'The dead are the lucky ones'

By Joanne Gilhooly
BBC correspondent, Unawatuna, Sri Lanka

Hotels on the coast of Sri Lanka suffered the worst casualties

We had not been able to get a room for Christmas at a beach hotel in the now destroyed resort of Unawatuna, on Sri Lanka's southern coast.

So we checked into a sister hotel 300m back from the coast and on higher ground.

The next morning the huge wall of water surged towards us, flattening all in its wake, but did not reach us. Few were so lucky.

Mala Vika from Colombo told me that she and her husband, their four-year-old son and mother were having breakfast in the open air restaurant, watching two toddlers playing on the edge of the sea, when the water suddenly erupted.

She did not know what happened to them.

Bashed and bruised

Her own mother was swept away but rescued by her husband before they all ran up to the second floor.

From there they saw a tourist on a mattress being swept in and smashed against the trees.

Tourists were injured as they dragged along by the surging waters

Pamela and Gordon Pearce, an elderly couple from Kent in England, had also been having breakfast on the coast when they were struck by the wave, Pamela forced one way, Gordon another.

Bashed and bruised, Pamela was carried in on a broken surf board - and later reunited with her husband.

Australian Paul McMullen told me how he and his three friends woke up to find their room filling with water - all but one escaped.

With just inches of headroom left above the water they had to force the roof off to rescue him.

They lost all their documents and were stranded - and still do not know what happened to other friends further along the coast.

Hotel staff patiently dealt with tourists' requests - to try to telephone embassies again, for bottled water, help on how they could get out and back to Colombo.

Anger

Only occasional hugs and silent weeping revealed that many staff had no idea if any of their own family members were still alive.

Winton, an ex-policeman from the village, insisted on showing me his mother's dead body - he wants the world to witness.

Winton does not know where to bury his dead mother

Only the day before he had been proudly introducing her to tourists and wishing us all Merry Christmas.

But Winton was also getting angry - he could not understand why the helicopters were hovering but no one had come to help on the ground - and he did not know where to bury his mother.

Like so many others, he has lost everything: "Unawatuna has been massacred," he said.

"The dead are the lucky ones".

After two days of no water, telephone or electricity and with growing fear of the outbreak of disease, those tourists who could walk to the road started to trek through the debris of the resort, hoping to flag down a van, an auto-rickshaw, a tractor - anything that still had petrol.

But there were already traffic jams on the Jungle Road back to Colombo.

With the main coast road damaged, everything has to pass muddy, single track roads through paddy fields.

An impressive relief effort by ordinary people was under way.

Buses tilted dangerously as Sri Lankans in cars, vans and on motorbikes loaded with relief supplies squeezed past each other.

It continued into the night - and as auto-rickshaw drivers used loudhailers to urge people to lend a hand, the village temples broadcast pleas for donations.