There was an earthquake. I was really scared. I almost fainted.

I messaged her straightaway to confirm she was okay. She wasn’t hurt but was rattled and worried about the aftershocks.

I had left Bangkok the previous day, Thursday, March 27, 2025, taking a train to Hua Hin, a coastal town three hours south of the Thai capital, built along an endless stretch of sand and sea. I hadn’t felt anything in Hua Hin, but being so close to the water, I was mindful of a tsunami.

On Boxing Day, 2004, an Indonesian earthquake generated violent waves that crashed into fourteen countries, including Thailand. The tsunami killed a quarter of a million people. Once you know about such things, they tend to stick.

I returned to my apartment, a safer distance from the water, and spent the afternoon drinking coffee while compulsively checking the news.

The quake’s epicentre was in Myanmar, which borders Thailand to the north and west. Bangkok is built on soft soil which makes it prone to heavy shaking during seismic events, even in cases like this where the epicentre was a thousand kilometres away. My social media filled with videos of water splashing out of rooftop pools and pouring down the sides of buildings.

Five thousand people died in Myanmar, but there were just over one hundred deaths in Thailand. Most Thai casualties occurred when a partially constructed, thirty-three-story skyscraper collapsed in a pile of concrete, steel, and dust. The collapse was captured by cellphones and dashcams.

The Thai government declared a state of emergency.

The building site was directly across the street from the Chatuchak Market, the largest weekend market in the world. It boasts 15,000 stalls and attracts 200,000 visitors each week. Beyond those numbers, I don’t have words to describe its scale. The market only opens on Saturdays and Sundays, which is fortunate because the earthquake happened on a Friday. Had it struck the following day, the market would have been swarming with people, and the potential for mass panic is something I prefer not to contemplate.

I returned to Bangkok a week later to find the city busier than ever and revving up for the Songkran festival. Dating back to the Hindu festival, Makara Sankranti, Songkran is an ancient purification and renewal tradition. It corresponds with the Thai New Year and is the most important holiday in Thailand. In 2023, UNESCO recognized Songkran as an Intangible Cultural Heritage, luring even more tourists to Thailand.

Tourists view Songkran as an opportunity to party and have water fights, but for devout Buddhists like Janrawee, it is a sacred time. She had returned to her ancestral home in Nakhon Phanom province to spend the week in prayer, merit-making (a form of charity), and to honour deceased relatives. Buddhists pour water on Buddha statues and over the hands of elders, as symbolic gestures of cleansing and gratitude.

Much like major holidays in the West, people realized there was money to be made, and Songkran is now marketed as a nationwide water festival. There are parades, temple ceremonies, and raves. It’s fun. It’s loud. The bars are full of people looking to party and splash water on whoever they can. I doubt many tourists give much thought to sacred purification rituals, as evidenced by the man I saw dancing in a roadside bar, water gun and drink in hand, proudly wearing an “I heart BJ” shirt.

People dress in brightly coloured Hawaiian-style shirts and roam the streets with super soakers and buckets of water. It’s impossible to stay dry, which isn’t so bad since April is the hottest month of the year with temperatures soaring into the high thirties. Trucks loaded with water tanks prowl the streets, spraying unsuspecting pedestrians. I was shot more than once, Columbian hitman style, by someone on the back of a motorbike.

Songkran was a lot of fun for the first couple of days, but as it dragged into the second week, it became tiresome. Sometimes you just want to walk down the street without having to worry about someone pouring a bucket of water over your head. The final straw was when two boys stepped out from an alley and sprayed me in the crotch, proving that Thai brats are just as obnoxious as their Canadian counterparts.

I needed a break and decided to visit the collapsed building. Given that it was a weekday, Chatuchak Market was closed and the surrounding streets were relatively quiet.

I confess to two competing motives–one noble, the other, less so. The families of missing workers had established a vigil at the site and were collecting money to help pay for food and medical bills. Many Thai people are poor and I wanted to help. At the same time, I wanted to gawk.

I’m not the sort of person who engages in voyeur tourism, like those who ride tour buses through the slums of Kolkata (Calcutta). Still, it is always interesting to watch rescue operations, wherever they happen, perhaps because most of us never participate in them directly. We are outside observers looking in. Be they car crashes or crumpled buildings, they remind us of the fragility of life. When confronted with our own mortality, it’s impossible to turn away.

I climbed the steps of an overhead pedestrian walkway linking opposite sides of the street and surveyed the scene. The side of the former building was lined with makeshift tents built with heavy plastic walls. There were trailers, cars, trucks, vans, and ambulances parked along the street, and there were people everywhere, some in work clothes, some in uniforms, and others in suits. The far side of the street was equally active with photographers and film crews.

From the walkway, I could see over a fence into the rescue site. Several cranes and a handful of backhoes and bulldozers were busy moving boulder-sized chunks of cement. Trucks came and went. They arrived empty and left loaded with broken concrete and metal. Two weeks on, the pile of debris was still forty to fifty feet high. Workers were climbing over it like ants, digging through the wreckage in search of survivors. More than thirty people remained unaccounted for, and the urgency to find them was intense.

In Canada, you would never be allowed to get close to an active rescue site, but Thailand has different safety rules. I returned to street level and headed towards the site entrance. No one stopped me or questioned why I was there. A group of people were busy cooking meals for the rescue workers, and a man offered me a plate of food. I declined. Farther along, a woman offered a bottle of water. I declined that too.

At the entrance, it occurred to me that I could probably stroll in and start sifting through the rubble or maybe even fire up a backhoe and start digging. I had the good sense not to do so. I pressed on.

At the far end of the street there was one final plastic tent, and unlike every other tent, it had a sign partially written in English:

Thailand Disaster Support Help Desk

I figured that if anyone could tell me where I could donate money, they would be inside this tent. I pulled aside the plastic sheet, which functioned as a door, and poked my head in. A woman immediately brought me inside. There were injured people lying on beds, some of them groaning. They looked more like rescue workers than victims pulled from the rubble, who likely would have been rushed to the nearest hospital. Medical staff scurried between beds, dressing wounds and setting limbs in casts.

I explained that I wanted to donate money, but the woman didn’t understand. She seated me at a desk beside a man who appeared to have a broken arm. A doctor was asking him questions and taking notes.

The doctor handed me a pen and a thick stack of papers, but the writing was in Thai. I don’t read Thai, but they looked suspiciously like medical history forms. I know the sounds a few Thai characters make, but that’s it. You might imagine trying to decipher the sentence, “The baby blew bubbles,” knowing only that the letter b made a ‘buh’ sound.

After finishing with the man beside me, the doctor realized I hadn’t filled out the forms.

“You don’t read Thai,” she said.

I shook my head to indicate I didn’t. She placed a blood pressure cuff around my left bicep, which began to inflate. The doctor spoke a little English and asked for my passport. She recorded my details, which made me fear I would be arrested for posing as an injured worker. My blood pressure probably spiked fifty points.

When the doctor saw my blood pressure reading, she looked alarmed.

“Very high. Too high. You need to spend the day resting.”

I didn’t know how to tell her that I have essentially devoted my entire life to resting, so I nodded to indicate I would. I explained again that I just wanted to donate money. She looked at me blankly.

“Do you want a massage?” she asked.

I didn’t.

More than anything, I wanted to leave, but I must have given her an ambiguous look, because she waved a woman over and told her I was stressed and needed a massage. The last thing I wanted to do was waste the time of the doctors and nurses or lie on a bed that might be needed for an injured person. It’s a miracle my blood pressure didn’t rise high enough to give me a stroke.

I was led to a bed where two nurses massaged my back and legs. It was the most uncomfortable massage of my life. I couldn’t decide if I should act stressed or relaxed. If I were relaxed, they might let me go. On the other hand, if they thought I wasn’t stressed, they might accuse me of playing victim just to get a free massage.

I opted to pretend I was stressed, which wasn’t overly difficult at this point. I tensed my muscles and made noises like I was in pain, trying to fit in with the wounded. As the massage progressed, I let my muscles relax and began making soft sighing noises. It was a delicate moment. I wanted to signal that I was feeling better without letting my moans sound creepy.

The nurses continued to rub my back and legs for another ten minutes before asking how I felt. I flashed a big smile and two thumbs up. They asked if they could take my picture which jolted me with a fresh wave of paranoia.

Do we really need to have photographic evidence of this event?

Because it was Songkran, I was wearing a short-sleeve shirt that was covered in bright orange koi fish. All I could think was that in a year’s time, they would build a memorial to the victims and those who gave their all to save lives. And who did I imagine would be the poster child of the memorial? Me, of course. The lone Canadian, in the koi fish shirt, was traumatized to near cardiovascular death, saved only by the gifted hands of the medical staff.

Not wishing to raise any red flags, I agreed to the photo and spontaneously asked if I could also have a picture with the nurses. Another medic abandoned a man on a nearby bed to take our photo. The two nurses beamed, and I did my best to smile like only an earthquake trauma victim can.

I thanked the nurses. We bowed to each other in the customary Thai way, and I headed to the exit, bowing to more people along the way. They all bowed back.

I never did find the vigil.

I returned to my apartment, still expecting to be arrested for impersonating the emotionally distressed. I took a shower hoping to wash away the residual feelings of wrongdoing, and spent the rest of the afternoon steeped in paranoia, while googling, “where can I donate money to earthquake victims?”