More on escaping the tsunami

I found more interesting thoughts on learning to listen to Nature when it comes to survival at the Malay Mail Online. What are all your thoughts on this?

Whether it is folklore or an old wives’ tale, the glaring fact is that 181 Thai sea gypsies did outsmart the tsunami. Instinctively, they listened to nature and responded.

This fishing community fled to a temple in the mountains of South Surin Island with the conventional wisdom “that fast receding water would reappear in the same quantity in which it disappeared.”

There was no sophisticated technology. They put theirs ears to the ground and understood nature’s message.

Equally strange is the survival story of the primitive tribes of Andaman and Car Nicobar coastal areas. They had moved to higher ground a few days before the catastrophe.

In this same area, the tsunami had swept off a full Indian military base with all its high tech equipment. And the air base and its hundreds of personnel, wiped out.

Yes, while scientists were trying to log on to the international knowledge grid to inform us, these simple people – uneducated and isolated from the mainstream – followed their instincts.

And so did the animals. The wild animals of Sri Lanka’s Yala national wildlife park instinctively moved to higher ground, just before the tsunami hit. According to the Reuters news service, only 30 of the 250 tourist vehicles that entered the park ever returned to base. Yet, not a single animal corpse was found in the wildlife park that the tsunami devastated.

There have been other stories of dogs howling, poultry and caged birds trying to escape and cats that went into hiding, prior to the event.