So I’m sitting on the boardwalk with Nerylie at one of our favourite restaurants in Mandurah and I feel movement through my feet. Just someone walking past. It’s been nine months since the Lombok earthquake and I’m still unnerved by the slightest vibration. I’m past jumping up looking for the nearest exit, but I wonder if I’ll ever totally move on.
Reality is that we got through the whole thing pretty well unscathed and almost certainly grew through the experience. We’ve been back since to catch up with friends and maybe for a bit of closure only to be confronted with the reality for the locals. Livelihoods put on hold and maybe even a child lost due to a premature birth. We’ll head back at the beginning of next year and stay at both of our favourite hotels: Puri Saron – badly damaged the night we arrived in August and Mama Bella’s which became our refuge for that crazy week. Hopefully Senggigi will be back to the relaxing escape that we have come to love and the smiles will be back on the faces of the locals.
Checked in to the Puri Saron and we headed straight out to Sendok for dinner. We being Nerylie, Nicki, Abbey and I. What a wonderful thing, having the opportunity to holiday with family like that. Nicki and I were finally going to get the opportunity to work together on our music. We had just ordered our meals and Nerylie commented that the ground was shaking. It soon became obvious that it was a quake and we quickly moved poolside where we were pretty well clear of the building. The movement progressively became more violent accompanied by a rumble a bit like a timpani crescendo. Don’t really know how long the whole thing lasted but, by the time the last violent shake occurred, we were a tightly huddled group including guests, locals and staff. Part of the roof had fallen, only just missing Nicki. We were all unscathed until Nicki slipped on something spilled during the quake resulting in a bruised butt. We headed out to the road where I went into teacher mode trying to comfort a few young people, both locals and tourists. Everyone was a bit shaken. Everyone except Nerylie who, to this day, wonders if she has a sensitive bone in her body. Power was cut, a situation that would persist for the rest of our holiday, but the phones still worked. Data was turned back on ($350 later) and everyone was trying to communicate with their families – news about natural disasters travels fast. Suddenly there was a stream of traffic with people shouting “tsunami”. I hadn’t thought about that. We were at sea level, maybe 200m from the beach. We quickly made our way through a hotel carpark which probably took us to about 20m above sea level. After a while we started to think that maybe we should go higher and followed a group further up the hill until we came to a clearing which I estimated to be about 50m above sea level. As it turned out, there was only a small tsunami moving away from us as the epicentre was on Lombok, about 45km from us. The experience on that clearing was quite surreal. People, approximately 100, from all over the World sharing their thoughts in a multitude of languages, all trying to manage this one common experience. We stayed there for about two hours and then made our way back down to the main street where, I was surprised to see, most buildings were still standing. The morning would reveal structural damage that rendered most of them uninhabitable. One bar had its lights on, powered by a generator. What else do you do after an earthquake? Nothing else to do so we spent the next hour drinking at the bar, served by the owner because all of the staff had fled back to their villages. We eventually made our way back to Puri Saron where staff had laid out mattresses in the carpark as the hotel had sustained a great deal of damage and was definitely not going to be our home for the next week. Sleep was not an option that night as emergency vehicles travelled north to the epicentre and then back down with the injured. 500 people lost their lives that night. Nicola had a bruised butt but the rest of us were just shaken (not Nerylie). We were so lucky. The following day, after arranging alternative accommodation at Mama Bella’s, I returned to Puri Saron to retrieve our stuff and was informed that the ceiling and part of the roof were resting on Nicki and Abbey’s beds.