Skip to content
I read with interest this first hand account by Lauren who thought she was going to die. If Dave hadn’t have found me then I would have been a million times worse than I was already!My heart was beating so fast as I read your post! :) That was the thing – I kept remembering old news footage from earthquakes and tsunamis and convincing myself that the same thing was about to happen to me.I should have been in Indonesia by now, if luck didn’t play it’s role and my plans got postponed. Happy travel :)Yep, they definitely were. I was relaxing on the beach when I heard the warning sign from a speaker on a pickup truck. Survivors, local residents and visitors release paper lanterns during a ceremony for victims of 2004 tsunami in Ban Nam Khem, Thailand, a southern fishing village destroyed by the wave, December 26, 2014.Survivors of Asia's 2004 tsunami and relatives of its 230,000 victims gathered along shorelines of the Indian Ocean on Friday for prayers and memorial services to mark the 10th anniversary of a disaster that still leaves an indelible mark on the region.Acehnese people sow flowers as they pray at mass grave to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, Dec. 26, 2014.Aceh was the worst hit location, and the closest major city to the epicenter of the 9.1 magnitude quake that triggered the tsunami. We were a bit freaked out too cause the highest point on those islands can be more than 5 or 10 Meters. Phuket airport has bag scanners located at the entrance to the building and I had just taken off my backpack to get it scanned when suddenly,The air filled with gasps and screams and as I raised my eyes in confusion I saw every single person in the airport simultaneously stampeding towards me wearing the same look of terror on their faces.I stopped talking, dropped everything and launched myself towards the exit, running faster than I ever have before. Last year I was stuck in the bottom of a mall while they announced over a speaker that a tornado was headed right toward us. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an approval rating of 81% based on 188 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. Songkran was a great way to forget about the trauma of the day before… :-)Glad it all worked out. I live about a mile from the beach straight up a pretty flat road, but even where I am, I’m probably 60′ above sea level or so, which is a pretty safe height.Thanks for that, Lawrence. :) I’m sure Dave will write a much less dramatic (and he would claim, more realistic) version soon enough..Lauren, I recently started following you on Twitter. Believe me I couldn’t have cared less about my clothes. Not because I get off on your terror (maybe a little bit that), but because you made it feel so scary.Like I knew nothing came of it, but I was still worried for you. It was. 10cm high? This sounds terrifying! Media caption Director Juan Antonio Bayona, says it was a "crazy idea" to recreate the tsunami with real water. I’ve been reading some earthquake essays and they don’t come close to being as intense as this. Please try again.Copyright Lauren Juliff © 2010-2019. In fact, 3 months later I’m still struggling and freak out everytime I go into an airport! […]I would have been climbing a tree probably. […] Tsunami 2012: I Thought I Was Going to Die, Never Ending Footsteps: I’ve never experienced a natural disaster quite like a tsunami and Lauren made me want to avoid it at all costs! Tsunami height and run-out (the horizontal distance the wave travels) are larger where the ocean floor has a gentle slope. At that moment, I believed that a tsunami was going to hit at any second and I turned around and ran towards it because all I could think about was getting to Dave. We would have been screwed… Glad it wasn’t any worse than it was.This is a brilliant piece of writing Lauren!
I mean really??? Wow.Thanks Juliann – I was hoping for that effect (sorry for scaring you though)! Not often does one get an actual descriptive account of such an incident. I would have been freakin’ out too, I mean, there was no way of telling what to believe really. Wow.