Warawadee Hemaratna, who runs an upmarket furniture shop in Phuket, was supposed to go and hang out with friends on the beach on the morning of what those in the area now call "the wave". But she felt lazy and slept in, before calling at the shop to pick up some things.
"We were in the shop and people said 'run'. We'd heard about the earthquake and the rumours were flying. Two waves, then three waves and everyone was running for higher ground," she tells me.
With her excellent English, she has been working in the hospital, helping the families of tourists who outnumber the local dead by three to one, by some reckonings.
"There are lots of people volunteering, students. There was nothing we could do initially but we've been helping people, looking for their missing family and friends," says Warawadee, who goes by the nickname Nurh and who comes from Bangkok. She moved here a month ago to help get the new shop going.
Phuket is an island made prosperous by tourism and looks like a resort in Spain or Italy in many ways. The beach is so central to life on the island, for both locals and tourists, that almost everyone who emerged unscathed from the tsunamis which lashed the southern resorts has got a lucky escape story. Everyone goes to the beach all the time, to swim, to relax and read a book and watch the sun go down, to jet-ski, for the kids to play in the sand.
NTR Emergency Radio is issuing guidelines in English, Italian, Chinese, German, French, many languages, on where people can get information about their missing loved ones and on how to help with the rescue effort. "They need clothing," says an Australian DJ. "We've got enough shoes for a while. We need razors and sanitary napkins, things to keep people clean." His message is repeated in Italian and German.
"It used to be very beautiful around here," Nurh says as we cross a tricky patch of beachfront road demolished by the Wave.
A busy bar area in Patong, centred on a statue of Buddha, has been turned into a disaster area. The golden statue has been cleaned and garlanded with puangmalai flowers.
Paul Clark works at the British embassy in Mumbai but was snorkelling in Thailand when the Wave hit and he stayed to do what he can. "We're all trying to get a database together. There are a lot of lists and some of them are getting duplicated. It's getting complicated, though the Thai PM said he would try to centralise things," he says.
In one case, Paul was talking to someone on the phone about a missing person on Phi Phi island. Another man overheard the conversation, thought he sounded familiar and tapped him on the shoulder. A mystery solved, though scores remain.
"We are getting some good news stuff, which is a boon amid all this bad news. But it's getting less," he says.
Panic is in the air in Phuket - people were running around wildly when the power went down at one stage yesterday.
Fears that sea-quake aftershocks were sending more tsunami towards southern Thailand sent thousands of people running through the streets of Patong on Phuket again in a grim echo of the horror of St Stephens' Day disaster.
Regulars and visitors at Lek Murphy's Irish Pub on Soi Sansabei sit and compare experiences of the day everything went wrong.
"This wave blasted ATMs out of the wall, there were cars in swimming pools," says co- owner Tony Waters, from Cork, gesturing towards the seafront of the town, where he came four years ago on holiday and never went back. "They are still taking the bodies out of the shopping plaza down there. Everyone ran into the basement when it hit. Terrible. A lot of our Thai friends are dead.
"We just saw people running up the street, scattering. We were a bit higher up, but we saw a lot of people trampled on.
"At the same time we had no idea how bad it was. We were worried about Anthony here because he lives above the pub and we had no way of contacting him," he says.
He points to his business partner, Anthony Ronayne, also from Cork, who says the bar has become a focal point for the expatriate community in the crisis.
There is an atmosphere of a community facing adversity in the bar, which was untouched by the tsunami but is just metres away from horrific devastation. The contrast is profound.
"We get people asking us about people but we've no contact with a lot of the guys who come through here - they come here and have a few drinks and then are gone on somewhere else the next day," he says. "There would be some fellows using this as a staging post for getting to Australia."
Jocky Neville, yet another Cork man, who works in purchasing and planning in the IT industry, says the day was "absolutely frightening". "It's frightening to look at the destruction, you almost can't appreciate what this thing has done here," Jocky says.
"There was a car jammed in Ocean Plaza. They were lined up on top of each other, the cars. And all the bodies they were taking out."
Richard Harrington, a Kinsale man living in Dublin, who is on a six-week holiday in Patong, reckons that over-imbibing in Lek Murphy's probably saved his life.
"I go for a walk at 9.30 every morning on the beach. On Christmas night I had a late one here so I missed it," he says, shaking his head at the irony.
"I opened my door and there were three feet of water in the courtyard, with fridges, deckchairs, everything in it. I watched 15 bodies being taken out of a supermarket," says the engineer.
Jocky Neville is defiant and says he has booked to return to Patong Beach in July.
"People are asking me: am I coming home? I am not, I'm staying here to show support. This is a time to stand by our Thai friends," he says. Everyone nods agreement.
Anthony Ronayne thinks business will definitely fall off after the shock sets in and he is not optimistic.
But he is defiant nonetheless.
"It'll probably take years, I don't know, we've had SARS, chicken flu and Bali [ bombing], and we survived that. Who knows?"
Rattling along in a jeep by the shoreline at sunset, it's a picture straight out of the brochures, a red sky over gently lapping waves on the beach.
Then I and my companion have to go by foot through the beachfront part of Patong, which until a few days ago was full of open-fronted pubs with bar girls and boozing expatriates. The Wave has played hell with the sex industry in Phuket - many of the very superstitious young bar girls have fled the scene, worried about meeting too many ghosts.
Narong Chaidum, who lost his travel agency and another tourist shop to the Wave, guides me through the streets, which feel post-nuclear.
"They are clearing away the debris of my shop, then I will just have to start rebuilding again. But whether the tourists will come is another thing. I don't know, but I have to do this. I live from tourism," says Narong.
And yet, not all normal life is gone. Just around the corner you hear the sound of a Thai band playing the opening chords of The Eagles' Hotel California, a candidate for Asia's national anthem if ever there was one. The Wave is gone, people are coming back to the fleshpots of Phuket. But everyone is asking: can it ever be the same again?