News of cyclone Nargis broke in Australia last Monday. By 7.09am I was in a tail spin. My husband had emailed me the previous week to say he was heading south from Mandalay through Yangon to Ngapali beach. With trembling fingers I launched Google Earth and pinpointed Ngapali on the Bay of Bengal, just west of the flooded delta. Photos of the hotels showed bures dotted along the beach. Images of beaches swept away by tidal waves in the tsunami flashed through my head.
Each day I pored over internet news pages, travellers' chat pages and maps of the cyclone's path trying to calculate the possible damage to Ngapali. There was no news of the area. The Australian consul said communications were down. They had no news of anyone outside Yangon. Teams were telephoning Australian nationals from Canberra, as the local embassy had no outgoing lines. My husband had not taken his mobile phone as there is no service outside Yangon, where it is CDMA anyway. I wasn't even sure which hotel he would be staying in or even if he actually was in Ngapali.
By Thursday morning I was beside myself with worry. I phoned his friends in Chiang Mai, Thailand. They were expecting him on the evening flight. I calculated there was less than a 50/50 chance of him being on the flight but pinpointed my hopes on a call at 8.30EST never the less.
My mobile phone did not stop buzzing all evening. Our children, his sisters, old friends, everyone kept calling to see if I'd heard anything. When it buzzed at 9.30pm I was exhausted and totally focussed on the work I was doing and didn't answer. Unknown caller, the mobile screen announced. I called messagebank and sank to my knees when I heard his voice. He had arrived back in Chiang Mai on all the pre-arranged flights. Until he was back in Yangon to catch his flight he had had no inkling of the cyclone.
He had been in Ngapali. A bit of a storm had broken communications - a not unusual occurence as infrastructure in Myanmar is very fragile. In Yangon he saw the result of the winds, people clearing roads and an avalanche of military outside his hotel. The junta were meeting to discuss the situation in the hotel, he was told later. It was only on the plane back to Chiang Mai that he saw CNN footage of the flooding and realised the enormity of the situation.
The country was on the brink of disaster before the cyclone, he says. Unimaginable hardship for all Burmese, not just those directly affected, will be the only outcome.
I shall post some of his stories, as he tells them.