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It was just as Rusali rose to fetch a torch from his car that he felt a huge blast of wind hit him.
Something wasn’t right.
“I felt that very strong wind and then I looked at the ocean and I saw the wave coming, it was a very high wave, higher than the house [between three and four metres],” he recalls.
“I thought shall I go back to the villa or get the car [for safety]?”
Kevin Resali, 36, removes the windscreen of his car with a friend so he can retrieve belongings from it.Credit:James Massola
In those split seconds before the tsunami hit, Rusali made a decision that might have saved his life – he rushed back into the villa and joined his family.
When The Sydney Morning Herald met Rusali on Sunday, he and a friend were removing baby seats from his car, which had been picked up, thrown and damaged almost beyond repair by the tsunami.
The windscreen, smashed, was half ripped away from the front of the car.
If he had been inside the car rather than in the villa when the tsunami hit it’s hard to see how he would have survived.
“My daughter was trapped under something but that actually saved her. My mother-in-law was hit by a collapsing wall and my wife injured her leg.”
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He starts crying.
“We have a few injuries but we are all ok.”
Rusali and his family are lucky.
At least 222 people were not, dying when the wave struck on Saturday night. Hundreds more were injured or are missing.
The toll will surely rise.
On the coastal road that wends its way through the resort towns and villages in this part of West Java – just 100km or so from the sprawling capital of Jakarta - from Anyer to Carita to Tanjung Lesung and beyond, the damage from the tsunami is everywhere to see.
From an abandoned soccer ball laying in the ruins of a house to a tractor flipped upside down in a paddy field; from flattened food stalls to crushed cars, evidence of the wave’s destructive force was everywhere.
People inspect the wreckage of a car swept away by a tsunami.Credit:AP
What was perhaps most striking, on the morning after the night before, was the empty silence in some villages along that coast ride.
Locals, spooked by the wave, had not yet returned after fleeing the tsunami – or others would never be able to return, having lost their lives.
Indonesia has already endured an awful few months of natural disasters, with a series of earthquakes on the island of Lombok and then an earthquake and tsunami hitting the Sulawesi city of Palu.
That another tsunami should strike, so close to the end of 2018 and within days of the 14th anniversary of the Boxing Day tsunami, seems almost too cruel to fathom.
James Massola is south-east Asia correspondent, based in Jakarta. He was previously chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Canberra. He has been a Walkley and Quills finalist on three occasions.