Pablo García Oliver’s life “restarted” on December 26, 2004*.
That fateful day a tsunami devastated the Indian Ocean, taking more than 200,000 lives in the countries that were directly affected by the catastrophe.
Millions of people, although they survived the fury of the giant wave, ended up with their homes and cities destroyed and with hardly any belongings.
The natural disaster, one of the deadliest in history, strongly impacted 14 nations, including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, parts of India and Thailandthe latter country where the Argentinean Pablo García Oliver, who was on his honeymoon with his wife.
The great wave surprised him in the middle of the sea; It shook him, displaced him and kept him fighting with the water until the lack of air almost broke his chest from the pressure.
He considered his emergence to the surface, almost drowned and without strength, as a mixture of luck and divine help.
Many of the tourists from dozens of countries who were on vacation in the region died, but García Oliver was one of the survivors.
He now lives in Buenos Aires with his family, works as an architect and has overcome, although he has not forgotten, the traumatic experience.
This is the testimony he gave to BBC Mundo about what he experienced on December 26, 2004.
“Omnipotent”
I was starting a new life.
At the time, I was a young lawyer just entering my 30s and I had married my wife.
We decided to go on our honeymoon to Thailand, a place we had never been.
If I had to describe how I felt then, I would tell you that I believed myself to be practically omnipotent, that nothing could happen to me. I felt eternal and full of youth. Ahead he had a new life in marriage with the purpose of starting a family.
It is incredible that what happened to me happened in that way, at that time and in that place, with so many factors of happiness around.
On the day of the tragedy we were on the Phi Phi Islands, small blocks of land located near the Thai province of Phuket, in the south of the country. They are known because the film The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was filmed in one of them in 2000.
No alert
If you ask me for one word to tell how it all happened, I would choose unexpected. We never received an alert. Nothing.
On December 26, we were staying in a hotel near the bay, from where small excursion boats were taken for tourists.
The beach where we were had no sand. It was an area of pure rocks.
The boats left from a raft tied to a type of wooden walkway that led to the coast. There were about 30 people on that raft and from there the different boats left for activities such as diving or simply to explore the island’s coastline.
It was there, right in the middle of the sea, about 80 or 100 meters from the coast, where the wave caught us.
I remember being on the raft and it was a beautiful, very nice day.
It was in a matter of seconds. Everything started to move, the bottom of the raft shook.
The next memory I have is that of a big explosion in which everyone is thrown into the air.
Journalists always ask me if I saw the wave, but the truth is that I never saw it. Everything happened in a second.
After that I was already Under water, deep (in the sea), drowning.
At 7:58 a.m. local time, an earthquake measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale struck off the northwest coast of Sumatra. The BBC then reported that more than 70% of the population was lost in the inhabited areas of that region.
Half an hour after the earthquake occurred, waves more than 30 meters high engulfed the Indonesian coast of Banda Aceh, killing nearly 170,000 people and destroying everything in their path.
It was not until an hour and a half later that the beaches of southern Thailand, where Pablo and his wife were, received the onslaught of the tsunami.
It is estimated that of the more than 5,000 who died in that area, about 2,000 were foreign tourists.
In the hours that followed, the violence of the sea also wreaked havoc on the coastline of Sri Lanka, the east coast of India and the east coast of Africa, leaving victims in countries such as Somalia, Tanzania and Kenya.
“Rebooted”
My wife was also sitting on that raft, but immediately after the explosion, what I remember was being very deep under the water. Everything was black.
I didn’t understand where I was. It was nothing. No idea where the surface was.
During that time, I thought I was dying and in fact I felt like I was dead, like I was floating in the middle of nowhere.
And it may seem like a movie, but all I remember is seeing some light and swimming towards it. Then it happened, like it was a computer. There comes a time when you are simply reborn, rebooted and there you are still alive.
He had managed to reach the surface.
The miracle was completed when a few seconds later the person who emerged from the surface was my wife. There was no one else left, nor any trace of the other 30 who were on the raft at the time of impact.
We were left floating, just the two of us, without understanding what had happened. I had never been told what a tsunami was, I didn’t know what it meant.
On the surface floated pieces of wood and a boat relatively close to which we approached to wait.
To tell you the truth, in situations like that you don’t have time to think about what you have to do. My wife and I always talk about what happened and how it happened. How similar things happened to us.
Look, I believe in God and I think that helped me, but you also need to be lucky. I think we both did everything we could to stay alive.
The last breath of air
I estimate that about a couple of hours passed when a boat came to our rescue to bring us closer to the beach where the hotel was located. There were other tourists rescued, but I don’t remember that it was any of those who were on the raft where we were hit by the wave. There were Americans and English.
I thought the worst had already happened, but then they recommended that, at a point close to the coast, we swim towards it so that the boat could continue its rescue journey for other survivors. The possibility of new waves also loomed.
Most of us started swimming, my wife and I in front. I helped one of the English because he had broken his ankle. Fortunately, my wife and I only suffered a few bruises.
I remember that the sea was quite rough and that I was constantly looking behind in fear of new waves.
I arrived where another group of people was already waiting with great effort, with almost the last breath of air. With my chest squeezing from the pressure of lack of air. I thought again that I was drowning.
The calm sea
When we arrived at the hotel they had everything very set up, it looked like a kind of field hospital with a lot of injured people, some of them very seriously.
They placed us in the upper part of the hotel, where the helicopters began to take the critically injured to the mainland.
Everything was so destroyed: a boat ended up in the middle of the hotel reception room.
I have a devastating image in my head and it is being on that hotel roof, at sunset, with a beautiful image of the sun setting. And there, in the distance, you could see the bay where everything began absolutely calm, as if nothing had happened before. It was incredible and very sad at the same time. Many people died there.
The next day a ferry approached and took us all to the Thai mainland. I remember above all the silence, it was absolute.
Those who traveled with us had lost their children, their parents, their partners. It was a very sad scene.
There was a moment when we went out to the bow of the ship to see the sea, and again an image was shown that I will never forget, remaining perfect in my mind: the sea of sandals. The water was full. They were all there, floating, adults and also children.
When we arrived in Phuket, at the airport, people were desperate. The waiting rooms also looked like hospitals, packed with victims. There were people with no belongings, no clothes and no passports.
Finally, after a very long plane trip, we were back in Argentina.
Alert
Pablo García Oliver, his wife and other Argentines who survived the tsunami were surprised by the massive presence of journalists at the airport. Television channels and other media were waiting for them.
Pablo says that even then he did not understand the seriousness of what had happened. When he first arrived in Buenos Aires and learned of the number of deaths, he understood the magnitude of everything.
He says that talking to the press helped him, that he never went to a psychologist for that reason and that deciding to write a book ordered him and kept his feelings to himself.
Today he enjoys his wife and four children, but he no longer believes himself omnipotent or eternal.
“I am much more alert, I have more fears. I’m not sure if the treatment of my children would have been the same if I hadn’t gone through that experience,” he says.
Every time he faces the sea again, the memory of the tsunami invades him, “of course,” but still try to enjoy it. In fact, he does not rule out returning to those beaches and walking there with his family.
“In my head everything has remained as a learning experience, where the fortune of surviving weighs more than the misfortune of having gone through a situation like this, of being aware of everything that can happen to one,” he reflected.
*This note was originally published five years ago, on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
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