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Hide-and-seek with crocodiles
31/12/2004 21:44 - (SA)
Port Blair - For G Balan, a gut-wrenching obstacle stood between his tsunami-devastated village and any hope of safety: A lagoon teeming with crocodiles.
Luckily for him and others who managed to swim across, the crocs were too busy feasting on the corpses of humans and animals to take any notice.
"We realised that there was certain death on this side, so we decided to cross and take the risk," Balan said. "It was hide-and-seek. But we swam."
Balan's ordeal on India's isolated Andaman and Nicobar island chain started with the shiver of a lemon tree and the shaking of a tea cup. Then the sea seemed to explode.
"You want to imagine the waves? Look at this huge coconut tree. There was a coconut tree like this next to my house. The water went over it. That high," Balan said, gesturing at a relief camp in Port Blair.
He said people were screaming and some prayed as they ran. Balan fled with his wife to a hilltop, where the couple and scores of others hunkered down for the night. There was no food.
One group of youths went into the forest to find mountain streams and bring water in plastic cans hurled by the waves. Balan led the others to a destroyed government compound where they stole rice that they boiled and ate.
The next day they reached a nearby harbour and a rescue ship came. The male villagers let the women and children board. When the boat was full, Balan and the others started walking to the next harbour, 18km away.
In their path was the crocodile lagoon.
"It still gives me a shiver. If they had seen me, they would have caught me by the stomach. They catch the soft part of the body and drag you away," Balan said.
Balan's encounter with crocodiles wasn't the only perilous brush with wildlife on the island chain. Building contractor Raj Ratnam was swept up to the top of a tree and clung to it for three days - with a giant python twirled around the trunk for company.
For Balan, the journey after the lagoon became simpler but hardly less life-threatening. The group had to walk 15km without food or water.
Among those in the group was 55-year-old Parvathi, who uses a single name like most people in her village. She had been engulfed by waves and survived by hanging on to a broken wall.
"Animals, people, TVs, bricks, carpets, everything was rushing past me. Many hit me. I didn't let go," she said.
"Straight ahead of me, I saw a dead woman about my age, buried in the mud. Only her neck and face were visible. She was looking straight at me," Parvathi said. "I almost died, I was so terrified."
As the survivors walked, they came across a shattered temple by the sea dedicated to the Hindu goddess Kali, known for her valour and short temper. The temple was just mortar and bricks now, and beneath the rubble they saw the bodies of three men and two women.
Balan knew them - a couple and three relatives who had apparently been praying at the temple when the waves destroyed it.
Balan didn't know that the couple's daughter had been flung by the waves into a deep forest kilometres away.
There, 16-year-old Divya and a neighbour held tightly on to trees for four days, until the surrounding water began to drain out.
They are now recovering at a government hospital on the island, said Gunesekhera, the neighbour's older brother.
"Even in all this death and sadness, there have been some miracles," Gunesekhera said.
- AP
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