Couple run for their lives

Hannah and Steve Irwin said they could not believe they were safe at home after the terrifying ordeal, which claimed the lives of a Swiss woman in their party, and many local people on the Thai island of Phi Phi.

Seconds before realising he had to run for safety, Mr Irwin photographed the Thai boatmen who were returning to try to secure their vessels, without realising the peril in which they were placing themselves.

Moments later the boats were smashed to smithereens by the force of the giant wave and the boatmen were believed to have perished.

The Irwins, of Staveley, were enjoying their idyllic honeymoon after marrying at Crosthwaite Church in December.

They had visited Bangkok and Phuket on the Thai mainland before travelling to Phi Phi.

On Boxing Day morning, Mrs Irwin, 30, who works for Impact Development Training Group at Windermere, had been able to feel a tremor which she now believes must have been the earthquake.

No one had paid much heed to the tremor, and Mr and Mrs Irwin started to get ready for a boat trip around their island of Phi Phi Don and the sister island of Phi Phi Le.

In what turned out to be a fortunate delay, the party was late in leaving and arriving on the beach at Lana Bay.

The first sign that something was wrong was when the group of 12 people of different nationalities tried to climb aboard the longtail boats only to find that the ocean had disappeared and they were aground.

A wave came back in and the party tried again, but the tide suddenly rushed out once more.

An Australian man in the group became suspicious and told his wife to leave the boat, which they all started to do.

Mrs Irwin said: "I was actually getting out when the big wave started coming back in.

"It was when it came round the corner and we could see that it was not normal, that's when he (a man on the beach) said "move further back, further back".

Mrs Irwin, who ran towards a hill and relative safety, said the noise of the wave was incredibly loud.

"I could hear it and I was turning back to look for Steve who was not running at first.

"We could not believe it was not stopping. I have only realised since that I felt so, so scared."

Mr Irwin, 34, who has his own physiotherapy business, had considered sheltering behind a building and waiting for the danger to pass but he decided not to. The building was destroyed by the force of the wave.

"I thought I will just hide behind this building, but then all the boats just smashed up and that's when I realised how much danger we were in and just ran.

"It (the wave) just kept coming and coming and coming and we were just running from it. We think we ran 800 or 1,000 metres back up."

There were around 20 boats on the beach, and the Irwins believed that many of the boatmen, who had returned to look after their vessels, were swept away.

Mr Irwin said: "You could just hear it picking anything up and just smashing it."

It was when the group had run up to the trees that they realised that a Swiss woman, called Marguerite, was missing.

Mr Irwin joined the search party the following day, but to their knowledge she has not been found.

The couple are not sure how Marguerite perished, because at one point she was ahead of Mr Irwin, moving away from the beach.

The couple was told that there were just 20 survivors from their beach, and many of those were the party of tourists. A fishing village on the beach was wiped out.

Too frightened to return to their accommodation that night, the couple and other tourists slept in the open up the hill.

They had been able to alert family, including their parents, Marni and Robin Dawson, of Crosthwaite, and Ian and Barbara Irwin, of Windermere, that they were safe.

Mrs Irwin said the delay in the party setting off had saved their lives: "If we had been ten minutes earlier and got out to that bay we would not have survived."

The couple arrived back at Phuket airport to very different scenes to those when they left, with coffins being transported. They still cannot really believe what they have been through.

Mr Irwin said: "All I keep thinking is what if we were two minutes earlier or the wave caught one of us."

Mrs Irwin said she was very upset about the Thai people they had left behind.

l The disaster led to a change in plan for Philip Airey and Rebecca Howell, of Allithwaite, who were supposed to be leaving soon for their honeymoon, staying in Bangkok, Phuket and Phi Phi.

Mr Airey, who works as a chef at his family business of Butterfingers Caf, in Grange-over-Sands, said they were now heading to Tobago instead.

The couple had married earlier in December, but opted to have a later honeymoon. If they had left straightaway, they could easily have been caught up in the disaster.

Mr Airey said they felt lucky not to have been in their original honeymoon destination during the earthquake.