Even on a drizzly day, motoring around the southwest corner of Thailand's Phi Phi Island and into Ton Sai Bay on the ferry from Phuket is breathtaking. Ton Sai is one of two back-to-back bays whose inward arcs almost carve the island into two pieces, but for a sandy thread of land about 400m wide between the two bays that holds it together. The mirror curves of the two bays are fenced by tall limestone cliffs that throw quiet but ragged profiles against the sky, blocking out the rest of the world.
At about 10:30am on a weekday late last month, passengers stepping off the ferry from Phuket found themselves surrounded by about a dozen friendly people touting snorkeling tours, diving excursions and bungalows on the beach. Laid-back porters set off up the pier pulling two-wheeled metal carts full of luggage -- there are no cars on the island. In the village, built on that sandy strip of land between the bays, groups of tourists gather around boxes of dive gear, getting ready to head out for a day of leisure. It is heartbreaking to imagine that almost one year ago -- at almost exactly the same time of day and when similar scenes surely must have been taking place -- the first wave from last year's tsunami was about to hit the island.
On that morning, divemaster Caroline Lecky was working at the Visa Diving Center, near the pier on the edge of Ton Sai Bay, when the water in the bay began to slowly rise, like a bathtub filling with water, seeping into the shop. She and her colleagues were amused at first -- they didn't know what was going on. But moments later a bigger wave hit the island, slamming in from the other bay, crashing through the village's shops, restaurants and hotels. Lecky would end up floating out in Ton Sai Bay, 30m offshore, but alive.
Almost 10,000km away, her colleague Sian Jones, of Newport, Wales, had just arrived back in the UK the night before to spend the holiday with her family. Over the next few days she would only know that most of her friends in the dive shop had survived by seeing them on the television news.
The first wave of the tsunami hit Phi Phi at 10:37am. Between 7,000 and 10,000 people are thought to have been on the island that day: tourists, business owners, workers, their families. Young and old. Foreign and Thai. In the minutes that the waves smashed through the village clustered on the strip of land between the two bays -- traveling at a speed somewhere between 50kph and 200kph at heights of 2m to 5.5m -- at least 850 people were killed. Thirteen-hundred are still missing.
In the days that followed after the thousands of survivors were evacuated, the island was declared uninhabitable. But for those who had called Phi Phi home, as they began to try to pick up the pieces there was a choice: start again elsewhere, or stay.
INITIAL SHOCK
In an interview late last month at the Carpe Diem cafe, on the edge of a peaceful and immaculate Ton Sai Bay, Jones and Lecky blend in with the young, tanned and seemingly carefree tourists that lope through the lanes of the village. But they are two of a loose network of people who have been instrumental in helping to bring the island back to life.
"The people who lived here couldn't leave it," Jones said.
The feeling was, "Of course we come back. Of course we help," she said.
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