KHAO LAK (Thailand): Most hotels in Thailand’s tsunami-shattered Khao Lak beach resort are closed, the sea is filled with junk, but young Thais are being trained in tourism trades for when better times return. The biggest source of tourism in Khao Lak, where more than 3,000 people died in the Dec. 26 tsunami — most of them foreigners — are the thousands of volunteers from around the world who have come to help rebuild the community.
Aid donors say the biggest priority, now that the relief phase is winding down after a disaster which killed more than 232,000 people in a dozen nations around the Indian Ocean, is to revitalize businesses and create jobs.
At the Ecotourism Training Centre, Reid Ridgeway, from San Francisco, and Pascal Hernikot, from Switzerland, are teaching 18 Thais whose families lost jobs and homes in the tsunami to become dive masters with computer and English-language skills.
“You can give people back a house or a boat, but if you can’t give them a livelihood, you haven’t completed the economic cycle,” Ridgeway said outside his classroom in a row of shophouses occupied mostly by micro-aid groups.
In Khao Lak, the tsunami killed a disproportionate number of English-speaking hotel workers. The Ecotourism training centre and outfits like it are seeking to fill the need for skilled workers when the foreigners eventually do come back.
Ecotourism students will be able to practise diving skills when volunteers begin cleaning up tsunami debris from the seabed just offshore next month.
“You’ve got big chunks of buildings, twisted metal, the occasional car, washing machines, TV sets, beach chairs that were washed into the sea,” Ridgeway said. “It’s not impossible to find bodies.”
Few people swim much in the waters off Khao Lak any more.
But the seas off southwestern Thailand are rated among the world’s best diving spots, and Khao Lak’s strip of luxury hotels set amid hilly tropical forests and powdery beaches attracted mostly northern European tourists.
The hotels are being rebuilt and, driving down Khao Lak’s main road, there is little evidence of one of history’s worst natural catastrophes. Among the few telltale signs — fishing boats thrust hundreds of metres inland.
Thousands of permanent homes have been built with private aid money to house the displaced. Unlike in other tsunami-hit nations, few are living in temporary camps any more.
Khao Lak is open for business again, says Anupong Sa-Ngunnam, who represents tourist-related industries in the resort.
By November, he expects 16 hotels with 1,200 rooms to be open, with another 3,000 rooms ready next year. Before the tsunami, Khao Lak had 6,000 hotel rooms.
Just down the road from the Ecotourism centre, the Christian-based ‘Step Ahead’ aid group is giving Thais hospitality training to work in the new hotels.
Four Italian volunteers have just finished an Italian cuisine class. In October, German teachers will run a class in conversational German, said John Quinley, Step Ahead’s executive director for micro-enterprise development.
“We’re looking for the capacity to serve the hotels as they open and, at the same time, those hotels will always need help with training,” Quinley said.
But can the hotels fill their rooms?
Tourist arrivals in Phang Nga province, where Khao Lak is located, in the first six months of this year are down 77 per cent from a year earlier, the Tourism Authority of Thailand says.
On Phuket, one of Asia’s premier resort islands an hour’s drive from Khao Lak, arrivals were down 62 per cent in the first six months.
“We’ve been the tourists the past nine months,” said Wes Fisher, spokesman for Khao Lak’s Tsunami Volunteer Centre, a Thai-led relief organization that opened shortly after Dec. 26.
Since then more than 3,000 volunteers have come through, from as far afield as Nanjing, China and Nantucket, Massachusetts.
Mostly of college age, they usually stay two weeks, building homes and boats, cleaning up the beaches and reefs, making furniture, teaching English and caring for children, Fisher said.
Tourism officials believe visitors may be reluctant to take a holiday at a place where so many people so recently died.
So the Tourism Authority has decided to deploy a statue of ‘Godmother Ruby’, a Taoist goddess of the sea, in an effort to soothe the spirits of tsunami victims.
In October the goddess will be displayed at many of the places struck by the tsunami and then take her place in a shrine on Phuket facing the sea.
Ridgeway at the ecotourism centre said Khao Lak would eventually turn its tsunami notoriety into an attraction.
“The area is famous now. There’s more Americans coming with the volunteers. It won’t be just Germans and Scandinavians like before,” Ridgeway said.
“It’s still going to be a major spot for diving but people will also come to see where one of nature’s wildest and most furious disasters happened. That could help repair lives and rebuild the economy.”—Reuters
