For Many, Holiday Getaways Turned Tragic

Paul Forkan, a 15-year-old British high school student, woke up Sunday to find 2 feet of water surrounding his bed at a beachfront resort in Weligama, Sri Lanka. He started to pile his belongings on the furniture to keep them dry, but soon a second and then a third wave roared in, smashing down hotel doors and sucking people out.

Paul escaped by climbing onto a roof. Eventually, he located his younger sister, but not his father.

“People just floated away,” said the shaken teenager, who was evacuated this morning from the international airport in the capital, Colombo. “We can’t find Dad.”

The warm, white-sand beaches of Sri Lanka, Thailand and other Asian resorts are a magnet for European tourists, eager for respite from their cold, wet, dark winters. Thousands of sun-seeking travelers, in package holiday tours or on more exclusive trips, spend their Christmas and New Year’s holidays in the region annually. This year should have been no different.

But today, instead of cherishing their memories, haggard tourists were dragging themselves home, a wounded parade through airports from London to Milan. Tour operators hustled to evacuate their charges while European governments pledged money for relief operations and set up telephone help lines, which were swiftly deluged by desperate friends and families.

Several hundred foreign tourists are believed to be among the more than 26,000 killed by the deadly waves that washed over the beaches of southern Asia.

Precise death figures are hard to come by because the tsunami waves so brutally rearranged the landscape, sweeping away not only people but entire resort complexes.

Deborah Bateson, a physiotherapist from southern England, said she ignored the warning of a palm reader at her hotel on the southwestern coast of Sri Lanka on Friday night. “He said to me the day before, ‘Stay out of the sea. Big wave.’ I took no notice.” More than 48 hours after the waves struck, many families remain separated. A 2-year-old blond boy was found sitting alone Sunday on a road in the Thai village of Khao Lak in Phang Nga province after the waters receded. Nobody in the area knows the whereabouts of his parents or even his nationality.

“He could be Swedish, because he was enthusiastic when a man spoke Swedish to him,” said Vilad Mumbansao, a staff member at Phuket International Hospital, where the boy, bruised and dazed when he arrived, is now said to be in good condition.

The largest number of tourists killed were in Thailand, where authorities estimated that 20% to 30% of the 1,000 dead were foreigners. In Sri Lanka, 72 foreign tourists have been confirmed dead, but that figure is expected to rise, according to Udaya Nanayakkara, chairman of the Sri Lankan tourist board.

Paul Presler, a 34-year-old stockbroker who had been vacationing in Kosgoda, south of Colombo, said that up to 40 people might have been killed in a single beachfront hotel.

“The children who we were playing with in the swimming pool. The people who we sat with for Christmas dinner. The chef who cooked the dinner. We believe all of them are dead,” said Presler, an American who lives in London. He said the tourists were mostly Dutch, German, British and Italian.

He and his wife, an aid worker, had checked out of their hotel 90 minutes before the first wave hit, to do some touring in the mountains. They returned Monday night, however, with their car loaded with $500 in rice, lentils and drinking water to bring to families of hotel employees left homeless.

“We’ve been so impressed by the kindness of these people in this tragedy that we want to put something back into the country,” Presler said.

As of Monday night, the U.S. State Department reported that eight Americans were among the dead throughout the region. “Several hundred we have been unable to contact, but that doesn’t mean they are injured or missing. It might mean just that the phone is not working,” an official in Washington said.

Officials in London confirmed that 15 Britons were among the dead, out of thousands known to be vacationing in the area. In Rome, authorities said two children were among the 13 Italians known dead -- 11 in Thailand and two in Sri Lanka.

The French counted six dead and 16 missing. Spain counted 12 of its nationals among the wounded, all hospitalized in Thailand, and said it knew of no Spanish dead. Fifteen Dutch were reported missing. Among Asian tourists, three South Koreans and two Japanese were confirmed dead.

Of about 6,400 Germans traveling in the area, at least four were killed, German tour operators said. Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who is on Sri Lanka’s east coast, was “close to danger but now is in safe conditions,” said a spokesman at his Berlin office.

“It is probably going to take days until reliable figures [on casualties] will be available,” German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said at a news conference. “There are still regions that haven’t been reached yet.”

At airports around the world, shocked and dazed tourists were heading home, some with little more than the clothes on their backs. Shin Jeong Suk, a 30-year-old South Korean, got off an airplane from the Thai resort town of Phuket this morning in the subfreezing weather in Seoul wearing nothing but a T-shirt, shorts and hotel sandals, a borrowed airplane blanket wrapped around her for warmth.

“It was like I died and was born again. I can’t believe I am alive,” said Shin, who had been vacationing on Thailand’s Phi Phi Island with her husband. Of the six couples in their group, two had come home; the others stayed behind to look for missing family members.

A large contingent of wealthy Italians was spending the Christmas and New Year’s holidays in the Maldives, but they were evacuated as waters flooded and cut off several of the atolls. “I was watching from the airplane window and only then realized the extent of the tragedy,” professional soccer midfielder Enzo Maresca told the Italian news agency ANSA on his return to Italy.

Swedish Olympic skiing gold medalist Ingemar Stenmark also had a close call. The 48-year-old former slalom star and his girlfriend, Christina Sylvan, were on the Thai beach at Khok Koli and saved their lives by sprinting onto a hill.

British and German tour operators were sending planes to the stricken region to retrieve stranded holidaymakers. The Germans sent psychologists on board the rescue flights to attend to traumatized tourists.

European governments dispatched teams of rescue workers, doctors and aid specialists to Asia, and most pledged money. The European Union offered an immediate $4.1 million.

A plane transporting 100 first aid workers and 5 tons of humanitarian aid left Monday afternoon for Sri Lanka. Another transporting tents and blankets left for the island at the end of the day. French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier was on board. He will probably go to Thailand afterward.

The disaster, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said, was “truly humbling as well as profoundly tragic for everyone involved.”

Magnier reported from Colombo, Demick from Seoul and Wilkinson from Rome. Times staff writers Janet Stobart in London, Jinna Park in Seoul and Christian Retzlaff in Berlin and special correspondent Karine Rebido in Paris contributed to this report.