Germany Assures Help After Quake

Vacationers go home

On Sunday evening, German travel group LTU sent a charter plane with experts from German aid organizations from Düsseldorf to Colombo, Sri Lanka. Tourism operators Thomas Cook, Rewe, Pauschaltouristik, Meier's Weltreisen and Dertour have cancelled flights to the worst hit areas.

Instead, many companies have been flying empty planes to the crisis-struck region to bring tourists back to Europe. The first plane of erstwhile holidaymakers returned on Monday morning to Germany on a Thai Airways flight from Phuket and Bangkok to Frankfurt am Main.

Thailand has escaped relatively lightly compared to the calamitous tolls in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. But as Southeast Asia's busiest tourist destination, with 12 million foreign visits expected this year, it is undergoing a Herculean tourist evacuation. Hundreds of rescue ships, helicopters and planes have been mobilized to move foreign visitors, estimated by a tourism official as topping 100,000, who had packed into southern Thailand's famed resorts for Christmas and New Year.

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, overseeing the rescue operations, vowed to fly any foreign visitor in need back to his or her country free of charge. "Any tourists who wanted to leave Thailand, we will issue a certificate of identification to use as their passports and Thailand will pay all expenses."

An emergency services director for Thai Airways said the government was encouraging all foreign tourists to leave southern Thailand and return to Bangkok or their home countries.

Beach holidays

In Sri Lanka, where at least 70 foreign tourists have died, dozens of German and British vacationers who survived tidal waves moved to a makeshift refugee center before cutting short their holidays and leaving, as the island's official death toll climbed to well over 5,000.

Bruised and shaken, men and women huddled at a conference center where tour operators set up desks to arrange for the evacuation of the tourists. "We have never experienced anything like this before," Briton Ken Babb told AFP. "This is not an adventure. This is a disaster."

Tourist Melony Maas, one of thousands of Germans said to be holidaying on the beach, said she and her mother wanted to help the Sri Lankan staff at their hotel after the first tidal wave, but the staff insisted they leave. "I cannot describe how I feel," Maas said as she awaited a flight home.

"This is very sad for the Sri Lankan people. A lot of poor people have died."

"This is my second visit to Sri Lanka. What I want now is to get back, but I will come again," she vowed.

And indeed for the majority of tourists who were able to flee the region, the catastrophe will leave little more than negative memories. For the hundreds of thousands of people who call the region home, the work of caring for families and friends, rebuilding houses and businesses and securing drinking water and medical supplies has just begun. The clean-up process will take weeks and months.