Word: patong
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...humans - in just one collection point of the city, the authorities have gathered 3,500 corpses. On the Andaman coast in Thailand, soldiers are using an ax and a spade to dig out the body of a woman half-buried beneath a palm tree. Eighty kilometers south in Patong, a honky-tonk beach town on Phuket Island, 100 bodies are laid out in front of a morgue that has room to refrigerate only two. To the south, in Galle, an old Dutch town on the Sri Lankan coast, Z.A.M. Fahim, 45, a restaurant owner, has found 32 bodies before midday...
...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 Indonesia?which was home to some two-thirds of those killed by the tsunami?trickled 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...
...wasn't. On the island roughly the size of Singapore, just a sliver of land was affected. Most of the deaths took place on only two beaches?Patong and its near neighbor Kamala?while some others received not much more than a rude bump. Even at Patong, most of the damage was confined to areas immediately behind the beach. Today, much of the debris has been cleared away or hidden behind high fences, and damaged hotels and businesses have already reopened or plan to do so in the next few months. "The devastation," says O.B. Wetzell, an American resort developer...
...Certainly, the tourists on Patong beach are smiling. A little over a month since the waters retreated and then advanced with such deadly effect, Herman M?ller, 41, a truck driver from Germany, is sitting on Patong beach and having, he says, "a very nice holiday." He's not alone. Hundreds of plastic deck chairs line the sand in two neat rows. Local hawkers do a steady trade supplying beer and tanning lotion to the crowd, while, behind them, kneeling on bamboo mats, masseuses cheerily press their palms into the backs of heavyset men for $8 an hour. On the beachfront...
...that message gets back to Europe, it will help those like Buncha Intiapat, 30, a motorcycle-taxi driver in Patong. On Dec. 26 he watched the wall of water advance on the beach. Instinct told him to ride his bike quickly away to safety. Four of his friends died, and he watched children scrambling and screaming before they were swallowed by the waves. In the days after the tsunami, Buncha says, he had considered moving back home to the northeast of Thailand, as many of his friends did. But now, as each day brings the opening of a new business...