Hangover

Tales of my coping after a night in excess are plentiful enough in this blog…so I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say, I was feeling washed out enough for the following day to be non-existent – even the blessed Mint Source shower gel (one of many excellent gifts from my older brother!) couldn’t bring me to life. The only interesting things that happened all day were my munching of Turkey and Stuffing crisps to quench my insatiable desire for comfort food (these were a really cool pressie from Jon and Char, along with a mini Christmas pudding!) and meeting a bunch of Canadians who had been on Ko Phi Phi when the wave had hit. The restaurant and reception hut at their beach resort had been swept away by the encroaching sea; their own bungalow had been untouched and they had left, with all their belongings, completely unscathed. They described how they’d been on the beach, watching this wave coming in and thinking (best Keanu voice here), ‘Whoah! Check out the size of that wave, dude! That looks gnaaaaaaaaaarly, bro…let’s go get our boards!’ Of course, as the wave drew nearer they started thinking more along the lines of, ‘Shit! That is a REALLY big wave…I think I’m going to get a bit further from it…oh, shit! RUUUUUUNN!’
It was pretty weird sitting talking to people who’d witnessed such a crazy thing and we could see from their earnest expressions and eagerness to get wrecked, that they had ‘survived’ something pretty scary. However, because their resort had been relatively unscathed, and because they hadn’t witnessed any of the carnage or heart-wrenching scenes that were soon to become all-too-familiar, their tale didn’t seem all that incredible. It was still distanced from us by this sense of the surreal…it was something that people could tell tales of to their friends when they got home…it wasn’t yet an unfolding human disaster. Still, I made a point of posting on the blog that we were okay…I know what it’s like trying to ascertain the correct story from newspaper reports and television clips and wanted to be sure that nobody was worrying about us. I was amazed and touched at the number of people who’d taken the trouble to e-mail to see that we were okay…and it was the tone of these e-mails that came in over the next three or four days that first began to indicate the scale and gravity of the disaster in the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, back on an increasingly busy Samui (literally thousands of holiday-makers had diverted or transferred from Phi Phi and Phuket!), the party seemed to go on as normal. Some of this was surely manic celebration after escaping disaster; the remainder seemed to be our ongoing ignorance and the Thai predilection for playing things down.