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AO NANG, Thailand - It would simply be wrong to regurgitate the old cliche and say that my life passed before my eyes as the great tsunami of 2004 pulled me into its embrace. In fact, my first thought was the fate of my camera, the intended use of which was the reason I had gotten so close to the wave in the first place. My second thought was about the skin being peeled from my body as I bounced along what, seconds before, had been a gravel road and now was a tidal estuary. And then: "Where are my shoes?"

It was to be a day of cliches, and on this life-passing-before-the-eyes thing, it is worth noting that in such situations time does tend to compress itself, and small details embed themselves in the memory, even one such as mine that seems to function less reliably with each passing year.

Another cliche is that tragedy brings out both the best and worst in people. Again, there was some evidence for this belief. When I asked a somewhat inebriated Australian if he had heard any estimates about when the power would be turned back on, he snarled, "People have died here today. I think we can put up with no electricity for a while. Understand me?" Well, excuse me.

Turns out the Aussie had been standing on the shore, not far from where I lost my shoes and around the same time, watching an acquaintance struggle to get his boat inland. It grounded on a sandbar when the wave troughed, and when it surged back up, the man was gone forever. Confronted with the fragility of life, forced to contemplate his own mortality, perhaps the Australian had understandably been annoyed by a stranger's trivial question about electricity.

Or maybe he was just a jerk.

There were, too, the usual tales of "heroism". And as always one wonders what "heroism" is - some people instinctively come to strangers' aid in an emergency, others do not. If one does what comes naturally, without thinking, is he a "hero"? Or is the person who preserves his own life first so that he can go back to his family who needs him, rather than sacrificing himself for a foreign tourist who had no genuine need to be in such peril in the first place, the real hero?

For many of the locals in Ao Nang, a small tourist resort town in Krabi province just east of the island of Phuket, the challenge had nothing to do with hauling hapless tourists out of the raging seas, but simply with fulfilling their obligation to serve the customers in the hotels, restaurants and shops. Supplies quickly became difficult to get. Staff had fled, some in fear but most to see to loved ones in less sheltered places on the coast than Ao Nang. The proprietor of Mother's House restaurant told her customers, "I do not have much food, the only beer I have is Chang. But if you buy your own outside, you are welcome to bring it here and sit at my tables."

At another small outdoor Thai restaurant, my colleagues and I - fellow Asia Times Online employee Martin Young and a mutual friend currently with The Standard newspaper in Hong Kong - waited for our order. And waited. And waited. We watched the few remaining staff of the place struggle to serve their customers. We, and nearly all the other customers, understood they were doing their best.

But not the "ugly farang" (foreigner).

You've seen people like this. They treat like dirt serving staff, shop clerks, any "inferior". They are paying for service, and they want service now, tsunami or no tsunami.

The one we saw even looked the part. She was a dowager type, with dyed red hair and too-tight jeans that seemed to squeeze even her face into a grotesquerie. Every few minutes she would march toward the kitchen to growl her complaints about the slowness, about the courses coming in the wrong order, about the quality of the food once it finally arrived. We watched with a combination of contempt for her, of sympathy for the staff, and of amusement subtly shared via nods and smiles with our Thai hosts.

One was reminded that in Thail