone jutting nearly a thousand feet out of the sea. And so, at a little after ten that morning, as beachgoers and climbers sat drinking coffee and eating pastries or putting on their first coat of sunblock, no one could see the massive swell approaching from the west.

Koh Phi Phi is surrounded by deep water—in places the depth off the western side is 100 feet just three feet from shore—so the tsunami was almost on top of the island when it bounced off the shelf, creating a wave that rose as high as 60 feet. The water could have been moving close to 50 miles per hour when it crashed into the 11-square-mile, hourglass-shaped island's rugged west coast. There, the wave split in two, sweeping toward the town through both Dalam and Tonsai bays.

The water hit the Tonsai side first, then plowed in as a larger wave from Dalam Bay, crashing across the beach in front of P. P. Charlie's and the other bungalow resorts and creating a Cuisinart of shattered windows, corrugated-tin roofs, scuba tanks, and people. Nothing in its path could stop it, and the water surged on, washing across one of the most crowded stretches of waterfront in Thailand and rolling toward the mainland.


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Climber SAM LIGHTNER JR. is the author of All Elevations Unknown: An Adventure in the Heart of Borneo.
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