tsunami?

At around 10pm on Friday, I was sat in one of the main backpacker bars, having a beer, updating this blog, watching the England v Australia one day game and generally chilling out.

A few moments later, the bar staff pulled white plastic sheets across the front of the bar in preparation for an impending rain storm. In true South Eastern fashion, it then absolutely fucked it down in quite incredible style.

I didn't think too much more about it, and carried on typing and supping away. Then a couple of minutes later, scores of people ran past the bar in the pissing rain screaming and looking terrified. This obviously disturbed everyone in the bar, who went outside to find out what on earth was happening. All sorts of things went through my head. Was there a lunatic on the loose with a machine gun? Had the group of fat beer swilling Geordies drinking from buckets of whisky and red bull in the Irish bar opposite exposed themselves?

In the general mayhem, I figured there could be a need to move quickly and bundled my netbook into my bag and made my own way outside. I asked a Thai girl what was going on, who replied in broken English: 'They think it could be tsunami. There been earthquake in Indonesia'. Fucking hell.

I'm not particularly well versed in dealing with extreme natural disasters, and my first reaction was that my hotel room on the top floor on the biggest building on the island was as good as place as any to head to. As I made my way through the sodden streets, I caught sight of the British owner of a nearby bar with a mobile held to his ear telling everyone around him to calm down. I stopped to listen more. It was a false alarm - a Thai guy on the beach had shouted the word 'tsunami' during the fierce rain storm, and everyone around him duly reacted like Freddy Kruger had just arrived on a boat with Myra Hindley.

Given that Phi Phi was totally devastated by the tsunami of 2004 and hundreds of people on the island were killed, I guess it would be unfair to describe the reaction of people to this mini scare as over the top. It was, as you would expect, something of a relief to discover that 12 foot waves were not about to engulf me.

How do you follow an event like that on a Friday night? You don't get that down the Prince of Wales Road in Norwich. I contemplated going back to my hotel room, but instead headed to a beach side bar where a DJ pumped out house music into the night and people merrily chatted away as if nothing had happened.

At around midnight, I went back to the hotel. The rain then started again - with fierce winds blowing so hard I thought the windows would be blown through. I looked out at the balcony and saw the shorts and t-shirt I had ironically put out earlier to dry had been swept away.

Perhaps unnecessarily, I contacted my parents to let them know that there had been fears of a tsunami here, but nothing happened - in case there was anything on the news about warnings of one. I then poured a large glass of Thai whisky, sat down on my bed and flicked on CNN. There were no weather warnings for the area - just predictions of more rain.

As I tried to sleep, the wind continued to batter the windows and I put a pillow over my head to try and block out the noise. Saturday was clearly not going to be a day for sitting on the beach, and I resolved to book myself on a Thai cooking course and spend the day in a kitchen...