Sri Lanka — 20 years on from the devastating Boxing Day tsunami

While scars from the natural disaster still linger, this beautiful, resilient country has become a thriving tourist destination once again. Chris Haslam reports
(Below is an extract taken from the TIMES Link below)

……………….The difference between those and the Indian Ocean tsunami is that rather than being powered by wind energy, it was driven by the seismic equivalent of 23,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. As the Ratnam family went to their churches, the first of the two most deadly waves was just beyond the horizon.
I leave Kalkudah and drive slowly south through some of the most serenely beautiful countryside on earth. Kingfishers sit together on the telephone wires. Elephants graze in jungle clearings and women dressed as brightly as the birdlife work in paddy fields. In Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka’s prettiest seaside town, dogs are dozing in the shade of the fishing boats hauled out on the white sand.

Offshore, novice surfers play in the gentle swells, and 39-year-old Sulfi Faizar, who runs a recycling company, is collecting plastic waste from the beach. Twenty years ago he was working in a hotel and his first inkling of disaster was when the policeman guarding the property told him to run for his life. Faizar thought the Tamil Tigers were in the street — the civil war was going on — so he fled to the beach.

“There was no sea,” he says. “Just dying fish and black rocks. Then, this giant wave, maybe 12 metres high. I thought this must be the end of the world, but then I remembered that the Quran says the end times will come on a Friday, not a Sunday. So I ran.”
Faizar cannot remember how long and how far he ran, but when he stopped he realised he was carrying a baby, taken, he later learnt, from a mother fleeing with twins. They all survived, but at least 200 people in Arugam Bay didn’t. The wave destroyed 500 houses and the bridge to Pottuvil, cutting the town off. “There was a place here called the Tsunami Hotel,” he says, “but until that day none of us knew what a tsunami was.”
https://extras.thetimes.co.uk/web/2024/times-travel/Tsunami%20-%2020%20years/Aftermath.mp4

Sharon Tissera owns the Hideaway Resort in Arugam Bay. The laid-back property, now a surf and yoga-focused hotel, has been here since 1979, and although it was only lightly damaged by the tsunami, everyone who worked here was in some way affected. “People were absolutely broken,” Tissera says. “We didn’t have the right therapy for them, or any real appreciation of mental health. The other day I saw this guy talking to the ocean, asking why it had taken five of his family away.”