Time to Go Back to the Beach

Patong beach, on the western coast of Phuket, Thailand, is the place to which many international journalists scrambled in order to report on the tsunami that hit Asia on Dec. 26. The death toll on the island numbered more than 200, at least half of them foreign tourists. Gradually, the scale of the destruction in Indonesiawhich was home to some two-thirds of those killed by the tsunamitrickled into the world's newspapers and onto TV screens. But in those early moments after the disaster, it was the harrowing images transmitted from the most famous beach on Thailand's most famous island that people...

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