As in every catastrophe, however, there were also moments of heroism, miracles of survival and, in today’s globalised world, no lack of international compassion. 

At Wat Yanyao in Phang-nga province, Dr Pornthip Rojanasunan, the forensic scientist, led a team of local, expatriate and tourist volunteers that toiled for weeks to identify many of the Thai victims. On Phuket the story surfaced of a young European girl who had studied tsunamis at school and when the waters receded before the wave hit, she told her mother to warn the other people on the beach, saving dozens of lives.  

As donations poured in from around the world, the Red Cross, World Vision, and many Thai and foreign non-governmental organisations launched Herculean relief efforts to cushion the aftershocks felt by locals whose houses and livelihoods had been destroyed. Thailand won international praise for the way it handled the calamity. Memorials were erected and Buddhist ceremonies held, where monks chanted as thousands of lanterns (one for each victim) floated across the night sky to honour the spirits of those who perished. 

Some of the post-tsunami, humanitarian endeavours continue to this day. On Phuket, Tom McNamara, owner of the Baan Rim Pa restaurant, formed the Phuket Has Been Good to Us Foundation to rebuild a school at Kalim Bay. The foundation also organised English classes there and at a school in Kamala, to provide hundreds of students with a chance to embark on careers in the local tourist trade.   

Although McNamara died of prostate cancer last year, his legacy is very much alive. Last year the foundation started the Coconut Club, which has been a boon for the 142 orphans – many of whom lost their families in the tsunami – living at the Kamala school. Sue Ultmann, the director of marketing communications for the Baan Rim Pa Group, says the club gives children the chance to explore the island’s rich possibilities. “Yesterday we took them surfing. We’ve also organised visits to temples and the swimming pool at the British Club. Before the club started, many of them had never been to the beach before or seen an elephant,” says the former travel writer, who has lived on the island for nine years. 

Perhaps the most positive development following the tsunami has been the blossoming – particularly on North Andaman, which was also devastated by the tsunami – of ecotourism. One of the pioneers is Andaman Discoveries, an NGO and tour operator started by Bodhi Garrett, an American born in Kathmandu. He lost everything in the tsunami.    

However, he and his friends looked at what wasn’t being done by the bigger relief organisations, such as repairing houses and fishing boats, and encouraged handicraft and ecotourism projects that would sustain the local communities after the big relief donations dried up and the media moved on. 

“Equipping stricken villagers with computers, English classes, business and tour guide skills empower them with abilities that could be put to other uses when tourism fluctuates or flounders,” he explains. “The training programmes also imbued them with a greater sense of cultural pride, which had ebbed to an all-time low after the disaster.”

Andaman Discoveries has gone on to win industry plaudits such as Virgin’s Responsible Tourism Award for Conservation of Cultural Heritage for its community-based itineraries, home stays and nature trails. 

One of its pilot projects took off in Ban Talae Nok (Village by the Sea), near the border of Ranong and Phang-nga provinces. Walking through the Muslim fishing hamlet hemmed in by mist-shrouded, forested mountains, it’s easy to see why its tailor-made itineraries, encompassing everything from mangrove boat tours and forest hikes to studying batik-making and teaching English, have been such a draw. 

On the main street, gaggles of schoolgirls in headscarves walk past goats, ducks and cows. Women shell cashews on mats outside their houses, the doors of which seldom close. Thanks to the tour operator’s Thai translator and cultural co-ordinator, the language gulf is bridged and interacting with locals proves that Thai Muslims are eager to befriend non-Muslims from the West.

The tsunami taught many locals some vital lessons in ecology. For one, the mangrove forests bearding the village acted as a breakwater against the waves. Parts of Ban Talae Nok not protected by the forests were wiped out, with 40 deaths among 200 villagers. Ibraham, one of the locals working with Andaman Discoveries, says that after the tsunami the villagers decreed that anyone who cut down a mangrove tree had to plant 10 in its place. 

Other eco-tourism projects are turning North Andaman green. Approaching the tiny mountainous island of Koh Ra on a long-tail boat from the Khuraburi pier in Phang-nga province, the only visible part of the Koh Ra Ecolodge is a Thai-style pavilion. All its bamboo-latticed bungalows are tucked away under a canopy of trees, eliminating the need for air-conditioning or fans. 

Off to one side of its wooden restaurant is a solar panel providing enough electricity to power the pavilion and computers during the day. When they install another four or five solar panels, its diesel-powered generators will be power sources of the past. A marine biologist and dive-master, Kim Obermeyer is the manager of the lodge. He organises dives, kayaking trips and treks to watch Malay sun bears raiding beehives. 

As Obermeyer says: “We hope the lodge will be a lesson in sustainable development that will also show other resort owners that sustainability can equal profitability.”        

Among the green lights of the Andaman’s  resurgence there have been plenty of stop signs, too. The government’s plan to limit the amount of reconstruction, and even the number of visitors to the Koh Phi Phi National Marine Park, has been ignored. Although the archipelago is a tourist magnet, it’s still plagued by many pre-tsunami problems such as water pollution, dying coral and helter-skelter development.

Thanks to the tsunami, though, emergency medical services around the Andamans received a boost. Contrary to myths that circulated in early 2005, there was no outbreak of contagious diseases in Thailand. “The public health ministry did a great job in controlling any potential epidemics,” says Peter Davison, the manager of international services at the Phuket International hospital, adding that there have been many positive knock-on effects in terms of accruing medical wisdom for future emergencies.    

In the unlikely event that another underwater earthquake sends shockwaves rippling across the Andaman Sea, the authorities and the general public are better equipped to deal with the situation. Throughout the region, even on beaches such as Krabi’s Ao Nang and Satun’s Koh Lipe that went unscathed, blue signs point out tsunami danger zones and evacuation routes. 

The early warning system put in place by Thai authorities is another series of lifelines. Alan Morison, the owner of the Phuketwan.com online news portal, says: “Around the major islands and along 350km of Andaman coastline there are 70 towers that can broadcast early warnings in five or six languages. Level 2 means prepare to evacuate. So far none of the alarms have gone to the third level, which would call for an immediate evacuation.” 

No doubt some tourists visiting the island will go to the tsunami memorials, the most prominent of which is the 20m long, 50-ton police boat on Khao Lak, which was swept about 1km inland. Other testaments to nature’s power are the two fishing trawlers in Ban Nam Khem, a village all but annihilated by three successive waves. Both boats remain dirt-docked in an empty lot several kilometres inland. Also in the village is the Tsunami Memorial Park, where a wave-shaped tunnel leads past plaques, photos, flowers and other offerings for the dead. Closer to the sea is a museum with exhibits about the scientific facts of underwater seismology.       

Up, down and off the Andaman coast, it’s tourism as usual. But some spectres linger. For those who lost loved ones and for the survivors who suffer sweat-soaked nightmares, it would be a grave disservice to whitewash what will likely be the biggest natural disaster of their lifetimes. In his non-fiction work Into the Wild, John Krakauer referred to a mother losing her child as creating a “sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind baulks at taking its measure”.   

The tsunami is also like that. In the days and weeks following the cataclysm, things were so shambolic it was difficult to comprehend. Body counts rose by the hour, newspapers and networks created waves of misinformation, elephants cleared the rubble on the beach of Khao Lak or carried sheet-wrapped corpses tied to their tusks, through the debris, stories that sounded similar to urban legends surfaced, such as the Phuket hotelier who told me they found a shark swimming laps in the hotel pool on Boxing Day. 

There were also less apocryphal death-defying tales of survival, such as the young Indonesian man found and rescued by a fishing boat after spending eight days at sea clinging to an uprooted tree. 

Speaking about the relief effort on Phuket, Ultmann recalls, in the emotional manner still common among those who were there: “Race and religion, age and wealth didn’t matter. Everyone pitched in together. It was mind-blowing.” 

Five years later it’s easier to comprehend the horror of the tragedy. Yet the tsunami still exerts a primal pull of bitter and sweet memories washing in and out on every tide.