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21yearsinthai · Cohort Joined: 08 Sep 2004 Posts: 315 Location:

Sun Jan 16, 2005 06:01 AM GMT
By Dominic Whiting

PHUKET, Thailand (Reuters) - Shops in the Thai island of Phuket are starting to peddle tsunami T-shirts, video footage and paintings, although there are few buyers as tourists shun one of Asia's premier resorts.

On Patong beach, where giant waves crashed through shops and piled cars on top of one another, stalls stash bootleg video compact discs (VCDs) with amateur footage from Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and the Indonesian province of Aceh.

"The police prohibit it, porno and tsunami, but a lot of people died and people want to remember," said stall holder Sunny, a migrant from neighbouring Myanmar, grabbing the $4 (2.1 pounds) disc from under a table.

The scenes, already broadcast on television, show the killer waves battering resorts and sweeping debris and people away. The footage ends with a song by Thai folk singer known as Ad Carabao.

"We didn't know what a tsunami was, we never thought or dreamt about it, but one day the sky darkened," laments the pony-tailed singer.

"It destroyed like the devil and hit our beaches and everything disappeared."

The December 26 tsunami killed more than 5,300 people, half of them foreign tourists, in Thailand. On Phuket, 260 people died.

Sunny says sales of the tsunami VCDs are slow, about 10 a day. Tourists walking along Patong's beach are now outnumbered by the transvestites and bar girls trying to lure them off the pavement into nightspots.

TSUNAMI ARTISTS

Guests fill only one tenth of the island's hotel rooms, compared to an average 90 percent occupancy in the high season, and aid workers, embassy staff and journalists are boosting visitor numbers.

Damage on Phuket, roughly the size of Singapore, was limited to a couple of beaches, but hotel operators say tourists are shunning the island because they assumed it suffered devastation on the same scale as Khao Lak, 80 miles to the north, Indonesia's Aceh or Sri Lanka.

In the echoing Central Festival shopping centre, a tsunami souvenir T-shirt hangs above a coffee shop and sells for $6.

The shirt shows a Japanese-style painting of a giant wave buffeting a wooden fishing boat, with "Tsunami December 26, Phuket" splashed across the front, but is not widely available yet at tourist shops.

A group of local artists have set up an exhibition in another shopping centre, hoping to sell tsunami paintings to raise donations for child victims.

The work is displayed over a white cloth on the floor strewn with photographs of crushed cars, bloated bodies, and wrecked hotels.

"It's an installation and the paintings are just part of it," said artist Chatree Tingsapat.

"We want people to see the damage of the tsunami so they can really feel and donate," he said. "Most of them are looking at the photos, not at the paintings."

In "The wave", an oil painting selling for $125, streaks of orange, yellow and purple are caught in light blue swirls of the sea. "Above tsunami" is a water colour of wooden "long-tail" fishing boats buffeted by waves.

Some visitors criticised the exhibition, which had not sold any paintings in three days but had garnered donations.

"They shouldn't put these photos here," said Pallapat Choomrak, 31, a Phuket teacher who was taking her six-year-old daughter shopping.

"Seeing the damage is okay, but these pictures of the dead bodies are not for children."