India Blog!

You can walk out to the beach from the Kailash hotel, although I have been cautioned many times over not to try swimming here. This is where the tsunami hit a few years ago, but it is pretty hard to tell there was any lasting damage to this particular site. Tamil Nadu had longer to evacuate than those in Indonesia and Sri Lanka and the hotel received warning from the Italian Embassy that it was coming and to evacuate the building. Not all communities were as lucky, with most of the death toll falling upon the lower classes that live in slums by the beach. The giant wave never hit the Kailash hotel, but came up to the gates. Now, the water is a little choppy, but not really dangerous. It's more the debris and pollution that keeps people away.