[Malone Brown]

Hey,
I was in Thailand during this. I has my bags all packed and was heading to the airport when we seen a huge comotion down at the beach so my girlfriend and I went down to see what was up. The water rose quite a bit and flushed away all the beach chairs etc., so we took some pictures. Soon after we seen a huge wave comming in and everyone started screaming and running. We took off throught the town trying to outrun the water. Some old Thai man was nice enough to let us hop in his pick -up truck and took us up to the mountains where we stayed for about 5 hours till the water went down.

It was an extremely scary experience to say the least. The worst thing is that watching BBC afterwards, we saw that they listed about 240 people dead in Thailand as a result. While we were still in Thailand, a Thai man was translating the local news for us and said that well over a thousand people have died, and hundreds of diving tourists were still missing. He told us that the government will probably not give out the true number of casualties because it will hurt tourism (which apparently they did not after seeing the BBC broadcast.)

It was a very frightening scene, we had our camera out before the whole thing happened so we got some pictures of the whole ordeal while we were running away, maybe I'll post them later if anyone's interested in seeing them. I was a terrible thing to happen to this beautiful country.

Malone