January 11, 2005

TSUNAMI         (shortlist, 2005 South Asian Journalists Association awards, editorial/commentary)

On the Road to Galle

Along this stretch of highway south of Sri Lanka's capital, 10,000 people were washed away. What remains is sorrow.

By Eric Ellis

Adrian Collins can't believe his eyes. Flying into a devastated Sri Lanka from London, he knew his beachfront villa had been trashed by the Boxing Day tsunami. What he didn't know was that a new, 300-foot, fast-rushing channel had turned a sandy spit once dotted with villas into an island. The British investment banker stares from what is now the mainland, then opens a bottle of Three Coins beer. "I'd always promised my wife a tropical island hideaway," he says. "Now we've got one."

I'd met Collins ten minutes earlier as we both sat stunned in the wreckage of Beruwela, a fishing village a few miles up the road. The scale of devastation is breathtaking. To rebuild will take billions of dollars that Sri Lanka, one of the world's poorest countries, doesn't have. Beruwela is one of countless hamlets along the single-lane road that hugs the coast from the capital, Colombo, south to Sri Lanka's third-largest city, Galle. Nearly half of the island's economy is generated along this 125-mile route—from banks, casinos, malls, and one of Sri Lanka's only McDonald's at its Colombo end, to tourist resorts and villas on some of the world's best beaches, through charming fishing villages and textile factories that stitch Victoria's Secret lingerie. Now the roadside is strewn with bodies, detritus from thousands of broken houses, and fishing boats that nature has flung about like rubber ducks. It's a highway of death: Some 10,000 people died along the Galle road.

I am on my own mission. Like Collins, my wife and I own a piece of Sri Lankan paradise. Our property at Mawella, an isolated village 75 miles east of Galle, is on a magnificent headland. But its state was the least of concerns as I drove down in a four-wheel-drive laden with food, clothes, and medical supplies, trying to reach our neighbors. We feared the worst. Sunil's two-room shack was just a few yards from the water's edge. His jaunty outrigger and nets have been our landmark as we walked behind his house to our plot, stopping for his wife's sweet tea while joshing with their three kids and 80-year-old grandmother. That was before Dec. 26.

But getting there is an issue. The rubble has been pushed to the side of the Galle road, but it is jammed with aid trucks, military convoys, do-gooders, media, and millions of heartbreaking stories. At Bentota, I chat with a tourist guide who was showing two Germans a Buddhist temple when the waves struck. He ushered them to safety, only to return when the waters receded to a vanished house and two dead daughters. At Ambalangoda, a village north of Galle, I stop at a beach villa owned by a friend. It's hard to find, damaged beyond recognition, but when I finally spot it, Ranjan, the housekeeper, bursts into tears as I come through the gate. He explains how he herded his wife, their year-old baby, and a party of Swedish guests to the roof of the two-story house as three waves crashed in and two commuter buses were swept off the road into a lagoon.

Sri Lanka doesn't have the expertise, resources, or time to retrieve the buses and the 100-odd dead; there are other more urgent priorities. At nearby Hikkuduwa the unmistakable musky odor of death wafts over the road. This is the where the waves swept the Colombo-Galle train off the track that runs parallel to the road. Ten days later military salvage crews are still pulling bodies from the wreckage. Wailing Sri Lankans file past a row of tables strewn with credit cards, bank books, wedding albums, and ID cards, trying to identify the 1,000 victims.

At Galle the tsunami wrapped itself around the 400-year-old fort, which was unscathed, and washed over the cricket ground and bus station in front. A year ago I had watched a game here. After the tsunami, it became a putrid open-air morgue for 3,000 corpses. Galle is also unrecognizable, but the destruction only gets worse as we head east into the direct-impact zone. Unawatuna, a party town popular with the rave crowd, no longer exists. At Koggola, the textile group MAS Holdings, Sri Lanka's biggest company, has a factory that lost two people and has 300 workers homeless. Nearby at Talpe, the cook at a foreign-owned villa we stayed in a year ago tells me the room boy, Vijay, was killed. He too breaks down in my arms. Everywhere people are drinking coconut milk to hydrate, unsure of the water quality.

I finally reach Mawella three days after leaving Colombo, a journey that normally takes four or five hours. The roads are gone here, so I walk inland across fields once thick with jungle. The beach is higher than I remember it. I run to Sunil's house, remarkably still standing. But I can't reach it because the tsunami has changed Sri Lanka's map, cutting several deep channels to connect to new lagoons.

I walk an hour in the other direction and finally reach Mawella. It normally bustles with fishermen, but today I count only a dozen people, sitting stunned in the ruins of their houses. One of them tells me that 30 died here while praying at a temple—the wave struck on a Buddhist holy day. Sunil and his family are nowhere to be found, but another neighbor tells me they are all alive, staying at a brother's house well inland. She takes me there, and as we drive through the gate, the grandmother sees me. "Everything is destroyed, everything is gone," she wails. "You have to help us." All I can tell her is that we—and millions of others around the world—are trying to do just that.