Disaters aren't so natural....

Figures and statistics don't really reflect the reality of a natural disaster. The lastest update from Thanh Nien News tells us here how badly the southern regions were affected, including Can Tho and Vung Tao. They say that at least 50 people were killed. The sheer destructive forces that mother nature unleashes, the raw power that wind and water can wield, and the complete vunerability of human beings is truely frightning when experienced up close and personal. Everything you thought was concrete and safe in your life can be washed away and destroyed as if they were made of straw - I'm talking about possessions, property and people. I didn't read anything in the article about Con Dao, which spooks me out a bit because if you look at the picture from this BBC article

and the compare it with this map:

Doesn't look too good hey?

I wasn't caught up in this storm, but I did witness the power of the 2004 South East Asian Tsunami first hand. I was on the island of Koh Lanta in the Andaman Sea. See one part of my story here.

I got off the island on December 27th after a night roughing it in a bar/nightclub. Luckily I managed to hitch a ride in a truck with an Australian guy who had contacts on the island, other independent travellers were paying through the nose to get off as locals with avaliable transport made a mint from the panic. Once we were in Krabi we housed up in a hotel. We took a walk in the evening along the river only to come upon the pier, where there were thousands of Thais gathered. It was here that the rescue boats were coming in with the bodies, and anxious relatives were waiting for news. The air was filled with the wailing of ambulence sirens throughout the night as the dead were ferried from the pier to the makeshift morgue at the Krabi mosque. On our way inland the tour group my parents were travelling with dropped in at a refugee camp that had sprung up, a sorry site, some desperate people. Seeing as I had days to spare after my parents flew home, I asked about information on helping somehow. The feedback I got from local police officers was this : they need help in Khao Lak to clean up the corpses being washed up on the beach. The morning after the Tsunami, there were 400. That is a job my mind was not, and could never be, prepared for. A few days later, at the start of January 2005, I flew to Vietnam.