This continues from the post
An Experience Of Living Through A Tsunami
Around 11:30 we took the tour car that we had booked for the day before (but unsuprisingly the hire car company had failed to pickup at 10:00) out for a journey to high ground. We stopped at a view point some 5km or so from Kata but could see nothing out of the ordinary. We tried to get to the very south of Pucket, where there is a headland but the road had been closed due to a power line going down so we back tracked.
Somehow we ended up driving by the side of an obviously man made lagoon which was fine until my wife pointed out plastic chairs floating in it and then we drove along a road with fallen trees covering the seaward side of the road. The penny didn't fully drop until I pulled in at the side of the road after we saw the sea just 100m from the road.
I have never seen such devastation in what must have been just a 300m stretch of beach. There were wooden sun beds stuck 10' up in trees. The wooden beach restaurants were destroyed. We wandered around for about 30 minutes taking photos in a bewildered sense. Only after overhearing a couple of motorcycle drivers say that there were rumours of aftershocks and that they weren't hanging around did we decide to move on. This is how bizarre it was. We were standing on a beach that 2 hours earlier had been 10' underwater by the look of it and yet the danger of the situation nor the true impact of what had happened had filtered home to us. It probably sounds ridiculous to you reading this but that was the way it was.
At this point I think I started to begin to understand about what had really happened. We headed back to higher ground and parked the jeep at the hotel. We then managed to tune the hotel room TV into CNN and started to see the pictures coming through. Again the full impact had not been driven home.
We decided to walk to Karen Beach, the next beach north from Kara Beach. This, I think, was when the impact of what had happened really started to hit home. Kata Beach was like a war zone. The beach was strewn with debris. There was debris all over the main road. However, the damage was only along a 200m strip, although the damage in this strip was substantial.
There was a restaurant at the end of a road between the main road and the beach where we had eaten at the first night here that was basically destroyed. I mean completely destroyed.
The walk to Karen Beach was awful. We passed stretches that were completely unaffected and others that were badly affected. It took about an hour to walk to Karen Beach and we ended up at Su's bar drinking beer and watching the BBC world news. There was a surreal calm at the bar. Here was where we saw that Sri Lanka, where we live, appeared to have bore the brunt of the tsunami.
We walked back to Kata Beach, still in a state of shock and this is where is gets weird. The hotel was functioning just like normal. They were getting things ready for an Elvis night. We ordered a sea food platter for 2 for tea. We then wandered across to an internet cafe across the road from the hotel and emailed a few of our friends who we knew the email addresses for. And then we went to bed.
Edit: Link to Part 1, Link to Part 3