Auckland honeymooners back with relieved families

Duan Sharp and his wife, Joanna, fled up the stairs at their hotel. Picture / Richard Robinson

Tears were threatening to spill and their faces still spelled fear as Phuket honeymooners Duan and Joanna Sharp returned to Auckland and the relieved embraces of family at the airport.

The Howick couple had been on the Thai resort island for two nights, and were standing outside their hotel basking in a cloudless 33C Boxing Day morning when they realised something was very wrong.

"Someone came past and said there was a freak tide," recalls Mr Sharp, a 29-year-old IT manager. "It had gone out and come all the way back in.

"Then I saw this wall of brown water, five or six metres high, coming towards us. All I heard was water - constant, rushing water."

He shouted to his 30-year-old wife, a newspaper advertising representative, to sprint back inside the hotel and up the stairs. They joined a panicking, jostling crowd as water chased them into the lobby of the 414-room Merlin Beach Resort.

"My heart was pounding. All I knew was to run to high ground," says Mr Sharp.

"That's the scariest thing that's ever happened in our lives."

From the second storey of the three-level hotel, Mr Sharp used his digital camera to record short video clips of the destruction below, its soundtrack horrified screaming.

Two waves of roaring water swirled round cars and buses and tossed them like confetti. Solid marble tiles in front of the hotel were swept away.

Among those who sought refuge were several terrified Australian men who had swum for their lives after the water punched its way into their first-floor room, splintering and collapsing the door.

Hotel staff got guests on to the roof and quickly up the slopes of a heavily wooded nearby mountain. A surreal calm settled as about 100 guests and 20 staff sat in the undergrowth, some despairing, the fortunate yelling in delight as they were reunited with those they had thought lost.

Mr Sharp recalls warm applause as people were tearfully reunited. It was hard to know what to say to those who waited in vain.

The Thai staff, whom Mr Sharp praises for sticking by guests when their own families must have been affected, took the risk of returning to the hotel to gather food and water from mini-bars.

The party camped on the hill for about six hours; Mr Sharp suspects this was partly so bodies could be removed from the resort grounds. Many people were enjoying the pool when the tsunami struck and he doesn't think they had a chance.

Coming down the mountain, the Sharps encountered a vastly changed landscape of mud and debris. Thankfully, says Mr Sharp, they saw no bodies - the sea was yet to start yielding its victims.

Allowed back into the hotel, the couple packed and fled. "All we wanted to do was get home."

They reached a darkened Phuket by foot and taxi. The couple were unable to phone their frightened families until they flew into Bangkok on Monday afternoon.

They found it impossible to eat. "We just couldn't," says Mr Sharp, whose wife was feeling too shaken to be interviewed.

He admits to still feeling "a bit on edge. I'll always remember it ... always."

Luke van den Bos and Rose Turner were also on their honeymoon at Patong Beach on Phuket when the tsunami struck. They cut their trip short, returning to Auckland last night.

Ms Turner, 22, burst into tears at the airport and was too traumatised to talk.

Her 23-year-old husband spoke about the morning after their first night together as a married couple.

They were asleep in their second-floor hotel room and were woken by a loud sound.

"We heard a big explosion. We thought it was a bomb," Mr van den Bos said. He now believes it was the sound of cars and other debris being swept into buildings.

Their hotel was across the road from the beach, protected from the full fury of the wave, but they watched as metres of water swirled beneath their balcony.

They waited an hour for the water to subside, then escaped to the hills after being warned that another 8m wave was on its way.

They slept the night in the hills, and the next morning New Zealand authorities in Phuket helped them get to Bangkok.

Sarah Bedford, 21, was at her parents' house in Bangkok. "Our pool was sloshing from side to side."

Jai and Shalini Singh planned to go to Phuket on Boxing Day, but when they arrived in Bangkok from India they heard about the tsunami. They called their travel agent, who said Phuket was in chaos.

"There was a hotel, but now there is nothing," the agent said.

- additional reporting Juliet Rowan