An article from today’s Guardian newspaper.

Jason Burke in Phuket
Thursday December 30, 2004
The Guardian (abridged)

Stefan Johansson, a 41-year-old air force officer from Sweden, is hoping that tonight is the night. He is not concerned about aftershocks hitting the beach half a mile from here, or about the haphazard rescue operation finally under way in southern Thailand.

Nor is he worried by the deaths of several hundred compatriots. Mr Johansson is anxious that the bar girl he has his eye on is going to keep holding out on him. “I’m having a good holiday,” he said. “I went for a walk along the sand this morning, did a bit of swimming. Now I’m off drinking, and then we’ll see.”

Mr Johansson is not alone. Four days after the tidal wave hit, normal life has returned to much of Phuket and surrounding resorts such as Patong. The “girlie” bars are reopening, the bazaars selling rip-off Rolex watches are busy, the tourists are streaming off flights and on to the beach. Here Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s request for the country to wear black and forego New Year festivities seems likely to fall on deaf ears.

“I heard what was going on with the wave and so on, and I just thought it was a bit of an exaggeration,” said Peter Anstiss, 48, from Sydney, as he shared a beer with his brother in a bar off Patong beach’s main drag. “I didn’t think too much about it.”

At Phuket’s airport, Pornthip Sucharitcharan was preparing to welcome 200 new arrivals on behalf of the Phuket Hilton. Today another 200 guests will fly in to stay at the hotel.

The only problem, as far as Mr Sucharitcharan was concerned, were delays caused to commercial passenger flights by the unprecedented number of aircraft landing at the airport . The congestion is due to aid flights coming in and planes bearing the dead, injured and badly shaken out.

(In Southern Phuket) the luxury Royal Lighthouse Villas is booked up for the rest of the season, and has had no cancellations following the disaster. And the sprawling Diamond Cliff Resort, set on a bluff directly above Phuket’s debris-strewn Patong beach, welcomed 136 new guests yesterday.

One new arrival at the Diamond Cliff, who flew in with her family from Moscow on Tuesday, relaxed on a lounger beside the pool. “We are here on holiday, not to be sad,” she said. “I know bad things have happened, but it’s nothing to do with us.”

With many beaches still covered in debris, and corpses still being brought in by the tide, most tourists are staying in their hotels. And though many of those in Phuket when the tidal wave struck have left, others are seeing out the rest of their holiday.

Last night Sally Capuvanno, 39, from Leeds, was heading off for her first night out of her hotel since the disaster. “We have been cocooned here. You’d never know it had happened. Now it’s all getting back to normal,” she said.

Others at her resort, only 100 metres from the water’s edge, said they had heard nothing as they lay by the pool when the tidal wave struck.

Back in Patong, Elliot Reid, from Melbourne, was finishing his gin and tonic. “I heard the warning from the government not to go to Phuket and just thought, fuck ‘em,” he said.

“At the end of the day, if your number’s up, your number’s up. By the time the next one happens in a hundred years, I’ll be dead.”

It?s not that I hate Christmas entirely. I really like buying presents, even if the current ratio of gifts to me vs gifts to family and friends is 2:1. I just hate having to wrap the things I buy. What makes some people so good at wrapping? Where did they get that special knack for folding the ends of a package that makes them perfectly aligned, no matter the shape or size of object. How did they find invisible tape that’s truly invisible, unlike the stuff on a roll that falsely claims to ‘disappear on virtually all giftwrap’. Are they glueing? And how do they know just the right length of ribbon to cut to go around the package with enough left to tie the bow and then they curl those ends so beautifully. I particularly envy their final flourish - the gift bags with just the right amount of co-ordinating pristine tissue paper poking out the top and a matching gift tag.

Damn you people and your wrapping magic. Every year I try to create a fabulous Junior League style gift and every year I fail. When handing over presents I pray that the recipient will rip open the package in a frenzy, ignoring the wadges of extra tape necessary to keep the edges from popping up, the narrow pointy fold of one end versus the wide flat fold of the other, the mishapen reindeer image where the two ends of paper didn’t quite meet. Then there?s the gift bag, a perfectly good bag ruined by the tissue paper that’s stuck on top, crumpled and torn from endless attempts to plump it up into little peaks.

In my family, none of us really cared about the packaging, especially as mum would often keep last years crumpled paper to be recycled next christmas. When opening presents, we?d glance at the tag, or in mum’s case read the tag out loud ?to mum, from Margaret? and off we?d go, chucking the wrapping behind us and not stopping until everything was open. Then we?d go back, spread out our haul for everyone else to see, pull the tags off the paper and chuck the rest of the wrapping into a bin liner. This seems a very healthy approach and one I wish people here would adopt. But no, here unwrapping takes longer than christmas dinner and all the xmas tv specials combined

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