Thailand's Tsunami Tourists Pose With Disaster

[Darknight]

Thailand's Tsunami Tourists Pose with Disaster

Reuters

(Not for sensitive readers)

By Mark Bendeich

BAN NAMKHEM, Thailand (Reuters) - After a day hauling bodies out of rubble in Thailand, Naulchawee Ketsawad squats beside the rotting corpse of a baby girl and has her photograph taken. Unthinking, she smiles for the camera.

The sheer scale of the destruction and death along Thailand's southwest beaches revealed a darker side of human nature Sunday, with thousands of onlookers and volunteer workers like 29-year-old Naulchawee posing for a photo with history.

"I took it to keep in my memory forever," she said.

Last week's tsunami, the world's worst natural disaster in decades, has stunned those who have witnessed its aftermath, but it has also got them reaching for their cameras and binoculars.

People come from hundreds of miles around to gawk at it.

"I am a tourist," said 18-year-old Jiradaj Jilajin after posing in a black T-shirt, beach shorts and flip-flops with his family in front of the Sofitel Magic Lagoon Resort and Spa, a luxury hotel that was gutted by the wave.

"It is an amazing tsunami," said Jiradaj who drove for four hours with his family to see the carnage at Khao Lak, once a tourist mecca, that felt the full force of the tsunami. Nearby, Greek rescue teams were still looking for bodies.

A searcher said he had been told by others that about 200 of the Sofitel's guests died in the maelstrom of the morning after Christmas Day. It is not difficult to believe: there is a car in the swimming pool. Christmas tinsel hangs from the wreckage.

BEREAVED AND AWED

Further north, the road into the fishing village of Ban Namkhem, where Naulchawee is looking for bodies, is choked with onlookers, edging forward in their cars for a closer look. Most have parked and are walking, cameras slung over their shoulders.

Naulchawee, from northern Thailand, and her fellow workers are taking each other's photo with cameras and mobile phones in the shade of a tamarind tree, where they have laid out the bodies of six children. The tourists file past and into the village.

There, they find a lake where people once lived.

The water is surrounded by fields of mud and detritus of village life: shampoo bottles, plastic kitchen bowls and broken furniture. Beneath it all, hundreds of bodies are thought to be entombed. A big commercial fishing boat crowns the disaster, having been pushed deep inland, its bow stuck in a house.

Turenjai Doolgindachbaporn, 42, left Ban Namkhem about 10 years ago for work and now teaches environmental studies at Khon Kaon University in northeast Thailand.

On her way back from the village, she stopped at a roadside vantage to take photos of the Khao Lak coastline.

"I saw less than 10 people that I knew before. All have them have lost their families," she said.

"I didn't see any friends from my secondary school or my primary school," she said. "I found nobody."