Hi friends - thanks for your emails asking if we're okay. We are both completely fine, having travelled up to Chiang Mai (in the north of Thailand) the night before the tsunamis arrived.

The first we knew of what had happened was yesterday afternoon, walking into a guesthouse that happened to have a TV in its foyer. We saw only a few images flashing across the screen, and some scattered comments in the news crawler indicating that Sri Lanka and Southern India had been hit. The woman checking us in noticed that we were staring at the TV in disbelief - in sign language and a few English words she started reeling off the names of Thai islands and beaches as well. This had happened here? In Thailand?

This seemed too other-worldly to be true. The scale of things seemed preposterous.

We haven't glimpsed a TV since, but reading what's available online and in the Thai English-language dailies is shocking to the core.

We will head back to Bangkok on the 29th, and I'm wondering if even there the effects of the tragedy will be evident - I imagine that many, many tourists will have fled the affected areas, and so many more people than usual will be in Bangkok.

One can only feel for all the people who've had their families, homes or livelihoods destroyed by this cataclysmic thing. Life seems so shockingly easy to snuff out.