ARUGAMBAY (Sri Lanka): Five months after the tsunami hit the country, Sri Lanka is ready not to be caught unawares anymore, with tsunami warning measures safely imposed. Yet for hoteliers, the damage has been irreparable. The best example is in Arugam Bay, east of Sri Lanka. That virtual tourists’ paradise, girdled by the gold of the beach and blue of the eastern sea, is now a heap of rubble and now beaches present a sad souvenir of destruction.

The government’s decree that no hotels should be built within 200 metres from the coast is lost on these people who continue to regard the sea as their only form of sustenance. “They ask us to build our hotels away from the sea. No foreigner or local will come to a hotel placed in the land region,” says A.M.D. Ifam, owner of Rock View, a tsunami-hit inn in the area.

M. S. M. Ismail, another tsunami-hit hotel owner, who lost six of his family members in the tragedy, said he and others were reconstructing their hotels with whatever means possible in the same area.

“Yes, we are rebuilding our businesses in the same location. We have no alternative,” Ismail said while clearing rubble from the area along with other devastated hoteliers.

“It is easy for them (the government) to talk. It is we who have to suffer,” he said angrily referring to precautionary measures taken by the government to prevent construction of new buildings close to the sea.

“It is ridiculous to think that tourists would come to an interior landlocked place for a holiday,” he said. The fears of hoteliers come in the wake of desperate efforts made by government tourist board to identify new locations in land areas that will attract tourists. As he spoke grim faces emerge from the row of destroyed buildings in which they are forced to live, occupying the least torn-down room or hall.