A candle and a laptop

The tsunami alert

In the last day of the my meeting in Bali, I realized at breakfast, that I was not dreaming at night when I felt everything shaking strongly. I have never felt an earthquake before! It was rated 6.5 and most people woke up with the shake.

Later that afternoon we heard about a strong earthquake in Japan and the 10m tsunami wave that did so much damage. We started to receive messages about a possible tsunami coming to Indonesia. Some people at the meeting panicked, packed their computers and decided to run. We left in a hurry without passports (most of them were left in the room) but we all agreed our computers (that we all had with us!) were far more important than the passports and the money we had left behind!

One of our colleagues lost a close friend in the 2004 Tsunami. The rest of us still have in our memories the devastating images of that Tsunami. I kept remembering my little daughter panic about Tsunamis. Every time we travel some place new she asks about the possibility of Tsunamis and typhoons to happen there… I just hope she does not watch the news these days!

We discussed briefly where to go. The recommendation was to go to higher floors (higher than 3rd floor) on well structured buildings. Our hotel had 4 floors but the building looked a bit run down, so we were not sure about the strength of its foundations! Since most of us are genebank managers we are trained to take decisions to minimize risks!

One of the persons in the group wondered why did we make so much effort to save our plant germplasm for so many years and now who would take care of it if all of us disappear!

One hired a taxi (in the middle of the rush he paid the taxi signing on his room number, forgetting he was staying at a nearby hotel – so minutes after we left the taxi got a call complaining about the fraud… that he promised to paid in cash after returning) for a few hours and took several of us to go to high ground. A second car was waiting for the rest of the group and was suppose to go the same place we had gone, but for some reason they never left the hotel and the message we left did not reach them.

We did not know where to go but just asked for a mountain nearby. The taxi driver took some time to understand what we meant, but when he understood, he quickly called his wife (they live near the sea) to warn her about it. The taxi driver identified the right place and drove us there. We soon realized (for our dismay!) that we were still near the sea, but after checking the altitude with the GPS we felt safe to see we were at 80m! This sounded high enough and we started to relax a bit.

We ended up on a beautiful cliff with a temple surrounded with gardens. The only problem was the hundreds of monkeys that were quite aggressive taking any accessories from the people. One of our colleagues had his reading glasses stolen twice. The first time he got them back (after giving food to the monkey to force him to drop the glasses), but the second monkey was more cleaver and did not return the glasses. Luckily our colleague had a spare set in the car! We felt sorry for the monkeys and wondered if they were trained to do that, once every time they stole something the locals nearby gave them food and then asked the owners of the items to pay them something… But on the other end, monkeys are extremely clever and does not take long for them to take advantage of such situation! They are however extremely fat as they are constantly eating… They do not look so healthy!

Only two of us had a telephone with us, one of them with internet connection. We started then to send emails to the other colleagues trying to find news. We also communicated with our families in different countries trying to get updates from the internet about the predictions for the tsunami in this region. After a couple of hours of indecisions, reasoning, communication attempts and a relaxing beer, we realized that we were far away (south west) from the place predicted for the tsunami wave to reach Indonesia (north east), it was getting dark so we could not see the spectacular tsunami approach anyway, one of our directors was at a reception near the sea with 20 ministers (so if they were safe – and they would know – we should not fear!) and we had to attend the conference dinner with a musical and dance show that was already booked at the hotel.

We also learned later on that the sea shore in Bali is very flat, reason for the boats to have difficulties reaching the shore (so the island stayed isolated form invasors for a long time, preserving its rich cultural and religious traditions) and the tsunamis are less likely to do great damage!

We went back and had a nice relaxing evening with spectacular Bali dances and music!

Later that evening when I was already packing my suitcase I felt another short earthquake… I got quickly dressed again until I went to bed, just in case… I must admit I am very happy to go home soon! These shaky areas of the world are very beautiful but a bit too scary when they start shaking this much!

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