Reconstruction in Thailand Phuket Rethinks Its Future
Erwin is an excellent cook. One of his specialties is Cordon Bleu with cheese and Rösti, Swiss fried potatoes. He's a portly man, his skin darkly tanned by the Thai sun, and he loves cigars. But the otherwise pleasant man from a small town near Lucerne, Switzerland, has been saying some rather unpleasant things lately.
For instance, Erwin says that there could be a silver lining to the horrific devastation caused by the killer waves that struck Phuket in December. He says that the tsunami may have done the island some good, because it liberated Phuket from a curse -- the curse of the cheap. Erwin sits on his balcony and praises the view. The balcony faces the sea to the southwest, and it's part of Erwin's hotel on Kata Beach, a stretch of coastline that now sparkles in the sun. There isn't a cloud in the sky. It's a scene straight out of a tourism brochure. A breeze comes up from the ocean, but then blends with the odors of burning wood, rubble and decay. Workers wearing face masks are still clearing the area next to his hotel, which officially remains a disaster zone. The only building that wasn't damaged is Erwin's hotel. That's because the view his guests enjoy from their balconies is the result of the hotel's location on top of a 20-foot cliff above the sea.
And what about the deadly waves?
Oh, the waves, he says. They passed through underneath his balconies, Erwin says, nodding grimly. The third wave came right up to the corner of the building. Erwin is thankful that it didn't make it any higher, and he jumps up to point to the spot where he and his guests were standing, at a wooden railing, as they watched the monster waves empty out the bay below. Erwin saw a woman floating past this balcony, and when she came within reach he threw her a rope. She managed to grab it and Erwin pulled her out of the foaming water, bandaged her cuts and handed her a glass of cognac. But the woman wouldn't stop crying, so Erwin brought her another brandy, a double, took the rope and returned to the balcony to watch the catastrophe unfold.
Erwin Schwerzmann, 62, cook and hotelier, spent years traveling in South America, and arrived in Phuket a year ago. He brought along his savings, a battered guitar he had inherited from his mother and, most importantly, his wife Elisabeth. Her nickname is Lissilein and she's 13 years younger than he is, but the two share the same tattoo on their right shoulders -- a dolphin jumping through a hazy ring of flowers.
Searching for a new beginning
But he really has something else on his mind. Here, he says, pointing to the December issue of Phuket's German-language newspaper, a publication geared toward tourists and expats. He opens the paper to the classified page, a Who's Who of the local German-speaking colony. "This," he says, pointing to ads for German keg beer and hearty German cooking, "is where all the tourists go who are looking for cheap but filling meals." He taps his finger on an ad for the German "Grill Shack" in Patong. "These are the kinds of dives that no longer exist," he says.
The list is long. The "Swiss Beer Garden" is gone. Swallowed by the sea. "And there," he says, tapping an ad for the "Coconut," "you'd probably be better off not using the toilet." Erwin shakes his head. "Many of these cheap dives are now gone, and that's a good thing." He puts down the paper. "It's time for a new beginning," he says.
There is much talk about new beginnings in Phuket these days. In fact, there is more than talk. In Patong, which translates as "banana grove," the second-largest town on the 210-square-mile island, bulldozers roar along Thawiwong Road and Phra-Barami Road. Teams of construction workers, their faces wrapped in rags to protect against the dust and the stench of corpses, haul stones and construction materials. A navy helicopter lands noisily in front of the Kamala Beach School. Soldiers jump out and unload cement mixers. Ten minutes away, on Bangla Road, prostitutes hurry to clean up their bars, places with names like "Pussy," "Josephine's" and the "Dragon."
The stench of mud and damp basements still permeates the bars. But the neon signs are back on, the loudspeakers have been dried out, and in some places almost naked girls have already returned to their strip teases on tiny stages, gyrating and rubbing their bodies against shiny poles. But they're dancing listlessly to rooms of eerily empty bar stools. The Farangs, or white people, are almost all gone. A shifty-looking Australian was there a while ago, and now there are two tattooed Britons, but they just stare without tipping.
According to the most recent government figures, the resort island draws about 3.5 million vacationers a year. The Thais fed them curry with coconut milk, gave them massages, were constantly friendly and cheerful and managed to transform Phuket into Thailand's second-wealthiest province, surpassed only by Bangkok. Anyone who could figure out how to amuse bored vacationers could make money. Entertainment ran the gamut from elephant rides, rafting, fellatio, diving, checking out transvestites, taking boat rides out to the reefs, to petting killer whales. Marine biologists believe that two-thirds of the reefs near Phuket have now been destroyed.
The Ministry of Tourism estimates that the Thai tourist industry will suffer losses of up to 579 million in the first three months alone. Images of the killer wave have robbed stressed-out Westerners of the last refuge where they felt safe: the beach. "That's precisely why we must convince the world to come here," says Erwin, "and we have to do it by offering high standards and quality." He's already begun gearing up for the new brand of tourist he hopes to attract, hiring a construction crew to add several rooms to the back of his hotel. The concrete is already dry and the first wall is up.
"People are forgetful, and where in the world can you find such an ideal vacation spot?" Erwin is confident that business will be booming again within less than a year. The Buddhists believe that those who are lucky and successful must have done something in a previous life to deserve their good fortune. It's a perspective that happens to complement the kind of fast-track capitalism that has allowed the Thai economy to achieve impressive growth figures upwards of five percent.
NEXT PAGE: Cleaning up a cesspool
Patong Beach's red light district: Will the sex trade tradition continue as the area rebuilds?>Many Phuket businessmen who thrive on tourism share Erwin's views. They want to see the aftermath of the killer wave used to eliminate the worst of the excesses of the boom years. The bars and cheap restaurants along the island's beaches should not be rebuilt, they say, and illegal resorts should remain shuttered. The spokeswoman for the Tourism Authority of Thailand has called for "using the tragic incident to reorganize the properties along the beaches and create a better environment."
Phuket, Asia's Mallorca, is the result of years of rampant, unimpeded growth. Whenever Asian tourism was somehow attacked -- by Islamic terrorists, by bombings in Bali, by the avian flu, by SARS or by the Iraq War -- vacationers continued to flock to Phuket, because it was a place where they could escape the world's horrors and have a good time.
But now the island's hoteliers are busy counting the dead and the missing, and assessing the damage to their buildings. Of the 10 bays on Thailand's west coast, the money coast, Patong Bay and Kamala Bay were most severely affected by the tsunami.
Mr. Boonchai is probably the only one who knows how many pieces of land he owns, and in which bays. But he claims that he suffered no losses. Boonchai is a short, slim, rigid-faced man in his late fifties. He wears expensive clothes and white leather shoes, drinks ice water and responds in monosyllabic words. His office contains a computer, two enormous safes and not much else. Some call him the godfather of Phuket.
No photos, please, says Boonchai, a local hotel owner. The flood destroyed at least 17,500 of Phuket's 33,500 hotel rooms, but Boonchai's businesses suffered far less damage because of they are located far enough away from the water, he says, sipping on a glass of water. And how does he feel Phuket should be redeveloped now that the flood has passed -- and what is his take on the rapid development of recent years that has turned his country into an amusement park?
He clears his throat. "There was never any alternative to development. Besides, we Thais are very flexible. Look, we celebrate Christmas, New Year's Eve, then the Chinese New Year in February, then the Thai New Year in April, then Easter, Halloween and the various Chinese holidays. We are polite and open to all religions and cultures -- why should we be unhappy about that?"
When asked about the prospects of cleaning up Phuket's cesspool image, Boonchai says the idea is "interesting, but unrealistic." But unlike many others, Boonchai has the luxury of leaving his properties vacant until he believes he has found the right tenant.
That was what happened with the hotel Erwin and his wife are now running. It was empty for 10 years, and Erwin discovered it while taking a walk, overgrown with bamboo, but well-maintained and in an excellent location high above the ocean. To convince Boonchai to lease the hotel to him, Erwin came armed with plenty of patience and every bit of his charm. "It's difficult to get an appointment with Mr. Boonchai. He's one of the richest men on the island," says Erwin. "If you deal with him, you can't ask for a receipt. You just give him the money, and he counts it and puts it into his drawer. That's it. Then you bow and the deal is done."
The word consideration might as well be a preamble to the Thai constitution. Thais hate to be criticized openly, to lose face. Criticizing someone else is just as bad. It's important to avoid any direct confrontation, so that social interaction becomes a series of evasive moves, mirroring Thai temple dancing.
Tending to the dead
It's a principle that applies to the living and, even more so, to the dead. According to Thai custom, the dead must be treated with special consideration. The living must reconcile with the dead, build them tiny temples that look like decorated bird houses, and always remember to leave them an offering of a small bowl of rice, a glass of water, and even a few cigarettes, just in case the soul of the deceased is a smoker. Otherwise, the Thais say, the spirits will take revenge and return to the houses of the living to spit on the floor. The souls of the dead have a journey ahead of them, a journey that involves a great deal of wandering. And that's why someone has to attend to the dead, someone like Samu Djamnung.
His head is shaved, he's barefoot, and he wears an orange robe, his right shoulder left bare. Samu Djamnung, 40, is the head monk at Pak Lok. Visitors must kneel before him when he prays, and women are absolutely forbidden to touch him. It's also very important to keep your feet pointing away from him during conversation, because feet are considered impure. The man speaks to his visitors, but his eyes seem to look through them.
Samu Djamnung sits on a cushion in front of his small temple. It's late afternoon, three cats rub up against him, and the floor at his feet is littered with three cans of Whiskas cat food, a bottle of holy water, a snoring dog, and a vase of lotus blossoms. Samu Djamnung yawns. The temple is inland; Samu Djamnung and the other monks were untouched by the killer waves. But the days after the disaster were difficult.
Pak Lok monastery lies on Route 4027. The monastery's spacious compound is teeming with dogs, cats and chickens. In the days following the catastrophe, the 12 monks who live here were constantly on the go, cremating corpses and administering funeral rites to the dead. Samu Djamnung, the head monk, remained in the monastery most of the time, holding down the fort, only leaving his station in emergencies. One of these emergencies happened just a few days ago.
On the outskirts of Patong, near the access road to Erwin Schwerzmann's bay, workers had found three corpses buried under roof shingles and wall debris. The bodies were swollen, and the stench must have been unimaginable. Nevertheless, the owner of the house decided not to touch anything, not to remove the bodies without spiritual support. A driver was dispatched to Pak Lok, one of the best places to find an escort for the spirits of the dead.
Samu Djamnung arrived a few hours later. He set up his bronze statue of the Buddha, lit a few sticks of incense and sprinkled the site with holy water. He bowed in front of the dead, tied one end of a string to the Buddha statue and the other end to the branches of a nearby tree, the string symbolizing the path the spirits would follow to heaven.
Then he chanted a prayer for 45 minutes. Everyone was silent, and everyone seemed relieved. When he was finished, Samu Djamnung was paid and returned to the monastery in a taxi.
Why were they afflicted by this catastrophe? The same question runs through the minds of Buddhists in Thailand, Hindus in India, Catholics, Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Muslims in Indonesia. Buddhists like Samu Djamnung believe they know the answer. It was because human beings, in their greed and egoism, had forgotten their bond with nature.
Religion versus reality
But a Buddhist like Nina, who rents out beach chairs on Patong Beach, has little time to think about her relationship with nature. She's worried about what happened to the 120 beach chairs she owned, each worth 2,500 Baht (about 50), each clearly identifiable as her property by its blue paint. And suddenly, immediately after the catastrophic waves struck Patong, her beach chairs were gone. But unlike those of her neighbors, her chairs were not tossed back onto the beach by the ocean. Nina isn't exactly sure who stole her chairs, but she has her suspicions. But that doesn't do her much good, because she can't or doesn't want to report the incident to the police. In Thailand, she says, you only go to the police as a last resort, unless you're a foreigner or very wealthy. Everyone else must help himself.
Nina plans to go to Bangla Road this evening to make some inquiries. If she's lucky, her suspicions will be borne out, and if she's very lucky, she will be able to gain the support of someone powerful enough to exert pressure on the band of looters, to force them to return Nina's chairs. But then Nina will be indebted to her benefactor, and an endless cycle will have begun.
Nina and her sister-in-law paid 300,000 Baht for the chairs, or about 6,000. She grew up on a farm, and she came to Patong 26 years ago. She remembers the town's red-light district from the days when it consisted of little more than a few shacks and a tiny gas station. Nowadays she drives a white SUV, has a cell phone, and is a partner in a digital photo processing lab.
During Phuket's heyday, Nina was willing to do just about anything to make money, no matter how painful. She was once a prostitute in a bar, then a bar owner. In between jobs, she worked as a waitress, sold hallucinogenic mushrooms to hippies, got a few modeling jobs, gave snorkeling lessons to children and saved every Baht she could spare. Her business renting out beach chairs was supposed to be her nest egg.
On Dec. 26, when the water began splashing across Rath-U-Thit Road, Nina was just about to get into her car to attend a Christmas brunch. She took off her shoes and climbed onto the roof of the vehicle, where she sat for the remainder of the afternoon, pulling people from the water, trying to make phone calls, and finally climbing up the side of her building into her apartment. It was only two days later that she made it back to the beach, littered with other beach chairs. But hers were already gone.
Now she walks along Bangla Road, scanning the restaurants and bars, looking for an influential friend. But she's out of luck this evening. Instead, she's greeted by barmaids who walk toward her, placing their palms together in the traditional Thai greeting, smiling and bowing in front of Nina. They call her "Mama." They look up to her, the prostitute who managed to turn her life around. Should anything change on the island? She thinks about it, hesitates, and then talks about how, a few weeks before the catastrophe, she was passing a section of the beach where new concrete was being poured for a sidewalk. A coconut tree had just been cleared to make way for the new sidewalk. "It sounds stupid, but I liked that coconut tree. It was 10 years old and it was already bearing coconuts. When I saw that it had been cut down, I thought to myself: If I were God, I would be so angry that I would destroy this island ... but I only thought about it for a moment. Of course, it was just a joke." She laughs for a moment, but then she's serious again: "But if I had never left my village, I would be a wrinkled old farmer today. I would never have owned skin cream in my life, wouldn't know how to drive a car -- what alternative do we have?"
The emotional crisis
The great flood tore down the facades of Phuket and interrupted daily routines. Now the island's inhabitants are descending into an emotional crisis. The tourists, swept from their beach chairs by the monster wave, have fled to their own countries, and the people who live on the island are now asking themselves whether they want to continue living the lives to which they've become accustomed. And as if all this weren't difficult enough, Farangs are also getting involved. Foreigners like John Gray.
Gray looks about twice Nina's size, and he's probably three times as heavy. He's 6'4", weighs 240 pounds, but has little fat on his body. He sports a gray beard and a ponytail, his legs are muscular and his neck is as thick as a small tree trunk. He doesn't smoke or eat meat. Two of his toenails are black where a kayak landed on his foot. He runs sea kayak tours. He owns 20 boats and has 30 employees. Each tour takes eight hours, and Gray always goes along.
John Gray is a native Californian. He was once a lifeguard and then a Navy diver, he knows how to surf, has released eagles into the wild, and he spent the 1970s running campaigns to save endangered animals.
John Gray has always wanted to save the world. But when the killer waves came, he failed.
He paces back and forth in his office, and suddenly stops. "I blame myself," he says.
Gray was probably one of the few people in Phuket who knew something about tsunamis. After leaving California, Gray went to Japan, then to Hawaii. "There were some smaller tsunamis there, in 1960 and in '64, and a relatively big one in 1946 that killed 159 people. After all, I lived there, so I read everything I could get my hands on about tsunamis."
On Dec. 26, Gray was planning to head out to sea on a boat tour with 16 tourists at around noon. He was already sitting in his office at 8 a.m. He has always ignored Christmas, and he never gets up later than 4 a.m.
"I felt something shaking and rumbling. Hey, I thought, that was a big one, a powerful earthquake. I asked someone to put a bowl of water in the room." There were ripples and rings on the surface of the water.
"At that point I asked myself: How do I get confirmation, and how much time do we have?" John Gray went to work. He wanted to save the world. He surfed through Australian and American earthquake websites, wrote e-mails, asked for advice.
This is what he wrote to an earthquake center in Australia: "Hey guys, do you know anything about the Sumatra earthquake and a possible tsunami? If you do, I need to know about it soon. We're about to head out on a couple of kayak tours around Phuket, Thailand. By the way, a couple of people in the group are Aussies."
In fact, there was only one Australian in Gray's group that day, but he thought that a little exaggeration couldn't hurt.
According to Gray's message log, the e-mail was transmitted at exactly 9 a.m. That was an hour and a half before the two giant waves hit.
The response came 24 minutes later. This is what it said: "We received a report from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. They believe that there is no threat to the Pacific. Nevertheless, we cannot rule out the possibility of a tsunami occurring in the vicinity of the epicenter, which would be off the west coast of northern Sumatra. We have no further information. Best regards."
Nothing had been resolved. Gray was at a loss.
He called the big hotels. "I told them who I was, what I believed and that they should get their guests off the beach. But I was ignored, and not a single desk clerk connected me to the hotel manager."
What about the police? "I thought about it," says Gray, "especially since my wife's uncle is the chief of police here. But you don't go to the police in Thailand, and besides, I thought, what could they do?"
Gray decided to at least warn his own people, who were already on the pier preparing the kayaks. Gray ordered his two drivers to leave the harbor and head inland. He told the captain of the boat that accompanies his tours to head out to sea immediately. "He thought I was crazy. I had to threaten to fire him on the spot to convince him to go."
That was at 10:12 a.m. About 20 minutes later, the tsunami wrapped itself around the island and crashed into Chalong and Phuket Bays. The boats in the harbor were destroyed. Gray saved 17 lives, but he still feels as though he lost a major battle, a battle with the sea. He still plans to win his battle with the people who are destroying the island, but Gray isn't the only one who is skeptical that the big land owners and the authorities truly want to see a reversal and a new beginning.
Mistrust of the authorities is spreading in Phuket. Some even believe the authorities could be lying about the death toll. According to official estimates, 262 corpses washed up on the island's beaches, but the number of people officially missing is 700. Local papers write that the real number is likely to be two or three times as high, quoting rescuers who believe that the death toll in Phuket could ultimately number in the thousands. According to the press, officials are concealing the truth so as not to discourage tourists from returning soon.
All Gray wanted was to spend his golden years in Phuket, relaxing and spending as much time as possible out on the water. But that's unlikely to happen now that Gray has vowed to hold accountable those he believes are responsible for the catastrophe. He plans to fight for a tsunami warning system, and for new, gentler, more ecologically sensitive tourism. And he wants to do this in Phuket of all places? "Especially in Phuket," says Gray.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
