My friend Jes had lived in Khao Lak before moving to Phuket. She has many good friends there. We heard Khao Lak got hit hard, so we went to deliver some supplies, see if we could help, and bring Jes to see her friends as phone lines were down and she had no idea who was still alive. 

Khao Lak is a small town made popular by divers and travelers seeking to get away from the congestion of Phuket, it is a one hour drive north from Phuket Island along the West coast of mainland Thailand, the entire province is known as Phang Nga. Martin, Vita, Jes and I (and the two dogs) made the journey up.
 
I look back at all the times I used terms like devastation, total destruction, carnage... how loosely I threw those terms around... Nothing could prepare us for what we encountered in Khao Lak, it was worse than our collective minds imagined. We likened it to what Hiroshima or Nagasaki must have looked like. 

Most of these pictures were taken off the main road, which sits back anywhere from 1 to 2 km from the sea. You can't even see the sea it's so far away. Yet, muddy water lines show the high mark to be at about 12 feet... 2km inland! A police boat sits inland over 2km illustrating this point. I don't know why this area got hit so hard, it must have something to do with the landscape of the sea bottom.

We saw many dead bodies, most beyond recognition or identification. They were bagging them because most were too bloated to fit in the wood caskets. We tried to find out what or how the identification process worked, but it wasn't clear. My other friend Chaya had worked a couple days at a rescue center and was in charge of photographing corpses, she said they were collecting photographs along with dna & hair samples, personal artifacts and finger prints... but as time goes on, I *think* they are giving up on this process. 

We asked the driver of a truck full of bodies where they were going, he said to the temple to burn them... I inquired about the identification process before burning them, he either didn't want to answer or couldn't speak English well enough to understand my questioning, I asked several of the other guys, got Jes to translate, I couldn't get a clear answer. Jes said they were just going straight to burning the bodies without ID.  I couldn't bring myself to believe this. 

After viewing the "wall of the missing", you get a feel for how important it is to have closure, just to know with 100% certainty the situation of a loved one. Even if dead, at least you won't wonder for years to come if just maybe they got washed up on some deserted island or are still in the mountains with a broken leg, but alive. You can put all questions to rest and move on. I struggled with this, what could I do, should I go police them and make sure the identification process is still taking place, and being done so correctly, do I have a role in this? a responsibility? Do I make it my responsibility? 

Thousands got washed out to sea and will never be found, does it really matter if the few more that are being found are identified? If you collect dna, how do you match it? against what? how is that all done? Dental records? how would we do that? These questions continued to grow and became very difficult for me, but I kept concluding that there must be some high level people who are on top of this and getting these things done... Maybe they are sitting in remote air conditioned underground bunkers smoking cigars and managing whole teams of lab technicians plugging away on the database. 

We visited Jes's friends house, what can one say. These were Jes's neighbors and friends. But we were relieved that we did manage to find some of her other friends alive and their houses still standing, luckily on slight hillsides. One girl was at the beach and got swept 1.5 km inland... and survived. This was the only way for Jes to communicate with these people, face to face, they have no mobile phones, so we were all pleased that some good fortune came from such otherwise hopeless despair.
 
We found the people very open to being photographed, especially the rescue/recovery workers. We were very taken back by this at first, here we are photographing some guys tossing full body bags in the back of a truck, and they pause to smile and give peace signs like a bunch of Japanese school girls doing Puri Kura, ("Print Club", Japanese photo booths). I'm thinking... "no no no... don't smile, pretend like you are working hard, pretend you are upset..." of course, immediately realizing the ridiculous shallowness of my thoughts. 

It was another example of Thai culture. Any American doing such work realizing a camera was on them would act out the scene, I mean, who would want to be captured bright eyed and cheery amongst bags of corpses? CNN certainly wouldn't show images of rescue workers flashing P-Diddy style gangsta poses, that would cut down on donations.  Thai's don't take life as a right, but as a gift, and they celebrate it. It doesn't show disrespect to the unfortunate, it shows a genuine sense of respect for humanity and a happiness we should all have for still being alive. I made it a point to try and not censor my photos or put a slant on them in any way.
 
From my friend Paul Normand --> "I came across an article that some Indian scientists had predicted this earthquake to the exact day because Jupiter, Venus, Earth, Moon, and the Sun were all in a straight line on the 26^th. Their theory is that it exerts a lot of pull on the earth when this happens. The ancient Mayans, Egyptians, Chinese and Indians all used to get very concerned on planetary alignments because something catastrophic happened. Maybe they knew something we are just beginning to realize.