Tsunami - 10 weeks on: Phuket Island puts on a brave face

Bar owners Ning Nong Pimpan and Nick Jackson, her Australian husband, just want the tourists to return to Patong Beach where business has been slow to pick up. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Bangla Rd is alive and pumping and thoughts of the tsunami seem far away.

Cliff Richard and Robbie Williams compete with the thump of nightclub beats along this late-night heart of Patong Beach on Phuket Island.

There are flashing lights, girlie bars, markets, a steady stream of motorcycles and bright red tuk tuks.

But most of the tuk tuks are parked, waiting for fares.

If it looks busy, locals say it is quiet.

On the outside, the Thai people laugh and party, but it is apparent they are hiding a lot of pain.

A tiny Thai woman in a pink dress, Ning Nong Pimpan, looks stricken for a moment but quickly recovers with a smile.

Two months ago, soon after the tsunami struck and devastated parts of Thailand, we travelled up the coast with Ms Pimpan to look for a close friend of hers who was missing.

"He dead," she says now with certainty outside the girlie bar she runs.

The wave which pounded Khao Lak in neighbouring Phang Nga Province, where he had a small hotel, took his body away forever, she says.

The front of Patong Beach was also swallowed by the wave, but two months on it is almost as though nothing happened.

Much of the damage to shops along the beachfront is hidden behind green corrugated fences as rebuilding goes on behind.

McDonald's, where up to a dozen people died, is one of them.

Umbrellas are back on the beach and the few tourists about sun themselves and swim during the day, strolling on the sand at sunset before heading to the bars.

Ms Pimpan lost many friends in the tsunami, at Khao Lak, Patong Beach and Phi Phi Island.

She will never forget them but shows the hurt only fleetingly.

The decision has been made to get on with life, she says.

Business at her bar, Cocktails and Dreams, one of many in a busy arcade, is on the up and tourists are slowly returning.

Her staff, the girls and "lady-boys" dancing on the bar top, need the tourists to come back, she says.

They come to Patong Beach to work so they can send money home to their families in poor, rural villages. There is no welfare system and this work pays well.

"I want to tell everybody we are okay now," says Ms Pimpan.

"I want to tell your people in New Zealand please come back, we don't need anything, we don't need aid now, we need tourists to come back to Phuket Island, that's all we want."

Ms Pimpan is married to an Australian, Nick Jackson, who goes walking and swimming at Patong Beach every morning.

The popular beach is cleaner now, he says, and the tsunami may lead to less clutter there.

"I mean, when one lives in a geographically very safe area for weather - they don't have cyclones, they don't have tornadoes, they don't have violence of weather - one would then build in a more casual manner and that's what's happened.

"As a consequence there's been too much stuff if you like on that beach area. Maybe now they'll restrict it a little bit."

Dean Rae, a Kiwi from Hawkes Bay, is part-owner of a bar called Two Black Sheep and runs a prawn fishing business, where people can fish for prawn with rods around a big swimming pool.

He says he has not been affected by the tsunami as such "apart from everyone you know that has been".

"The best thing is that everybody come back, mate, for a holiday. This is quiet, I mean, this is the middle of the high season."

Mr Rae believes those who watched the television coverage associate the devastation in Thailand with what they saw in Indonesia, but the reality is that only a tiny part of Phuket Island was affected.

Most hotels are open, as are the shops and restaurants. He says people should not be uneasy coming here to have a good time and swim where people died.

"The day after it happened I walked from one end of the beach road to the other and you never saw one Thai person sitting there moaning ... They've been through enough."

Businesses are suffering throughout the island's coastal areas.

In Krabi, to the south, taxi driver Jarat Vajidee sits beside his vehicle. The day before, he worked from 8.30am to midnight but had just one passenger.

He also runs a minimart but has had to close up because he has no money to pay the rent.