It was a day of bright and sunny skies when Sari Lightman boarded a longboat, planning to enjoy a day of snorkeling with her family in southern Thailand on Dec. 26, 2004.
Lightman, then 20, and her twin sister were exchange students in the country’s north. They were taking a holiday break with their parents, who were visiting from Toronto.
Much like the thousands who would witness the widespread devastation left in the wake of a massive tsunami, Lightman said there was no indication that something was awry when their boat set off from Railay, a peninsula on Krabi Island.
“We were actually out on the water when the wave hit,” Lightman said. “We were surrounded by all these limestone cliffs, and the cliffs just began to vanish, and I realized it was because we were ascending.”
“The water was just kind of swelling like a mountain.”
Still unaware of what was happening on the shores of the hardest-hit areas such as Khao Lak and Phuket, Lightman’s boat came across the first signs of destruction and tragedy. Other tour boats that had left minutes before theirs had been severely pummeled by the rough water.
“It was kind of like coming upon the scene of a really horrific car accident,” Lightman said. “All the boats were smashed and people were calling out for lost members in their boats.”
Lightman remembers the frightened look on their Thai boat operator’s face as they immediately turned back: “He said he’d never seen anything like this before and he had been on the water his whole life.”
Back on shore, the magnitude of what had happened was beginning to emerge. Lightman saw pieces of boats, and debris and oil in the shallow waters. They were immediately evacuated to higher ground, where the group would stay put overnight.
“We just all linked arms and just waited because they said that another wave was coming,” Lightman said, adding later: “I felt like we were waiting for death, essentially -- waiting for this wave to come and wash us all away.”
The next day, the family made their way back to the beach, where there were boats waiting to take tourists to the mainland for flights out to Bangkok.
“We saw that the beach was just covered in glass and I remember some of the bungalows -- they were on the other side of the beach, I guess they had been thrown by the water,” Lightman said.
At the local airport, waiting to depart to Bangkok, tourists still in bathing suits had bandages wrapped around their head.
After flying home to Canada, Lightman and her sister would return to Thailand two weeks later, to complete their course study. But 10 years later, the feeling of fear and confusion in the tsunami’s immediate aftermath remains vivid, she says.
Lightman, now a musician, returned to Thailand’s south on tour with a band last year. She said she was reminded of the strength of the Thai people, who rebuilt after the tragedy. “They were really adamant about getting their lives back together.”
