Edition:
January 21, 2005
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The Friday Flyer Assistant Editor
On Sunday afternoon, December 26, Rod Fletcher was looking over the wooden railing of a remote fishing village restaurant on the western coast of Malaysia when he saw an unusual sight. The water level suddenly rose about three feet. Used to sailing and the ways of the ocean, he remarked, “That tide came in awfully fast.”
But that was all he knew about one of the most remarkable natural disasters in recent history until he and his traveling companions got back on the mainland and his Chinese Malay friend, Sum Kwai’s, cell phone began ringing incessantly. It was Sum Kwai’s frantic wife and friends, trying to make sure he was alive since a big wave had come ashore 300 miles up the coast in Penang and washed numerous sunbathers away to their deaths.
It wasn’t until the next morning at their hotel in Kuala Lumpur that Rod and his companion, Anna Pieters, read the newspapers and saw early reports of the tsunami’s widespread destruction in Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Like Americans and other startled viewers around the world, they watched news reports on CNN and BBC while information about the magnitude of the destruction was still unfolding.
One bit of news they were quick to pick up on was the devastation in Phuket, a popular tourist destination that was in their original itinerary, but which they had cancelled because of an American advisory that warned tourists of a problem with bird flu in Thailand.
Due to check into a beachfront hotel in Penang in two days, they were especially dismayed to learn several beachgoers, most of them children, were killed on the beach next to the hotel. Lured by the sight of fish flopping on the shore during an unprecedented low tide, tourists jumped over the safety of a seawall surrounding the city and were walking on the beach when the biggest wave hit, smashing them into the wall and then sucking them back out to sea.
Later, a photograph in the local newspaper would show bloated and disfigured bodies lying on the shore near Rod and Anna’s hotel–a sight not seen in mainstream American newspapers.
Still in Kuala Lumpur, the couple worried that Penang had been destroyed, especially when they saw one news clip that mixed up the destruction in Phuket, calling it Penang. They called their hotel and heard all was well so, when they arrived on Wednesday, most of the damage had already been cleaned up except for a couple of boats that had been flung over the seawall onto the roadway. Ironically, the beach was cleaner than ever because the wave had washed away all the kiosks of beach vendors.
An article in one of the newspapers Rod brought home from Penang points out that sunbathers on the resort coast were not caught as off-guard as some TV reports seemed to indicate. Lifeguards on the hotel beaches trained to watch sea conditions blew their whistles to get people out of the water at the sight of unusual surf, but some people merely clapped at the lifeguards when the waves didn’t at first seem to be dangerous. When the sea actually receded, some went out to look at the exposed sea life. For the most part, however, many people did heed the lifeguards’ warning and at least got behind the seawall.
For the rest of Rod and Anna’s stay, conversation among all the tourists was the tsunami, with one overriding question, “Where were you?” Rod explains.
Only a week after the tidal wave hit the area, there was no shortage of tourists at their Las Vegas themed New Year’s Eve party and life quickly got back to normal on beaches and at poolside – an image that seems impossible in the imagination of Western viewers who spent that whole week viewing news videos of the devastation that took place in other areas around the Indian Sea.
According to Rod, however, the push was on to accommodate tourists and keep them in the area, so he and Anna were happy to oblige.
After leaving Penang, the Canyon Lake couple headed into the Cameroon Highlands of Malaysia, where they stayed at the gambling resort of “Genting.” At an elevation of 4,500 ft., the weather was cool enough for them to wear jackets, while clouds from the monsoon season billowed into the open doors of the resort. They returned home on January 11.
Asked if he would recommend South Asia as a tourist destination, Rod, a native of New Zealand, says he highly recommends it for its beauty and the fact that English is the primary language, though he notes he and Anna never met another American during their entire trip.
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