Swept Away

(Washington Post Sunday Opinion)

The sand at Koh Phi Phi Island Village Resort was as white as ever, maybe even whiter than I remember from my previous visit to this almost four years ago. The tsunami that swept over vast tracts of Thailand and other Asian countries in late December spared this beautiful vacation spot, but sent powerful swells over the beach, washing the sands clean. The nearby lagoons still looked as pristine and blue as they did in Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2000 film. And while resorts on the other side of the island took a direct hit, Koh Phi Phi Island Village still boasted wooden bungalows set in plush gardens, a hilltop spa with a stunning view of the Andaman Sea, fresh coconut juice at the Center Bar and skilled masseuses waiting to please.

Postcard perfection, one would have thought, yet something seemed off. What was wrong with this picture: I wondered And then I realized: There were hardly any tourists.

All over post-tsunami Thailand, even beyond the devastated sites that are gradually being cleaned up, the overwhelming sense is one of absence. Not just the absence of those killed or missing, but also the absence of the visitors who once poured into resorts up and down the coast to enjoy Thailand’s raw beauty while pumping life into the nation’s economy. Unless they return soon — and a recent massive earthquake off the coast of Indonesia has further dampened that prospect — the area could be hit by what many Thais fretfully refer to as "the second wave, an economy downturn from which they might not so quickly recover.

Koh Phi Phi Island Village can easily accommodate a couple of hundred visitors or more, and winter is normally the height of the tourist season. But when I arrived there in February with other journalists to look at the damage from the giant waves, about a dozen holiday-makers had the 70-acre property all to themselves. That was fine with Sara Evans, a Washington-area resident on her first trip to Thailand. She was having the vacation of a lifetime, she told me.

But for the resort’s employees, the shortage of guests was hardly a boon. Half the staff was on leave — perhaps a polite way of saying they were unnecessary — while the other half worried that, unless tourists started showing up, their jobs might be next to go. Workers seemed to have so little to do that most of them — from desk clerks to beach attendants — eagerly took part in a semi-traditional Thai wedding ceremony hastily put together in honor of a visiting Australian couple.

I came across surreal scenes all over the stricken region: small clusters of isolated foreigners basking in five-star luxury alongside magnificent swimming pools or rolling along picture-perfect oceanfronts so weirdly desolate that they seemed like private beaches, or dining in ornate restaurants where the musical performers onstage outnumbered the dinner guests.

Not far away, on the other side of Koh Phi Phi and elsewhere, scenes of devastation were being painstaking cleared. Though the clean up is nearly finished in many areas, the residual gloom from the cataclysm that left 5,395 daed and 2,393 missing has kept visitors away.

In and around the major tourism hub of Phuket, where Thailand’s tsunami did the most damage, it’s been a buyer’s market. With all but 11 of 871 hotels at popular destination points along Thailand’s battered coast fully operational, according to the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT), visitors have their pick of the lot.

Thailand’s Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told International relief agencies shortly after the tsunami that his country didn’t want or need charitable handouts, a statement that skeptics dismissed as political posturing. But the prime minister knew that his country would ultimately be better off moving aggressively to recapture the tourism market rather than relying on donations. After seeing firsthand the problems with relief efforts there and the limitations of simply handing out money to the needy, I came to believe that assessment made sense.

Tourism accounts for 5.2 percent of Thailands gross domestic product, and a sustained downturn could depress the overall economy. The number of jobs lost in southern Thailand as a result of the tsunami now stands at roughy 294,600, according to the tourism authority. This includes jobs both directly related to tourism (hotel, restaurant, resort) and those indirectly related (fishing, sales and real estate).

Many Thais in hard-hit areas such as Koh Phi Phi (literally, island of many ghosts) and Khao Lak saw their jobs washed away. Others simply abandoned them once the horror began to sink and stories about apparitions of those who had died along the country’s Andaman coastline — 1,953 of them foreigners, or falangs — began to circulate. There was the panicky tuk-tuk driver who quit after claiming that a group of falangs negotiated a fare but vanished before the end of their ride; the security guard who abandoned his post outside the ruins of a hotel after being rattled by what he said were the untraceable, terrified cries of a drowning woman; and the popular crab-seller whose business suddenly dried up because locals were convinced that his crustaceans and fish had fed on the dead bodies that had been swept out to sea.

Real-life nightmares are driving others into the ranks of the unemployed, including Ta, one of the receptionists at Koh Phi Phi Village. When I asked her if she knew anyone who had died in the tsunami, she broke into tears and disappeared into a back officer, returning a short time later to apologize. She explained that her best friend and five other friends with whom she had partied the night before all perished when the tidal wave tore through the island. She told me that she had already given notice and intended to start a new job — as well as new life — in the country’s far north, and never return.

But most found themselves out of work because tourists were no longer around in sufficient numbers. Even though 80 percent of tsunami-area hotels ere undamaged, massive numbers of prospective visitors altered plans to vacation in Thailand in the wake of the tsunami. During the first two months of this year, foreign arrivals at Phuket International Airport amounted to only 48,118, compared to 254,077 during the same period last year. Thai travel agents, overwhelmed with cancellations, told me that most tourists had pulled out because of a sense of apprehension and a wish to show respect for the dead.

In response, the Thai government has been trying to get International travelers to return by saying that visiting Thailand is safe, that there were no outbreaks of disease, that bottled water is plentiful, that no dead bodies have bobbed up in view of snorkelers and that not vacationing in Thailand out of respect for the dead is, in fact, disrespectful because it deprives Thais of their jobs. Thousands of people dependent on tourism for a living want the visits to return as soon as possible, Juthamas Siriwan, TAT’s governor, said in a speech to the median tour operators in Stockholm.

Before my trip to Thailand, I thought I could make a difference by simply giving money directly to those who needed it most. At Bang Niang Refugee Camp outside Phuket town, I distributed the proceeds from a fundraising dinner held at my Washington home. But while handing out money to those who had lost relatives to the tsunami may have been personally rewarding, it didn’t get anyone a job. Many of the refugees had worked as fisherman, fish sellers, beach vendors and beach attendants, and the giant wave may have cost them not only family members but their livelihoods. Charitable contributions have enabled only about 10 percent of residents in the affected areas to repair or replace their fishing boats and homes. Putting hem back to work seemed like the best way to avert that second wave.

While the latest tourism figures are sketchy, they seem to be improving in the tsunami-affected areas, according to TAT spokeswoman Soroya Humchuen, who told me in an email that recent numbers had crept up by roughly 10 to 20 percent over January and February, partly because of deeply discounted hotel prices. Koh Phi Phi Island Village, she said, is expecting a temporary surge to around 30 to 40 percent of capacity because of a festival in mid-April. The would represent a dramatic improvement from the time of my visit there, when only 10 or so of the resort’s 104 units were occupied.

Whether this recent upswing is for real or what stock investors refer to as a dead cat bounce won’t become apparent until the beginning of high season next November. But, perhaps because of Thai tourisms previous success in coming back from the Asian economic crisis, bird flu and the SARS virus, the mood on Koh Phi Phi and elsewhere remains resolute. In Phuket, a banner hung along he beachfront proclaimed, even the tsunami cannot beat us."

The Thais are certainly resilient. But the picture of the future is still fuzzy, and only one thing is likely to bring it into focus: the return of the tourists.