At 5am, the 8 of us in our dorm room were woken up by loud, frantic banging on the door. A guy outside yelled something about getting sandbags. I was groggy and slow to wake up, and my first thought was that the other girls must’ve slept in and missed their boat. Usually when I’ve woken up in a panic it’s because I’m late for an early morning flight. My Thailand travel buddy Molly was on the lower bunk next to mine, and the first thing I clearly heard was her realization of what was going on.
“Ohhhhh F*#$, ohhhh f*&#, the room is FLOODED! All our stuff!”
That woke me up quick. Sure enough, the floor was covered in about 4” of dirty brown water that smelled of sewage. Crap. Literally. We were all quick to spring into action and try and salvage our stuff. Someone suggested we sacrifice one of the beds to put all our backpacks, and within minutes the bags were piled on a top bunk, in case the water got really high.
Considering the circumstances, I was lucky. My most valuable stuff (passport, laptop, etc.) were in a locker high off the ground and spared any water damage. My bag wasn’t horribly hit either. The way it was positioned on the ground kept my clothes dry, although a few books were sacrificed. The entire backside (shoulder and hip straps) were completely saturated with the dirty water.
One guy in our room had his laptop packed up in his suitcase under the bed, since he was going to be leaving in the early morning. His laptop was pretty much ruined. Everyone else just had a lot of wet clothes to deal with.
Once we got all our bags off the ground, we weren’t really sure what to do. The electricity was off, and it was still dark out so there wasn’t much we could do other than wait. So we sat on the beds and waited. All the while talking about how we couldn’t believe this had actually happened. The night before while we were hanging out, we had jokingly talked about the hostel getting flooded, but none of us actually thought it would happen. Before going to bed a few of the girls brought our flip flops in from outside, and that saved them from getting washed away. I found mine floating in the lobby.
Before the flood, we’d already gotten tons of rain. Our hostel was on a side street jutting off the main road, and had been a giant puddle for the past few days. The door to the hostel was a few feet off the ground though, so we figured even with all the rain we’d be ok. However, the main road was extremely flooded, and sandbags were set up blocking off our street from the main road. Sometime between 3am and 5am, the sandbags broke and our street became a river. I have an idea on the time because one of the girls had woken up at 3am to use the bathroom, and our room was fine.
As the sun came up, the water levels were also slowly receding, even though it was still raining. Soon there were just muddy puddles all over the floor. Everyone went outside on the steps to get some photos, since the water outside was still about a foot deep. The Thai man working at the hostel was great. He answered our questions as best he could, set to work mopping up the water. Six of us had been planning on catching a ferry off Koh Tao that day, and he called around to see if any boats were still running as scheduled. None were. So our next step was finding another place to stay, this time on higher ground.
Molly and I opted to leave our bags behind as we hunted for another place. We waded out in the water, our flip flops sticking in the mud. The small pedestrian/motorbike road running parallel to the main road at the opposite end of our street was actually ok for walking. Along the way, we came across an entire section that had been washed away. There was just a narrow concrete beam on either side of where the road had been, and a pile of paving stones underneath. In the water, fishermen were trying to salvage boats that were almost completely sunk.
We did find another place, a really nice diving resort that was twice the price of what we were paying at the hostel. It was on higher ground though, and keeping dry was our main concern! We had to walk all the way back, and this time we tried the main road. For entire 10ft sections there were just massive deep puddles. Some people were trying to motorbike through them, and it didn’t look like much fun.
Once we got settled in at our new place, the clean up began. Molly and I completely emptied our bags out on the balcony, and sorted through the damage. We washed everything in the shower. First up was a thorough scrub of the back packs (to give them ample time to dry) and then our clothes. By the time everything was cleaned and we’d had showers, it was already about 1:30pm. We’d been up for over 8 hours, and hadn’t stopped to eat. That was a really long day.
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