Devastated, but the Holiday Must Go On ; It's a Tragedy We Can Never Forget, but Just One Week On From the Asian Earthquake, the Tourist Industry Is Already Reviving Itself. How Should We Feel?

Summary

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IT IS hard to talk of holidays when the papers are full of photographs of dead babies. It is hard to talk of tourism when the death toll keeps rising. It seems callous to worry about whether we will be able to go to the creamy white beaches and deliciously blue seas that make those destinations battered by the tsunamis so popular with British travellers. And yet this is what many of us seem to care about.

Decent human beings express shock at seeing images of blackened, bloated bodies on the shore. We shake our heads and say how terrible the devastation is and how awful it must be for those who have lost loved ones. We call the emergency hotline and pledged our Pounds 25.

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Extract

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Devastated, but the Holiday Must Go On ; It's a Tragedy We Can Never Forget, but Just One Week On From the Asian Earthquake, the Tourist Industry Is Already Reviving Itself. How Should We Feel?

Now we want to know if our holiday is cancelled. My telephone has been ringing incessantly. "Is the Banyan Tree closed?"

they say. "Shall we ditch Sri Lanka and go to Kerala?" says another.

"We're off to Langkawi in March - they'll have tidied it up by then, won't they?"

Two days after the waves ate their way along the coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, Thailand and the Maldives, devouring everything in their path, I heard one television reporter say: "It will be years before tourism returns to the regio...

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