Against the Odds: Surviving the World’s Worst Tsunami and Overcoming Trauma

Against the Odds

Surviving the world’s worst tsunami

and overcoming trauma

John Maddocks

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Copyright 2018 © John Maddocks

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Disclaimer

The events and people depicted in this book are real. Some names have been changed for privacy reasons.

For Celeste and Nick

In memory of Steve Rickards

‘Among natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being completely unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be there when it happens.’

Kathryn Schulz, ‘The Really Big One’, The New Yorker, July 20, 2015

‘And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?

And what did you hear, my darling young one?

Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world …’

Bob Dylan

‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’

‘It is important to realise that the day John awoke from a lazy holiday doze to the roar of water which was about to smash him around his beachside cabana in Sri Lanka, the event had the potential to shatter everything he believed in from that day onwards. How he survived is an incredible and astounding personal account of the tsunami devastation that occurred on December 26, 2004.

The rebalancing of his questioned beliefs was a test of his remarkable personal resolve.’

Daren Wilson, Psychologist

Preface

Travel is my life. I’ve been travelling since my late teens, captivated by the excitement of experiencing new places and different cultures. Now I make my living as a travel writer and photographer, capturing my journeys in words and images. The highs experienced when travelling to places like the Arctic and Antarctic, remote Greek Islands, the Himalayas and outback Australia are up there with the best the planet has to offer. And there is always another new and challenging adventure around the corner.

There are risks, of course, but my travel life has been charmed. I have never had any trouble when hitchhiking on three continents, staying in very cheap accommodation or occasionally finding myself in the wrong part of town. The risks involved in this type of travel are calculated ones, and the good times far outweigh any annoyances.

But sometimes travel can go horribly wrong. On Boxing Day 2004 my good luck ran out. While relaxing at an idyllic tropical beach in southern Sri Lanka, my wife and I were smashed by the Indian Ocean tsunami. It was sudden, totally unforeseen and brutal. There hadn’t been a tsunami in the area where we were staying for over 2000 years. Thousands died around us and villages, hotels, fishing boats and small businesses were destroyed.

A catastrophe the size of the Boxing Day tsunami hit the Indian Ocean coastlines like an apocalyptic explosion. The day the wave hurtled across the ocean at the speed of a jet plane, it flooded the world’s consciousness and lodged the word ‘tsunami’ permanently in the international vocabulary.

I returned home after living through the worst natural disaster of modern times, overwhelmed by shock and subject to volatile emotions. Images of death and destruction haunted me. When the 10-metre-high wall of water smashed my beachside cabana, everything about my life to that point was completely challenged. By some miracle I had lived, but my belief in what I had thought were everyday certainties was shattered. As I staggered out of that damaged building and into the landscape of nuclear-level destruction around me, I didn’t realise that I was taking the first steps on a journey beyond immediate survival and towards the shadowy realm of post-traumatic stress.

Because I’m a writer, I desperately needed to record what we’d been through as soon as I returned home, despite the level of trauma I was experiencing. The resulting brief account of the tsunami impact has been published numerous times both nationally and internationally. But friends and colleagues who knew the full story found it compelling and urged me to write a complete account that included my struggle to avoid PTSD.

An editor asked me why the book took so long to write. The answer is that facing down severe traumatic stress is a long-term process. It can take years of therapy with no guarantees that it will work. Every realisation I had along the way needed to be absorbed thoroughly before taking the next step. And writing about survival and dealing with traumatic stress was often incredibly challenging. I was reliving and describing powerful, chaotic emotions related to direct life threat. There were times when stark memories and feelings became so overwhelming that I had to take a break and stop writing for days, sometimes weeks. But I was determined to keep going and each time I returned to the writing, I felt stronger and more resilient.

In the end, every aspect of my tsunami experience and recovery, including the writing, became part of a psychological and spiritual adventure that has transformed my life. That adventure has produced the immense satisfaction of taking on serious challenges and overcoming them. I could have died, but I survived against the odds, and now I find that living on borrowed time is truly liberating and exciting.

Part 1:

Smashed

Chapter 1:

Leap of Faith

A hand grenade explodes, ripping through seats close to the stage where Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan is performing. A hotel employee and a press photographer are killed instantly and eighteen other spectators are injured, six critically.

This happens in Colombo the day before my wife Cheryl and I are due to arrive. Shahrukh Khan, who is performing in a show called Temptation 2004, doesn’t realise what is happening until the lights are turned off and he is quickly ushered off the stage.

There had been demonstrations outside the show because the concert coincided with the anniversary of the death of a respected Buddhist monk. Police used tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets to disperse the demonstrators. No one claimed responsibility for the grenade attack, but the Sri Lankan government said it was undertaken by ‘elements opposed to a peaceful negotiated settlement of the ethnic problem’, while the Indian government condemned it as a ‘terrorist incident’.

I read the newspaper report as I sit with Cheryl in the expansive lobby of the Amari Watergate Hotel, Bangkok. It is December 14, 2004. We have several hours to kill before our evening flight to Sri Lanka. We look at each other. I have been planning this trip for two years, closely monitoring the fragile truce between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government.

The Tamil Tigers, which is the shortened name for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), were guerrilla fighters attempting to establish a separate state called Eelam in the north and east of Sri Lanka. Established in 1976, they began fighting the Sri Lankan army in earnest in 1983. Despite a 2002 ceasefire between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government, sporadic outbreaks of fighting continued.

We cancelled a trip at the end of 2003 because of renewed fighting, not simply because of the possibility of danger to ourselves, but because it is impossible to sell travel stories about war zones.

Now we must decide whether this grenade attack signals the beginning of new guerrilla activity in the Sri Lankan capital or whether it is an isolated incident.

What do you think? I ask Cheryl.

We don’t have to go to Sri Lanka if the fighting is starting up again, she replies. But it’s really up to you. You’re the one who has stories lined up with newspapers and magazines.

We could stay in Thailand and go to Chiang Mai, I suggest. There are always stories to be found in that region and we definitely need a break as well.

We have been in Bangkok less than a day, having arrived from Spain late on the previous night. The trip to Spain with other travel journalists had been exhausting, we are still jetlagged and we will need several days to recover at our next destination. Thailand is among our favourite countries and we have been to the ancient city of Chiang Mai in the north before and liked it.

On the other hand, the grenade attack sounds more like a one-off incident than a resumption of major hostilities, I point out. And we will be in Colombo for only three nights, including tonight. After that we go straight down the south-west coast to Tangalle, and there’s never been any fighting in that area.

We now have one hour before we must check in at the airport. We deliberate for another few minutes, and I emphasise that I don’t care if we cancel the Sri Lanka trip if Cheryl is uneasy. But she knows the trip is important to me, as I have at least four stories lined up with editors keen to print articles about resurgent tourism to an exotic country opening up after twenty years of war.

We have no way of knowing that this is a fateful decision. While we rationally assess the possibilities of renewed war and terrorism in Sri Lanka, we are unaware that a far greater danger awaits us, a danger that we cannot imagine, let alone prepare for.

I’m sure we’ll be okay to go to Sri Lanka, I tell Cheryl, and she agrees. After all, there is danger in many of the countries where we travel. On December 3, the day before we arrived in Spain, the Basque separatist movement ETA bombed five petrol stations in Madrid. On December 6 ETA detonated another seven bombs in bars, cafes and town squares across Spain. One of the journalists we were travelling with joked that it is sometimes difficult to know whether we are travel writers or war correspondents, but we continued our journey unfazed.

In the taxi on the way to Bangkok airport Cheryl and I reassure ourselves that we have made the right decision. We recall that even relatively peaceful Thailand has had its problems over the years. Our taxi passes near the spot where legendary Australian war photographer Neil Davis was killed in September 1985 by machine-gun fire while he was covering a brief coup attempt. Davis was most famous for the photo he took of a North Vietnamese tank crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, a photo that came to symbolise the end of the Vietnam War. I often think about the quote Davis wrote in the front of every diary he kept for over twenty years: ‘One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name’.

Cheryl and I also talk about the time we arrived in Bangkok in the middle of a coup in 1992, when hundreds of thousands of Thais took to the streets to protest against an undemocratic government. At that time, more than fifty demonstrators were killed by the army.

We have both been in numerous dangerous situations, individually and together, during our travels to over fifty countries. When she was younger Cheryl once found herself penniless in Tehran through no fault of her own. In the absence of New Zealand representation in Iran, she went to the British Embassy and told the officials there that she had money waiting for her in Kabul, and asked for a loan to cover the cost of her bus fare to Afghanistan. The officials refused, but told her to give them her full name, home address, next of kin details and passport number so they could notify her family if she died before reaching the Afghan capital. Cheryl was forced to hitch from Tehran to Kabul with a friend, experiencing a number of close calls on the way.

I have also had my share of adventures and narrow escapes while travelling the world with a great deal of enthusiasm but little money. And when travelling together we have slept on the decks of tramp steamers through South-East Asia, flown on the world’s dodgiest airlines, stayed in the cheapest hotels and lived with the locals in some of the poorest countries. Along the way I was able to turn my passion for seeing the world into a profession as a travel writer and photographer. Now I was about to push the boundaries of my fortunate travel life to the extreme, experiencing an event that was as cataclysmic as it was unexpected.

Around midnight we arrive at Colombo International Airport after a smooth flight on Sri Lankan Airlines. After clearing customs and changing money, we find our driver from the Taj Samudra Hotel, where I have arranged to stay through contacts with the Taj Hotel Group in Australia.

As we drive out of the airport precinct, we notice a large military security presence that includes tanks and armoured vehicles. Soldiers sit behind machine guns in sandbagged emplacements, while others cradle automatic weapons as they patrol razor wire fences on the airport’s border.

All because of the Tamil Tigers three years ago, our driver tells us. They blew up so many planes here you know, but the army killed them all.

The driver is referring to the attack on July 24, 2001 by a fourteen-man suicide squad on the international airport and nearby air force base. Using rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank weapons and assault rifles, the Tamil Tigers destroyed eight military aircraft at the air force base and two Airbuses at the civilian airport. They also severely damaged three other Airbuses, meaning that five of the twelve planes in the Sri Lankan Airlines fleet were out of action.

This attack had a devastating effect on tourism and the economy overall. But seven months later in February 2002 a ceasefire brokered by Norway was signed between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers. Since then tourism has increased dramatically and, by the time we arrive, Sri Lanka is one of the world’s new hot destinations.

The huge army security presence at the airport does little to allay my misgivings over the grenade attack at the concert. The bitterness of twenty years of ferocious civil war that killed over sixty thousand people, and its lingering distrust, will not be dissipated quickly. Random breaches of the ceasefire still occur, and negotiations for a lasting settlement are bogged down.

The longer the peace holds, the greater the number of tourists that are lured to this place early Arab traders called ‘Serendib’, or ‘Gem Island’. Because of Sri Lanka’s Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial past, Europeans find the country welcoming and arrive in considerable numbers on cheap charter flights. Some Australians are finding Sri Lanka to be as cheap and friendly as Bali was twenty years ago, and are seeking out a new sun and sand island after the Bali bombings in October 2002.

The streets of Colombo are almost deserted as we drive to the hotel in an old Ambassador car. Although in travelling from Bangkok to Colombo we have gone from one Buddhist capital to another, the differences are huge. Bangkok seems like a highly developed, glitzy First World city compared with the run-down streets of Colombo. The headlights of our car capture a scrawny dog as it scavenges in the gutters, and some people stand nearby around a fire burning in a 44-gallon drum. The architecture I can glimpse in the darkened city seems drab, and everywhere there are signs of unrelieved poverty. It is not a good start to our trip, and the advice of colleagues to limit our time in Colombo to a couple of days comes flooding back.

My spirits lift, however, when we pull into the sumptuous entrance of the Taj Samudra Hotel. The huge lobby, with its exquisite marble floors and Raj décor, is stylish and impressive. Large, elegant pot plants stand beside tall columns and tropical flowers flow over the edges of attractive containers. The graceful ambience of the place and the friendly check-in staff make me feel relaxed.

In less than a fortnight we will be standing in the same spot, pleading for a room. The lobby will be so crowded that people are sitting all over the floor, and many will be staring at our dirty, torn clothes in amazement. Instead of relishing the calm tone of a bygone era the hotel strives to create, I will feel like a beggar, desperately seeking to be heard among a multitude of people with their own urgent needs.

Chapter 2:

A Fragile Truce

Twenty years of war on an island the size of Tasmania have left Sri Lanka with deep physical and psychological scars. In 2004, after two years of tentative peace, there is still a large reservoir of distrust and a pervasive sense of corruption. Despite being outwardly positive about the cessation of major hostilities and an improving economy, many Sri Lankans expect the war to resume in the near future.

I strike up a conversation with a friendly Sri Lankan businessman at breakfast in the hotel on our first day in Colombo. The headlines in the local English language newspaper are reporting some breaches of the ceasefire between the Tamil Tigers and the government forces. I ask the businessman whether the war will start up again.

Oh yes, of course, he tells me. I am a Buddhist and I support this government, but I am certain that the war will resume soon. And do you know why?

No, I don’t, I reply. I thought everyone in Sri Lanka was tired of the fighting.

Well, the truth is that the war will resume because the government and the senior monks make so much money out of it.

The senior monks? I ask, surprised.

Yes, my dear friend, he says, leaning towards me confidentially. They make a lot of money from it. Government is a business, religion is a business and war is the biggest business. Everyone makes a good profit!

Later in the morning we decide to walk out of the hotel and along Galle Road, Colombo’s main thoroughfare that runs parallel to the Indian Ocean. The staff members outside the entrance immediately assume that we want a taxi, and are surprised when we say we will walk.

Once outside the Taj Samudra’s 5 hectares of landscaped gardens we cross the road to Galle Face Green, a pleasant grassed area that has a promenade beside the ocean. People fly kites here and lovers meet in the evening to watch the sunset.

Apart from the charming Galle Face Green, there is little of interest as we walk down busy Galle Road. The buildings are generally modern and bland, the traffic noisy and the diesel fumes oppressive. As I walk past the British High Commission I have no idea of the part that it will play in my life several weeks from now, when I desperately try to seek help for my British friends trapped at Tangalle in the country’s south.

Further along the road we pass ‘Temple Trees’, the official residence of the Prime Minister. The peaceful name belies the machine-gun turrets surrounding the perimeter and the barbed wire entanglements spilling onto the road to prevent pedestrian access. Before we reach the entrance, a soldier brandishing an automatic weapon tells us brusquely