So we asked around the airport. “Are planes still flying to Thailand?” I asked a gentleman at the check-in counter.
“Yes, why wouldn’t they be?” he questioned.
We checked in and went to our gate. We asked the attendants there, “Will our flight be delayed because of the storm?”
“What storm?” was their answer.
So we boarded the plane to Thailand. Nothing was going to thwart my ironclad vacation plans. A pesky storm wasn’t going to get in the way of my outline execution, I assured myself. But Mother Nature had much bigger plans than I: The day we left was December 26th, 2004, and the tsunami had just hit.
Luckily, we flew into Bangkok first. I had booked the best hotel money could buy, but as soon as we got into our room we turned on the news. Devastation had struck; hundreds of thousands were dead, and many were nowhere to be found. Families were ripped apart, villages and towns were destroyed and the only thing that was certain was chaos. For the next two days, we stayed at that hotel, had side-by-side massages and drank lemon grass tea by the pool. I didn’t want to watch the news anymore. It was too sad. But because our plans depended on it, on day three, I turned on the T.V. Phuket and Phi Phi were hit the worst—out the window my plans went.
We were able to keep our flight to Koh Samui, the only island that was unaffected, but we arrived at our hotel just as our rooms were being given away to victims of the tsunami. I wasn’t going to argue with someone who just lost everything, so we started knocking on doors. “Sorry, we’re booked,” I remember hearing over and over. We were able to book one night at a time at some places. Others had room for us two or three nights at a time. We were only planning on staying in Koh Samui for one week, then we were going to take a small plane to Phuket. But I was able to get to a computer and see the damage to the hotel. Well, I wouldn’t say it was damaged, it was gone.
