Local men see the aftermath in Thailand

It was the bunny on the beach that stunned Michael Jennings first, a symbol of how everything had changed when the tsunami hit.

"We were in a jungle," he said of the bungalow he and his buddy Khristian Johnson had rented above southwest Thailand's Tonsai Beach on Christmas Eve.

"We could see monkeys from our bungalow back up on the hill. I didn't know they had bunnies in the jungle."

Johnson, 23, and Jennings, 26, based in Columbia Falls and Bigfork, were on a tour through Southeast Asian locales for seven weeks starting in November. They planned to wrap it up with some world-class rock climbing on Thailand beaches over Christmas and New Year.

But Mother Nature added her own tragic twist when a 9.0 earthquake deep beneath a tropical ocean triggered one of the deadliest disasters in history.

Jennings shook his head, recalling that first walk along the newly devastated coastline on the morning of Dec. 26.

"I looked down and there was this bunny. It was soaked," as was everything strewn along the beach so recently slammed by the tsunami that had towered across the Indian Ocean.

"It was bizarre."

Bizarre indeed. So was all they encountered on what, an hour or two earlier, had been a powdery-smooth white sand beach.

It will be some time before that beach scene returns to normal.

ON FRIDAY EVENING, Johnson and Jennings returned to an American reality as they finished 40 hours of flights from the tropics into a wintry blast at Glacier Park International Airport.

But with the south Asian tsunami death toll mounting past 150,000, the travelers say their experience still seems surreal.

"For two miles all around us, there were people dead," Johnson said. "And there we were in a little pocket with no casualties."

Locals were counting their dead at East and West Railay Beach, immediately on either side of them. Krabi, the main town to the east, got hit hard.

By a gentler twist of fate, Jennings and Johnson were in a rock-climber's paradise on a hill above Tonsai Beach almost due east of Phuket.

It was the Thai island of Phuket that took the brunt of the tidal wave in that area. Phuket served as a buffer of sorts for the watery blast that continued eastward to Krabi, Railay Beach and ultimately Tonsai Beach, located on a finger of land stretching south from the Thai mainland.

Situated in a protected bay between West and East Railay Beach, Tonsai was populated that day with rock climbers and the restaurant and longtail-taxi boat vendors catering to them. Perhaps it was their athletic response, maybe their savvy preparedness that spared the Tonsai crowd from further casualties.

But to Melody and Dudley Johnson of Columbia Falls, who had mistakenly fixed their son's location as Ton Sai Bay on the Phi Phi Islands, a cluster unprotected from the tsunami, Phuket's buffering effect came as little comfort.

Johnson had e-mailed his parents on Christmas to say he and Jennings had climbed at Tonsai the prior day and they planned to spend the night on the beach and have another climb on Sunday.

Not long after receiving that message, Melody Johnson watched in dread as the early-morning news programs began airing the first reports of the deadly Sunday tsunami.

She spent an agonizing day, frantically e-mailing in hopes of a response from Kit.

For interminable hours, no word arrived.

Finally that night, Jennings' mother, Joyce Sataba of Portland, phoned with the news that both of the young men were alive. Later, Melody Johnson learned that lack of facilities prevented Kit from getting in touch and that Jennings did not have the e-mail address to contact her directly.

Meanwhile, Johnson had been busy with his Canon EOS, capturing the post-tsunami rubble on film.

His bachelor's degree in photography from Montana State University - and his experience from two prior trips to Thailand, a couple through Europe and another to Central America - helped focus his mind as he saw and captured the utter chaos of a day that changed history for millions of people.

THE TWO FRIENDS, both MSU students and rock-climbing partners who worked as cooks at The Raven in Woods Bay last summer, had visited friends in Malibu, Calif., last spring.

There, they cooked up plans to return to a region of Thailand where Johnson had climbed in the past.

Johnson, a 1997 graduate of Flathead Christian School in Kalispell, had been living in California off and on before deciding to return to Bozeman and finish his degree 2 1/2 years ago. Jennings, halfway through his MSU history education course work, has changed tracks and begins classes next September at the Culinary Institute le Cordon Bleu in Portland.

This Southeast Asia trip was to be a good interlude for both before Johnson headed back to California and Jennings to Portland.

They traveled through Vietnam, visited Cambodia, attended cooking school in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, then headed for the fabled beaches and craggy limestone cliffs of southwest Thailand.

In that part of the country, roads thin out the farther south a traveler goes. They stop entirely at Ao Nang and Krabi, so the only way to reach Railay Beach to the south is by boat.

To conserve funds and get to the best terrain for serious climbers, they bypassed the more expensive Railay Beach and headed for the no-nonsense Tonsai Beach on Christmas Eve.

A first day of climbing proved to be all they had hoped for - tropical heat, wafting breezes and challenging rock. They decided to go at it again the next day, and took a bungalow for the night.

It was in the only spot they could afford, far back from the beach and high on the hill. Little did they know how fortuitous that would prove.

That night, despite the predominantly Buddhist population, Christmas parties and lights and bands livened the beach bars and cafes.

"That evening we went out to have dinner," Johnson said. "We went to the beach and they had mats and candles everywhere. It was a real cool atmosphere."

Then it was time for relaxation.

"We actually made a decision to wake up late the next day," Jennings said. They had been traveling long and hard, and needed a rest. "That's the only reason we weren't climbing at that time."

"I couldn't sleep past 9 in the morning, so I was sitting out on the porch to our bungalow, writing in my journal," Johnson said. "All these people started running by. And it's a pretty steep path there."

"He came in and told me people said there's a tidal wave," Jennings added.

In the years he had been visiting Thailand, Johnson had never seen a wave more than a foot tall, so they sprinted up the hill to get a look. When they realized they had missed the big one, they headed for the beach to check out the aftermath.

WHAT THEY FOUND shocked them.

Everywhere was rubble. Broken beer bottles, bits of shattered coral reef, exposed crabs, bar tables and chairs littered the sand.

There were splintered and overturned longtail boats across the beach. A couple of them were jammed inside restaurants. One even floated in a swimming pool.

"It was subsiding," Jennings said of the big wave. "It was all washed away where there had been mats and tables from the restaurants. The beach was just dirty."

The first row of businesses had been situated about 10 to 15 feet above the high-tide mark. But when the water ravaged 30 or 40 feet above that front line, not even the "safe" business locations were left untouched.

When all was done, a pair of 15-foot-high waves had crashed into Tonsai, with another high surge shortly after. Over the hours that followed, the sea abandoned its 12-hour cycles of high and low tides as it rose and fell from the high-tide mark in mere minutes.

The sea's fury was remarkable, coming as it did to what normally is a sheltered bay.

It took Jennings and Johnson an hour and a half to make their way to the far end of the beach. The closer to West Railay Beach they drew, the more devastating the toll.

Debris was shoved up against a sidewalk. Dazed people wandered through the rubble. Rumors persisted that another tidal wave was on its way.

Luckily, it was not.

"There were a lot of casualties among the boatmen," Johnson said.

A friend among the climbers organized efforts to help the local families over the following days. Everyone did what they could do to ease the suffering and restore order.

As they connected with others in the ruins, they discovered a certain acceptance in their grief.

"A lot of the Thai people were like, 'What do you do? You can't see it coming. You can't move your stuff,'" Johnson said.

THE AWE and strangeness of it all soaked deep into Johnson and Jennings.

After the first couple days, most of the Railay Beach tourists and locals left because of rumors that there would be no food or water.

On Tonsai, the two Montanans found ramen noodles. More elaborate food had to wait until, days later, they found operating ATM machines to dispense cash. The bars were up and running fairly soon, but the restaurants were not.

In normal circumstances, it was easy to catch a boat for the 10-minute trip to Ao Nang, but what boatmen remained had abandoned that route in order to ferry people out of the area entirely.

Quick trips had turned into 90-minute hikes over the hill.

Still on the beach and wanting to help locals reestablish some means of income, Johnson and Jennings hitched along on the outgoing boats, bought cases of beer and soda, and trekked with them back to the bars.

Three days after the tsunami hit, Johnson still was unable to find an operating Internet cafe to e-mail home. Eventually, he found one in Ao Nang to the north.

Five days after, they still couldn't get a boat out of Tonsai.

"You'd have a hard time finding a boat there now," Johnson said. "At least half the boats were totally destroyed."

The pair canceled plans to visit Koh Phi Phi, an island that essentially was split in two with a new pool of water through its low midsection.

Ultimately, they stayed on their return travel schedule - taking a boat to Ao Nang, a bus to Phuket, and then a series of flights to Bangkok, Seoul, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Kalispell.

Images and experiences of local suffering remain vivid for both men.

"It's surreal," Johnson repeated. "It was that day, and it still is. To be there and see that first day, but be high up and protected from it all …"

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com