Along the ocean, a tourist destination copes with death
PHUKET, Thailand -- Day after day, the bodies keep arriving at Wat Lam Kaen.
The Buddhist temple in the Khao Lak beach section of this popular resort is one of several temples in the area that have been turned into makeshift morgues, where the calming aroma of incense has been overcome by the sulfurous smell of decay.
The grim scene is but one example of how Phuket is struggling to cope with the tragedy. More than half of the estimated 4,800 deaths in Thailand are thought to have come from a single stretch of beach at Khao Lak, which bore the brunt of the tsunami's impact. Many of those killed are foreign tourists.
Like many other Thai Buddhist temples, Wat Lam Kaen is the heart of the community, a small fishing and tourist town. The compound spreads over an area the size of several football fields, and sun-bleached red and gold carvings swath the exterior.
It normally is a placid place where locals make offerings to monks and pray.
But for now, the temple has been taken over by the frantic bustle of forensic teams.
"It is very tough here right now," said Tiprat Jitkaew, a university student who flew down from Bangkok to help bag bodies and take DNA samples.
Jitkaew offers masks to people who come to look for friends or family members, and she tells them that they do not have enough ice to preserve the bodies properly or enough help to pack the bodies quickly enough. She apologizes for the smell.
"I think I have seen 900 bodies in the last day," she said as other volunteers and police officers bustled about. "We have only one doctor from Australia here, and he came here from his vacation to help. We need more people."
A Khao Lak resident who identified himself only as Rod said he worried how young people would be affected by seeing so much carnage.
"The worst part is for the children," said Rod, who lost two aunts who were driving a half-mile from the ocean when the waves hit. "They should not have to see this."
Around Phuket, photographs pinned to several bulletin boards attest to hopes that relatives may still be found alive. But local authorities are encouraging people who have crowded the town to go home.
"Please tell your friends not to come," a tourist police office announced over a loudspeaker at the Town Hall rescue center yesterday. "The bodies are no longer identifiable."
Thailand also drafted elephants to help with heavy lifting and prisoners to help retrieve the thousands of bodies strewn along the beaches, offering them two days off their sentence for each day worked.
In one jarring sight yesterday, several foreign tourists were back on the debris-littered beaches. They played in the gentle waves of the Andaman Sea, rode personal watercraft, posed for snapshots, and sunbathed.
That was mind-boggling for an island resident, Aime Yodkaew. "I just figure if everyone uses about an hour of their holiday time" to help clean up, "this would help a lot for the locals," Yodkaew, a Swede who lives on the island with her Thai husband, said as she cleared debris.
But Yodkaew acknowledged that the sooner tourists get back to indulging in the sort of fun Phuket was noted for before the catastrophe, the sooner her husband's sailboard and catamaran rental business will be able to start making money again.
Material from wire services was included in this report.
