It was like a dream: the Stardust Hotel

This article first appeared in The Bulletin, December, 2005.

'You can hardly believe you are under ten fathoms of water. It was like a dream,' Merete said, before waving her arms wildly in the air, miming the act of struggling up from under the wave that engulfed her, along with her hotel, husband, guests and staff. She gasped and looked upwards to indicate to me the shock of the moment when, after having being held for so long she thought she would drown, she breathed air and saw the sky again. She was later found, injured, on the roof of what was left of her hotel. The body of husband of more than 25 years was found 3 days later and 3 kilometers away, over on the other side of the lagoon. 'But I knew something was wrong,' Merete told me, 'when he hadn't returned by nightfall that first day.'

When I told people I was going to stay at Arugam Bay, a surf destination on the east coast of Sri Lanka, there was one hotel everyone recommended to me: The Stardust Beach Hotel. I was told, time and time again, that it was 'famous'. The word famous, I came to realise, meant many things. It meant that the Danish couple, chef Per Goodman and his wife, architect Merete Scheller, were particularly intrepid. They had started the hotel 23 years ago when there was no tourist accommodation in an area devastated by civil war. They also meant that Merete had a strong sense of style and Pers was a great cook. It is even more 'famous' now that Pers has died and Merete has chosen to stay and rebuild - 'I like building' - when she so easily could have returned to Denmark.

Those of us who experienced a disaster like the tsunami on the news each evening are several disasters down the track now. We've moved onto the flooding and bungled evacuation of New Orleans, the horrific images of victims of the bomb-blasts in Bali and the earthquake in Pakistan. All through this year other horrors have hummed, like so much white noise: suicide bombings in Iraq, famine in Africa. The times are so tumultuous we do not often get a chance to see what happens to people once the disaster is over, the water's receded (there is always,it seems, too much water), the AID has flooded in and people have forced themselves to keep on going.

Four-hundred and twenty people died in Arugam Bay last Boxing Day and that number seems relatively small given the devastation I see when I arrived, eight months later. By the time the van I am in crosses the new bridge (the old bridge had been swept away) which links the town of Pottuvil to Arugam Bay the road has ceased to exist; it is now just bits of asphalt a few inches wide surrounded by potholes. The buildings on either side of it have been reduced to the foundations, a few columns, and, sometimes, one brightly painted wall. My driver gestures at a pile of rubble to his left and says, 'that's your hotel' then pulls up in front of a single whitewashed building, surrounded by piles of bricks and dirt. When we get out a young man with a broad smile comes to meet us: 'I'm Richard,' he says. 'Welcome to The Stardust.' The sun is setting over the lagoon behind us. There is a yoga class for surfers being held in the ruins of the restaurant: people are attempting head stands and their legs flounder in the air as they try, and often fail, to hold their pose. Women in burkhas are walking along the beach, a few steps behind their husbands, before the night sets in.

The Stardust Hotel reopened for business on July 1st with only 6 rooms and some cabanas - far fewer rooms than it once had. The well water is still contaminated which means that the limited fresh water available is being provided by the Danish Army. The electricity is provided by a generator. If you look at the rubble around you might feel that they were opening prematurely, but there is demand - they had been booked out from day 1 - and no other way of getting together the money to rebuild. Eight months after the tsunami the few lucky enough to have insurance - like the Stardust - are still wrangling with their insurance companies and hadn't yet received payment.

The east coast of Sri Lanka feels very different to other parts of the country. It is sunny when it rains in other parts of the land, then it rains when the west is dry. When you drive east in August, as I did, you move from grey skies to the intense glare of cloudless blue: it is like moving from the black and white of Dorothy's Kansas, to her colorful dream of Oz.

While people in Arugam Bay talk with exuberance about the rebuilding, no-one wants to remember, or talk about, that Sunday morning when their town, friends and family disappeared. The most anyone other than Merete says to me on the matter of their survival is, 'I climbed a tree.' You look up the straight palm trees, without so much as a foothold, and it becomes clear why more children, woman and old people died. The agility and strength needed to get up these trees quickly would defeat most westerners of any age.

Because of the Civil war, and because of the distance from the political centre of Colombo Arugam Bay is less dependent - that was the word used by a UN worker I met - than towns on the west side of the country. But both west and east have got caught up in the the highly politicized Coastal Conservation Zone (CCZ) that has been introduced since the tsunami. This is meant to extend 200m inland from the high water line in the north and the east, and 100m in the south and the west. Damaged structures are not allowed to be repaired or rebuilt if they fall within this zone. This zone is also the one which the government has agreed to provide housing to those who lost their homes. This means that if you were living 300 metres from the water line when the surge destroyed your home - and there are tens of thousands of people who were - then that's just tough luck.

There are many good environmental reasons for introducing such a zone - the areas worse hit by the tsunami were where sand-dunes had been bulldozed and mangroves destroyed - and the CCZ does allow for the re-development of hotels that are registered with the Ceylon Tourist Board; but that is a tiny number of the hundreds of hotels that dot the coast. A policy like this mean a tourist town like Arugam Bay will be wiped off the map not by the tsunami, but the laws that have come in its wake. Everyone I spoke to in the months I was in Sri Lanka believed the government was using the CCZ to clear the coast line before selling swathes of it to the developers of big hotels. In Arugam Bay they held protests before deciding to ignore the CCZ, daring the government to come in an forcibly close the entire town. Last I heard they were being left alone, though troops were being used in other parts of the island to quell the riots the zone has caused.

On my first night at the Stardust I sat in the reception area, now a temporary restaurant, and ate a truly memorable meal that was cooked on a gas ring in what used to be a guest bedroom. In the years before Pers died international chefs visited annually, cooking for guests and teaching Richard - who has worked at Stardust for 14 of its 23 years - his trade. Most of the staff at the Stardust has been there for years and one reason Merete didn't return home is because she doesn't want to leave the staff without jobs in an area where unemployment sits at around 70%.

I listen to the talk around the restaurant: 'There's a swell from Indo that should be here tonight, man. The place will go off.' Clearly the tsunami has not daunted the surfers and when it comes to waves it is still a case of the bigger the better. To get back to my room I pick my way through a dozen or so dogs all of whom have blue ribbons tied in a bow around their necks. They are flopped in little piles, cooling themselves on the sand. All the dogs are young - not much bigger than puppies. (It is only later that I realize that I don't see an old animal for the whole time I am there.) That first night I lie on my bed, under a fan, and listen to men chat as they pour concrete and thatch roofs till almost midnight. When they stop I can hear the surf crashing onto the beach and it is hard not to wonder how loud the sea sounded last Boxing Day, as it receded then surged in, swallowing the coast line. Six hours later I am woken by a glorious, but sleep shattering, sun rise.

Arugam Bay's relief work is centered around Siam Nest , a cafe that used to be known best for its Thai food. I don't know what the place looked like before, but now it's a rough looking arrangement of stilts with an open air restaurant upstairs and a kitchen underneath. There is a scrawled sign written on a white board there, stuck above the improvised bar: 'This event is not the end! Remember: it's a new beginning and a great chance for us all.' Posted 20 hrs, December @6, 2004." A second sign tells us a satellite system is in place so there will be 2 or 3 hours warning if another wave is driving across the ocean floor from Indonesia and a third says that any tips left will go to the homeless. Less inspiringly, a fourth warns women not to go around the point alone as there have been several attempted rapes of western women in the area since the influx of builders and Aid workers.

Pretty grey tabby kittens dot the laps of the restaurant patrons and lounge on bags of rice. Presumably they are the from the first litter of the very pregnant tabby who lies, exhausted, in the shade. The guy who is serving us tells us they found her crying up a tree after the tsunami; most cats drowned. A man has a tiny monkey on a lead - he was orphaned he tells us - and it dashes about before grabbing a passing cat by the tail and climbing onto its back so he can ride it.

The movie Step into Liquid is playing on several TVs around the verandah but I only tune in for long enough to hear talk of a 'perpetually mellow pelican'. But it seems that surfer duds have given Aragum Bay more than bad movies. People tell me, time and time again and with genuine gratitude, that nothing, not even the tsunami, could keep the surfers away. They were accommodated, along with all the locals, in tents, until cabanas started to spring up again. Their presence gave the town a purpose, and the beginnings of a livelihood.

'The view is better now,' Merete tells me one evening, gesturing to the ocean and the breathtaking sweep of coast. Before the wave the stretch of sand from the hotel to the beach had been a garden of flowers, palm trees and Palmyrahs. Some had survived the force of the wave but the salt it left behind was slowly poisoning them. Then she looks sad for a moment, 'Everyday,' she remembers, 'we cut flowers from the garden'. And it strikes me that it is the delicate details that get lost when a disaster is reported on and now that I am back home I don't so much remember the ruins as an old man laughing and pointing up a palm tree when asked how he survived; Mars, sitting high, dark red in the night sky; kids playing chasey in the skeleton of a school; and a young man at the Stardust bending over a plant and stroking its leaves, encouraging it to keep going until the rains come, the salt is washed from the soil and things can grow anew.

Permanent Link for this Article