Divers at Pulau Weh tell of journey to safety

Divers at Pulau Weh tell of journey to safety

Neil Western, Agence France Prese/Hong Kong

When the catastrophic earthquake struck, British tourist Al Howard and his French girlfriend Sophie Pasquier were among the closest people on the planet to its tumultuous epicenter.

Two days later -- after an epic journey across seas littered with floating corpses and mangled cars, then crawling over a wasteland of flattened houses and bloodied bodies -- the tourists remarkably emerged alive to tell the tale.

The couple's story of survival, recounted to AFP after they successfully fled Indonesia on Tuesday, is one of the first to emerge from witnesses closest to the center of the disaster which left more than 55,000 dead across Asia.

Howard, a 33-year-old former soldier, and Pasquier, 34, were on a diving trip on Pulau Weh, just 130 kilometers from Sunday's seabed eruption, when the earth shook.

The couple, who live in Hong Kong, were waken at 8 a.m. on Sunday when their holiday bungalow shook for 30 minutes, Howard said. Within minutes giant waves roared in and reduced the holiday idyll to ruins, with water rising almost as high as their hut, which fortunately was 15 meters up in the highlands behind on Gapang Beach.

From their balcony they watched as the waters receded to leave a scene of devastation, with huts destroyed and debris flung far and wide. Yet so remote is the island that the couple had no idea of the scale of unfolding disaster they had been among the first to witness.

"We were totally cut off," said Howard, a sales director with European aviation giant Airbus. "We had no idea anyone else was affected because communications were wiped out."

It was only after they hired a fishing boat to ferry them to Sumatra that the carnage wrought by Asia's biggest earthquake in 40 years became terrifyingly real.

Arriving in what had been Banda Aceh, they were confronted with visions of hell.

"Everything was flattened. It was like a nuclear bomb had hit the place," said Howard. "I've seen bodies before but nothing by like this. We lost count."

Pasquier, 34, said she felt lucky to be alive.

"It was indescribable. I'm just glad we made it out. I feel so lucky," said the public relations executive.

The night before the quake struck the couple had been celebrating Christmas with two friends, Briton Sean Patterson and his Japanese girlfriend Akiko Tada.

They dined along with 25 other mostly Western tourists at the Lumba Lumba Dive Center, a resort set up nine years ago on Pulau Weh by Dutch couple Ton and Marjan Edberg.

"When the bungalow shook I thought it might be a volcanic eruption, that it was Krakatoa erupting, but then I realized it was an earthquake," Howard said.

Had they not been sleeping off the effects of the previous night's party they would have been on the beach with other tourists when the raging waters rushed in, he said.

Instead Pasquier was stood outside the bungalow and shouted "come out now!" as the tsunami roared inland at terrifying speed.

"I got up and water was suddenly three meters away from the hut having surged right through the dive center," said Howard.

When the waves finally retreated to the shoreline Howard and Pasquier walked down to the resort. "Nothing was left. Huts had been destroyed. Concrete benches uprooted and hurled 30 meters."

Several aftershocks rocked the island as the four friends joined other tourists gathering up wreckage strewn along the beach and patching up the wounded.

"There were rumors people had been swept away, but we didn't know. There were no bodies on the beach. Some people had been lacerated by the debris and everyone brought medical supplies to bandage them," Howard said.

The next day, Howard and this three friends decided to leave the stricken village. They drove over the island to the more protected eastern shore but found Bulohan village had also been demolished. Driving on to Sabang village they managed to hire a fishing boat to take them to Banda Aceh.

Halfway through the three-and-a-half hour voyage, the group sailed into so much detritus which clogged the propeller that they feared they would not make it to land.

Then the horror began to strike them.

"As we got within a mile (1.6 kilometers) of the coast we saw bodies, cars, even snakes floating in the water ... there was debris everywhere," said Howard.

When they reached Banda Aceh the ferry pier had been destroyed, so they pulled up next to another fishing boat and clambered ashore to a scene of utter carnage.

"Oh My God -- a child," Pasquier gasped as they walked past the first of hundreds of dead bodies they would have to clamber past and over as they made their way through the ruins of the city.

"From then on we walked for two to three hours in total silence," Howard said. "There was no road left. We had to pick our own way through the destruction, right past the dead.

"Walking through the carnage was awful. At some points we had to crawl through the rubble with smashed faces of the dead inches from our own.

"I saw child on a bonnet of a car. A mother with three children laid together. Some corpses had tarpaulin over them, others didn't. There were so many bodies I gave up counting.

After a grueling six kilometer stumble through the twisted wreckage, the four tourists eventually found a road. A makeshift morgue nearby was stacked with hundreds of bodies, Howard said.

"People were standing around shocked, holding their heads in despair. What could they do? They had lost their lives."

After almost three hours waiting at the roadside, the four hitched a ride on a truck to Banda Aceh airport 40 minutes away.

Howard said their luck was in -- a Garuda Indonesia plane was on the runway. Even though the airport was partly flooded the exhausted survivors managed to get on board and an hour later the plane took off for north Sumatra's airport of Medan.

In Medan, their mobile phones began to pick up signals and they were able to call worried friends and relatives.

It was then they realized that they had not just been at the center of a local disaster but at the epicenter one of the world's biggest ever earthquakes.

"We are worried about the people we left behind," said Howard. "Everything has been destroyed. While there is still food available on Pulau Weh, there maybe a shortage of bottled water. And who knows when they will get help or new supplies."