Tsunami? Not this time!

Narrabeen's wonderful ocean pool suddenly got very empty today.

The news this morning had been about a mega-earthquake in the Pacific, and tsunami alerts in New Zealand, Norfolk Island and elsewhere. Sydney's a bit further away, but it's still in a straight line to those Kermadec Islands.

A police helicopter came circling overhead. It was broadcasting an unintelligible message. Must be a tsunami alert! Everyone got out pretty quickly.

Comparing notes with the other evacuees, we decided it was probably a missing person request in fact. There was something about a man wearing a blue T-shirt. This was confirmed later when we studied the police notices. No tsunami today!

LATE UPDATE:   NSW Police announced late this evening that a missing 88-year-old Narrabeen man had been located safe and well in the CBD. Excellent news!

What next for Padang's beach?

Since I was last in Sumatra they've been through a few natural trials and tribulations. A few more volcanoes have erupted, and they've had some massive earthquakes and a particularly devastating tsunami.

The city of Padang in West Sumatra is very much in the firing line for the next really big earthquake and tsunami, of the scale of the 2004 magnitude 9.0 event in Aceh to the north. Needless to say they're very conscious of it.














In 2009 Padang suffered a 7.6 magnitude earthquake, which killed over a thousand people, and destroyed a large number of buildings. When there recently I met someone who had lived through it, and was still traumatised by the memories. She said she was working in a ground floor office, and was able to get out before the building was destroyed. Some colleagues died. Fearful of a tsunami (which thankfully didn't come), the survivors ran several kilometres inland. The nearby high ground was avoided because it would have meant crossing a bridge, which they feared might collapse.

Rebuilding Prambanan - a job for life?

And Prambanan does need a bit of rebuilding, as you can see in this shot of the Candi Sewu complex, a kilometre to the north of the 'main' Prambanan complex.

Candi Sewu was a Buddhist complex, as opposed to the main complex, which was Hindu. Both were built in the ninth century, and they have been abandoned, rediscovered, demolished by earthquakes (with the last big one in 2006), and rebuilt several times. Here's the link to the Wikipedia piece, for a much better description and history of it all than I could do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prambanan

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. On a previous trip to Indonesia nearly 30 years ago I made the effort to visit Borobudur, the other great temple complex in the Yogyakarta region. That's a Buddhist one, and quite an impressive edifice it is. I somehow wasn't as motivated that time to get out to Prambanan, even though it's actually very close and convenient to the city.

On this last trip I rectified that, and was rewarded with a very pleasant day out.

The main upstanding structures are beautiful things. But I was very struck by how big a job they still have in front of them. Candi Sewu consisted of a main central temple, plus 240 'guard temples' all around it. Very few of these guard temples are still standing. The rebuilding effort seems rather slow and half-hearted, and looks like it could keep the handful of construction crews busy for centuries, rather than decades.

Prambanan's about 17km north east of Jogja, right alongside the main Solo road, and I got there easily and comfortably on an air-conditioned  Jogja city bus.