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AP Reporters recall their struggles, feelings as they reported the devastating tsunamis

EDITOR'S NOTE: A reporter is an observer, yes, but there can be no detached witnesses in places where the ocean swept away all vestiges of normal life, leaving only destruction and despair. The tsunami that ravaged South Asia also haunts the men and women of The Associated Press who told the world about it; they are beset by memories of orphaned children and childless parents, of lifeless multitudes and infernal havoc, of the stench of death that permeated their clothes, their brains, their very being.

These are the things they will remember.

The sickly odor wafting from the rubble told the story: Thousands had died

By ALISA TANG
Associated Press Writer

PHUKET, Thailand (AP) — Driving along a pitch-dark strip of road once lined with hotels and diving shops, my colleagues and I rolled down the windows of the truck to get a clearer view of the havoc left by the tsunami. The stench of dead bodies wafted in, and I understood for the first time that thousands had died at the beach resorts of southern Thailand.

I had started reporting the story two days earlier in Bangkok after learning of the 9.0 earthquake near Indonesia's Sumatra island from a friend shaken awake by the tremors.

Phoning Thai officials for details, I listened to radio reports of cars being swept away and people taking refuge on rooftops to escape waves two or three stories tall. I relayed the stories of cars and fleeing people to my editor, but I left out the gigantic waves — which I felt had to be exaggerated rubbish.

Still in my pajamas, I hurried to AP's Bangkok bureau and then headed to the airport to fly to Phuket. I didn't have time to change clothes for three days.

In Phuket the morning after the disaster, I saw cars stacked like kids' building blocks, a bar-lined street turned into rubble with loosely dangling Christmas garlands — and dozens of tourists' bodies, some naked, others in bikinis, at the hospital by Patong Beach.

A sunburned Finnish tourist with corn-rowed red hair walked around the hospital barefoot in a beige miniskirt and a maroon T-shirt with white saltwater stains. She had a bandaged cut on her leg from being tossed by the waves, but still had sunglasses hanging from her neck.

"The water went back, back, back, so far away, and everyone wondered what it was — a full moon or what? Then we saw the wave come, and we ran," said the woman, Katri Seppanen, 27, her eyes teary as she told of being separated from her mother and sister for two hours after the waves swept over Patong Beach.

Despite hearing the skyrocketing death toll updated several times a day by Thai officials, the true extent of the destruction and lives lost didn't sink in until my pre-dawn drive that night to Khao Lak, the worst-hit area on Thailand's Andaman Sea coast, where the waves came in about 10 meters (30 feet) high.

The headlights of our truck flashed over a few corpses wrapped in white cloth, laid out next to the road to be picked up and taken to Buddhist temples that were now open-air mortuaries. A Thai resort employee slept by the roadside next to a candle.

We came upon a Westerner trudging along, a small bag in his hand. He got into our truck, deliriously mumbling "I need to get to the hills" as he imagined himself still escaping the waves. He left us a few minutes later, haggard and half-mad, before I could get his name or his story. It was one of many times my heart broke in those days after Christmas.

That night, I camped with AP colleagues Sutin Wannabovorn and Jerry Harmer in a truck on a mountainside next to a police post, the spot with electric lights that we found in the devastated area.

I later met John Krueger, 34, from Winter Park, Colorado, who had to punch his way through the roof of his rented bungalow as the floor of the flooding building rose beneath him and his wife was pushed out of the room when the cement wall broke apart under pressure from the water. Both survived.

I cried when I heard Swedish doctor Marie Guldstrand recount the tale of 7-year-old Karl Nilsson of Lulea, Sweden, who had been playing in a hotel room with his brothers, Olof, 5, and Vilgot, 3. His parents, Thomas and Asa, were outside.

"He told me: `I was under the water but somehow I could breathe. I was just closing my eyes and moving with the waves. Then, suddenly the flood ended and I was in another city,'" said Guldstrand, who found the boy at a Buddhist temple where survivors sought shelter. His parents and two brothers had vanished.

As millions of people frantically sought news of their loved ones, I got word that my sister-in-law, Maria "Clea" Annechiarico Tang, who had been snorkeling near Phi Phi Island, was alive and unhurt. Clea was evacuated from Phi Phi as I headed to the island to report on the destruction. My parents in Fairview Heights, Illinois, knew I was safe because they saw TV footage of me on Phi Phi — still in my pajamas.

Colleagues who worked with me covering the tsunami have reported on genocide in Rwanda, war in Iraq and rioting in Haiti. They said they had never seen death and destruction on this scale.

"Death is death is death," veteran AP photographer David Longstreath drawled after viewing hundreds of swimsuit-clad corpses.

I disagree. Late one night walking through the ruins, I felt a tiny comfort that these dead had not been hacked to death by machetes, blown up by suicide bombers or wrapped in burning tires, the victims of hateful rage.

Their lives were taken by nature. Many were tourists who had been strolling by the sea and watched in awe as the turquoise waters vanished suddenly from white sand beaches. Others were Thai villagers who excitedly ran to catch fish left flopping on the sand.

One victim was 37-year-old Cecilia Bergman of Stockholm, Sweden, who spent her last minutes in a black bikini, playing by a hotel swimming pool with her 18-month-old son, Hannes, just before the wall of water crashed upon her.

Like thousands of other miracle children, Hannes survived but may never forget. When he sees television news reports of the tsunami, he cries, "Mama! Mama!"

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AP reporter Chris Brummitt juggles oranges for survivors of the tsunami, at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Banda Aceh, July 11, 2005. (AP Photo/Jocelyn Gecker)

No one to blame for tragedy: no Third World dictator, no invading army

By CHRIS BRUMMITT
Associated Press Writer

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) — Nearly everyone you meet in Banda Aceh lost family or friends. Some 40,000 people are thought to have died here, and reporting from this smashed city has made me more aware of the nature of a job that often disconnects journalists from those around them.

Such was the pressure to produce copy, I never had long to talk to survivors. Often my phone would ring in the middle of an interview, and I would break off, babble for five minutes in English — a strange language to most of the victims — and then return to asking how it feels to lose everything. Once I got the quotes, I would say thank you and put my notebook away.

The interviewees — who usually had no money or house — would often ask for money. It's something of a journalistic ethic not to pay for news, and I simply couldn't help everyone. But such was the disaster that I occasionally gave some. More often, I muttered some nonsense, promising to pray for them or saying that millions of dollars of aid was on the way.

The strangest thing was seeing an American television network anchor its whole evening news show from the center of town even as the smell of bodies lingered in the air. The backdrop was a small mall that had been destroyed in the earthquake that trigged the tsunami. The show took place at 6 a.m. Bright lights, makeup, pressed shirts — with dozens of haggard, hungry people looking on.

This was a tough story because there was no one to blame — no nasty Third World dictator, or corrupt local official, or invading foreign army.

It was the most natural of disasters. Many people I spoke to, even those who lost close relatives, said God had sent the waves crashing into their towns as punishment because they were no longer living according to his teachings.

I arrived in Banda Aceh two days after the disaster, joining another Associated Press reporter, a small crew for Associated Press Television News and two AP photographers. We lived on the oily floor of a firehouse at the airport. It was open to the elements on all sides, and we shared a rudimentary shower and toilet with refugees. There also was electricity.

On New Year's Eve, six days after the disaster, we moved into a half-built house, one with no windows, doors or furniture. We had a small party. A reporter brought some spicy beef curry his mother had cooked for him in Jakarta. After days of instant noodles and plain rice, it tasted great, much better than the glass of warm, cheap champagne someone else provided.

After that, a family next door cooked for the AP team. We had rice for breakfast and rice "with something" for dinner.

On Jan. 9, we moved into a proper house in a nicer part of the city that had escaped the tsunami. I slept in a bed for the first time since I left Jakarta, sharing with a reporter who normally works in West Africa but has joined an AP team of nine reporters, five photographers, eight TV people and a technician helping to cover the story.

It was on my fourth day here that I began feeling I had seen too many bodies.

The feeling came after a long, hot day on an island where dogs were eating bodies lying on the beach. We got back to Banda Aceh after a four-hour boat ride in which we were tossed about by a rough sea. Bodies floated in the harbor and lay on the shore. It was threatening to rain, and people were scavenging pots and pans and dirty clothes from destroyed houses. A fisherman tried to sell me a large tuna with sharp yellow fins running down its back.

More than two weeks after Banda Aceh was shattered, the stench of rotting corpses hangs over much of the city, a smell that sticks to clothes and hair. If colleagues walk into a room after working in the hardest-hit areas, it is clear where they have been — they stink of death.

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AP reporter Shimali Senayake interviews displaced villagers at the coastal city of Galle, southern Sri Lanka, Jan. 5, 2005. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

Until now, the sea was a friend that brought calm in troubled times

By SHIMALI SENANAYAKE
Associated Press Writer

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — My husband and I were on our way to his parents' home in the tea-growing hills in Hatton to wish them a "Happy Christmas" when I heard of the disaster. By the time we reached the house 30 minutes later, hundreds were already being reported dead.

I immediately began trying to arrange a ride to Trincomalee, where the tsunami first hit in Sri Lanka. No one was willing to make the eight-hour trip to the other side of the island; everyone sat dumbstruck in front of television sets watching the unfolding horror as more coastal towns were reported hit.

Finally a man with a sister in Trincomalee said he was willing to go, so he could check on her and her family.

All the while I had been desperately trying to get in touch with my parents, whose house in Colombo is about 200 meters (yards) from the beach. My heart was pounding. I prayed but I couldn't get through — the phone lines were dead.

About half way to Trincomalee, I got a call through at last, and my mom said the family was safe. I begged my parents to leave, fearing another wave could hit, but they brushed off the threat. Perhaps they felt the sea — which seemed like a neighbor to us — could do no harm. Still, I was worried.

When I reached Trincomalee close to midnight, there were no lights. Water still covered the main street, and fishing boats sat as far as a kilometer (half mile) inland.

I went to the main hospital where a group of frantic Indians nursed their injuries; they told me one of their friends was missing and another had been killed by the waves.

Part of the hospital was destroyed and the waves had washed through the wards. Patients were missing. Dozens of bodies, including children, lay on the floor of the morgue and along the corridor. The bodies two foreigners, identities unknown, were there, too.

I couldn't believe the sea was responsible for all this.

I lived all my life by the beach. The sea always calmed me when I saw it out my bedroom window. When I would get home from work before sunset, I would walk to the beach, inhale the fresh air and gaze at the waves. It was the same when I felt low. And I would always return with a wonderful feeling. The water was so special to me that my husband and I had our wedding reception on the beach last year.

So, early on the morning after the catastrophe, I went down to the Trincomalee's beach. Villagers cautioned me not to go, saying the tide was still high. But this was the sea — how could I be afraid?

Then I saw the row after row of crushed houses, uprooted palm trees, ceiling fans twisted in a few sturdier structures where the shells had been swept clear of furniture and all signs of family life.

And people began telling of the human loss, tales of children being washed away while making sand castles. A father was walking with swollen eyes tightly holding the hands of his daughter. The waves had washed away his wife and 6-year-old twin sons while he and his daughter were at the market.

The sea looked so peaceful. It was all so difficult to comprehend.

Despite the exhaustion from long days of reporting about wrecked towns along the coast, I couldn't fall asleep at night. I would wake my husband with a phone call and pour my heart out. I think it was prayer and those talks that kept me going.

There were so many sad stories, like the baby yanked from her father's arms by the surging waves. He had lost his mind, and his distraught wife sat by his bed. It was only when a teardrop smudged my notebook that I realized how I was straining not to weep as I listened to her story.

When I walked into the main hospital in the southern city of Galle, a woman clung to me, beseeching for help to find her 7-year-old son. I was speechless and could only hold her until relatives gently led her away.

There were so many times I felt guilty for being alive.

Heartbreak was a constant. I journeyed to a little known village to track down an 18-year-old woman who had been plucked from the waters — then raped by her rescuer.

She was only a few years younger than I and her story was devastating. Not only had she suffered a brutal assault, she had lost her parents and seven other family members to the tsunami. Sitting beside her on her bed, I struggled to record all that was being said. But when she broke down, I couldn't hold back either.

I returned to Colombo dazed.

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AP reporter Neelesh Mishra, left, and photographer Manish Swarup at Jarawa Creek in the Andaman and Nicobar islands of India, during coverage of the tsunami devastation. (AP Photo)

A journey in time — from the age of the bow and arrow to modern times

By NEELESH MISRA
Associated Press Writer

PORT BLAIR, India (AP) — In just over 50 minutes, I traveled tens of thousands of years, from meeting a man who lives much like his prehistoric ancestors to transmitting my breaking news story from a laptop computer linked to a satellite telephone.

After covering the tsunami's terrible toll on the Andaman and Nicobar islands, an isolated Indian archipelago where 1,316 are known dead and at least 5,542 are missing, I was reporting good news.

It had been feared that some of the islands' tribes — among world's most ancient peoples, many still hunting with bows and arrows and rubbing stones together to make fire — had been wiped out by the rampaging sea. But I had learned that the 260 or so members of the reclusive Jarawa tribe had survived.

Every journalist in Port Blair, the capital of the Andamans and the base for a small army of reporters and photographers, wanted the story. But the road to the government-controlled Jarawa reserve had been cut by the earthquake that set off the tsunami. Hours after it reopened Jan. 5, the first permit to travel to the area was given to The Associated Press.

Before that, I had spent a week documenting tales of nature's fury, human pain, miracles and endurance. In a decade of covering earthquakes, riots, floods, wars, plane crashes, train wrecks and guerrilla strife in South Asia, I had never encountered such tragedy — and such courage.

I met tribespeople who had to swim past crocodiles to reach relief camps. I spoke to a mother whose baby was born in a dank forest where hundreds had fled the waves — delivered by a homeless woman who knew a little nursing. I talked to an 80-year-old retired soldier — veteran of both the British colonial and the Indian armies — who saved the lives of his family by hacking a path through forest with a machete and walking 18 kilometers (11 miles) to safety.

On Car Nicobar, the archipelago's worst-hit island, I stared unbelieving as a village lay dead before me. Malacca was a pile of unending garbage — except for a still-erect, unscathed statue of Indian independence hero Mohandas Gandhi. The stench was overwhelming. Sniffer dogs looked for bodies under piles of bricks. My stomach churned.

At a makeshift refugee camp in Port Blair, I walked up to people randomly and asked what they had gone through. Invariably, a dramatic story unfolded.

A baby had drifted from the arms of his screaming mother and began drowning after staying afloat for some minutes — but the father saw her toes bobbing in the water and pulled her up. A blind man who ran from the waves he could only hear, stayed on a tree for hours before being guided to safety by a Christian priest. A young boy desperate to summon help for his family and fellow villagers wrote poignant letters to his uncle and to authorities, giving them to anyone who was heading to Port Blair.

And then, there were the Jarawas.

AP photographer Manish Swarup and I traveled some 95 kilometers (60 miles) along bumpy roads to the highly restricted Jarawa area. With us was a driver so terrified of the tribe's warriors that he kept threatening to turn back toward Port Blair. From the rear seat, I could see his face pale in the car mirror. Now he had me nervous.

We had reason to worry. The Jarawas are leery of outsiders and are sometimes hostile to intruders. And they are excellent archers. In the past, they have killed the occupants of moving cars, even in the dead of night.

We were the first journalists to reach Jirkatang, at one end of the sprawling tribal preserve. Suddenly, the nervous driver shouted: "Look! Jarawas!"

Just like that, we had run into seven tribesmen, sitting around a police checkpoint. Some sprawled on plastic chairs, one watched from atop the post's boundary wall. Another sat on the thick root of a tree.

On impulse, I waved to one. He waved back. His name was Ashu.

I interviewed him using a combination of hand signs and help from a government official who spoke a little of their language. Ashu told me his whole tribe had survived the waves and were safe in the forest, but only shook his head when I asked how. Anthropologists believe tribes' traditional knowledge of the sea and wind movements helped the Jarawas and others escape the tsunami.

Ashu told me how he lived, what food he liked and disliked. He showed me his bow and arrow and how he sharpened the lethal metal arrowhead. He taught me some words from his language — "gua" for jungle, "ular" for the sea, "iney" for man.

In the background, the other Jarawas sat listlessly.

One man, though, was wringing his hands in despair — my colleague Swarup, who could not take photographs of the Jarawas. Ashu stopped him, saying simply: "If you take our pictures, we fall sick."

"One of the biggest stories of my career was right before me and I could not cover it," Swarup said later. "But I did not want to betray their trust."

We drove to the edge of the forest, away from an ancient way of living back into the modern age, and quickly filed a story to AP's bureau in New Delhi using a satellite phone.

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Amid the devastation, news of hope from home — a son is born

By IRWAN FIDAUS
Associated Press Writer

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) — I've seen many tragedies in Indonesia, from the slayings of 1,500 people in East Timor in 1999 by Indonesian troops to battles between Christians and Muslims that killed nearly 10,000 in the Maluku islands.

Nothing prepared me for what awaited when I arrived in devastated Aceh province from Jakarta to report on the tsunami's aftermath. I never imagined such utter destruction was possible.

Everybody I spoke to had lost at least one relative or friend. Many lost several. A doctor who rushed from Jakarta to check on family found only one of his 25 relatives who had lived in the coastal town of Meulaboh before the waves flattened it.

"We don't have any more tears to weep," one survivor told me.

The tragedy took several of my close friends, including a journalist who often provided stories to The Associated Press from Banda Aceh, Muharram M. Nur. His house was demolished by the inrushing sea and he is presumed dead; his wife is hospitalized and their three daughters were still missing two weeks after the tsunami.

When the earthquake hit, Muharram had immediately contacted AP's Jakarta bureau and then raced to a prison reportedly hit by the quake. The waves swept in after he called.

I lost a friend who got married in November and spent his honeymoon in the couple's home village in Aceh province. Arief Rusli and his wife were swept away on Uelele beach, where they had been walking when the big waves roared in that Sunday.

Another Acehnese friend was Rufriadi Ramli, a lawyer who was often a source for stories on human rights abuses in the region's long-running separatist conflict. He hasn't been heard from since the disaster.

Thoughts of other places were swept away by the devastation. One had to deal with the grim here and now — bodies in rivers, pieces of flesh on roads, expanses of shattered buildings, the fear of disease outbreaks, hunger among the many homeless.

Then, suddenly, I learned of a new life coming — my first child. My wife in Jakarta called early on Jan. 7 to say she was about to give birth.

I felt sad, nervous and confused.

After three hours and several phone calls from my sister came news that brought a smile to my face despite the apocalyptic scenes around me. My wife had given birth to a boy.

I rushed to the airport for the flight home. It should have taken only a couple of hours, but the trip stretched over 17 hours because my jetliner was diverted first to Malaysia amid the huge number of relief planes flying in and out of Aceh.

In the frustration of the delays I consoled myself with one thought: My wife and son were safe and healthy.

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AP reporter Lely Djuhari works on her story in Banda Aceh (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

A reporter must do his job — despite friends and colleagues among the dead

By LELY DJUHARI
Associated Press Writer

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — It had been a mad rush to get on the flight to Medan, as near as we could get to Aceh province close to the massive earthquake that shook Indonesia and much of the surrounding region.

But when Associated Press photographer Achmad Ibrahim, AP television news cameraman Andi Djatmiko and I finally got there, we had to spend over an hour haggling with drivers who didn't want to go the 400 kilometers (250 miles) to Banda Aceh; they feared aftershocks and had heard reports that huge waves had smashed ashore.

Finally, we convinced one driver. We drove for 12 hours to arrive bleary-eyed in Banda Aceh, stunned at nature's carnage.

The provincial capital was a wasteland of rubble and mud. Watermarks in places up to 7.5 meters (25 feet) high stained the sides of buildings, marking the tsunami's path as it rampaged through the city. Hundreds of bodies — men, women, children — lay in the streets

Scenes of chaos are imprinted in my mind. Two dazed-looking brothers hoisted bamboo sticks with a sarong hanging between them, a limp, reddish-black leg jutting out. Bodies wrapped in straw mats were being moved about in the passenger seats of motorized rickshaws. People on foot struggled to carry bloated corpses, hurrying to bury them within 24-hours as required by Muslim law. Unclaimed bodies lay on the ground, only partially covered by plastic or cardboard.

"A parent should never have to bury their own children. I spent all night burying 11 of mine," said the first villager I spoke to, his hands bloody from digging.

"I don't have any energy left. But I have to search for two more — my daughters," the man added, then broke down in tears.

People ran up to me, tugging on my arm, wanting to tell me their stories. Whole buildings lay across roads. The police station compound, about the size of half a football field, was full of mud and perhaps 200 bodies.

I had to step over corpses, listening to the wails of survivors, while walking to the now squalid Baiturrahman mosque in the center of town. It once stood pristinely with gleaming, ornately decorated white walls.

Several minutes later, I called AP's Jakarta bureau by satellite phone with one of the first eyewitness accounts out of Aceh.

But we needed to find someplace with electricity so Ibrahim could transmit photos. Our car was low on fuel so we couldn't keep the engine running to provide power for the phone through the cigarette lighter socket. We heard rumors that Sigli, 120 kilometers (75 miles) away, still had power and headed off on a drive that took four hours over a bad mountain road, arriving with barely any gas left.

The town's streets were ghostly quiet, but the police station had electricity and gasoline.

There was no time to relax. We had to get fuel. Food was less important, but I managed to do a deal with Sigli's police chief. He'd give me two single-portion packets of instant noodles if I cooked noodles for 20 of his men. Soon, I was bustling over a wood fire and a monstrous wok. After refueling ourselves and the car, we set off again for Banda Aceh. We'd had little sleep or food.

I stayed in Aceh 14 days. The living conditions gradually got better. Food — and bathrooms — became more available. Working was hard, with frequent blackouts and endless cursing at balky satellite phones. Aftershocks rattled the area day and night.

The horrifying images haven't gone away, and most likely never will. But the adrenaline from the constant rush to get out the story helped. Personal losses weigh the most. In a curious way, though, they also have given me the strength to go on.

One of the hardest moments was learning that Muharram M. Nur, who wrote stories from Aceh for the AP, was missing and probably dead. Nur and other Aceh journalists had been an inspiration when I started writing about the province in 1996 — mostly about the separatist conflict that has wracked the region for decades.

On our four-hour nighttime drive to Banda Aceh just after the quake, I had a strange feeling as we passed through Bireun, a normally dangerous rebel zone. Then, it struck me why — the complete absence of fear that the military or rebels would take pot shots at the car.

An exhilarating feeling came as a I saw Americans and United Nations officials in Aceh, a place which I had thought would never get much international attention.

One of my most touching experiences was interviewing an APTN cameraman's 10-year-old son who survived the tsunami up a coconut tree. I feared that recounting his story would damage the boy psychologically and froze when he told of seeing his mother and little sister swept away to their deaths. But cameraman Ferry Effendi knew his son Ardiansyah well. He helped by signaling me when to pause and when to press on.

An unexpected, pleasant moment came on New Year's Eve in Banda Aceh. The office manager at AP's Jakarta bureau, Elis Salim, had sent champagne with an AP staffer. A close friend and I drank it while talking over our experiences. Slowly, the screams, the haunting images, the fear of aftershocks slipped away, at least for a while.

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AP's Singapore Chief of Bureau Christopher Torchia speaks to displaced villagers as he covers the tsunami disaster in the southern Sri Lankan coastal city of Galle, Jan. 8, 2005.
(AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

Faces of dead children and a personal worry — a brother in the storm's path

By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA
Associated Press Writer

GALLE, Sri Lanka (AP) — The first day and night had my nerves fraying — not from the rush to get from Singapore to Sri Lanka to cover the tsunami, nor the seven-hour drive on clogged roads to the ravaged town of Galle, nor the spectacle of death and devastation that I witnessed.

It was personal. My brother was on a diving vacation in the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, and I didn't know whether he was safe. He had taken a seaplane to an outer island two days before the disaster. Communications were bad and the extent of damage in the low-lying islands, which were pummeled by the tsunami, was not clear.

Then, after 30 hours of tension, relief washed over me when a text message on my cell phone reported my brother was fine. My mood lifted — even though just a half hour earlier I was at Galle's main hospital surveying hundreds of bodies, most of them swelling and contorted by decomposition.

As dusk approached, I had to be careful where I stepped at the hospital. The morgue and a nearby ward were full of bodies, and more were laid on walkways, and on the grass. Stiff limbs jutted from puffed-up torsos. The smell in the humid air was overpowering, and I covered my nose with my sleeve.

I was repulsed, but also drawn, looking at faces of children and the elderly, trying to imagine the personalities of these ordinary people and what they felt and saw in their last moments.

Yet, during my two weeks in Galle, I felt detached from these dead strangers, who lost their human characteristics as decay took its toll. The immense volume of death made it difficult to focus, to understand that this was about individual lives.

Besides, I had to work. Journalists report what they see, but have little time to contemplate it because deadlines and logistical challenges intrude. The trip to Galle, particularly in the early stages, was a frantic blur: hunting for a place to stay, for translators and drivers, and for phone lines to file stories because I did not have a satellite telephone.

That meant stumbling in the darkness with my laptop under my arm, sometimes in a downpour, up the road to a private house without power but with one of the few working phones in the city. Later, the manager of the seaside Lighthouse hotel, whose European tourists were evacuated after the tsunami struck, graciously let me sit at his desk and dial up on his private, often unstable line.

In order, my translators were a nature guide with the angular facial features of a bird; a young man with a goatee and upturned collar who helped rescuers recover bodies; a timid, elderly lawyer in spectacles; and a punctual public health inspector who lost medical books and pamphlets when the waves flooded his home ("All of them are lost," he said with a smile). I also relied heavily on the language skills of Eranga Jayawardena, a patient Sri Lankan photographer from The Associated Press bureau in Colombo.

My first driver was a hazard, tailgating other cars and playing chicken with oncoming vehicles. We had three flat tires in less than 24 hours. He was sometimes hard to track down when I returned to the car after an interview. The next driver drove barefoot, though he was a little slow on the accelerator. Fuel was a problem in the first couple of days because of long lines at gas stations.

The partly damaged resort hotel where the photographer and I stayed was reluctant to take us in at first because most of the staff had abandoned the place. It soon turned into a media hotel, where aid workers, foreign government officials and U.S. Marine spokesmen networked, or just relaxed in the candlelight at sunset with a fruit juice or beer.

In one sense, the experience was mundane, laden with the hassles of covering any other region torn by war or natural disaster.

But it was unique because of the enormity of the destruction — the leveled blocks and flattened walls stretching for hundreds of kilometers (miles) along the coast. And for its absurdity — the fishing boats sitting beside the bus terminal and in schoolyards a kilometer (half mile) inland, the two dozen German tourists sitting by the pool at an intact hotel while bulldozers dug mass graves just down the road.

My imagination failed me no matter how many times survivors explained how the waves came surging down city streets, enveloping everything and killing their relatives, or how the bays temporarily emptied out, exposing sunken boats and rocks where people once dived.

When a hotel waiter casually mentioned something about a train submerged with 1,000 people aboard, I drove to the site. I still had trouble comprehending the magnitude of what happened even when I saw the crumpled, scattered train cars and tracks twisted by the power of the water.

Emotion emerged now and then, perhaps compounded by tiredness and the intensity of the work. I asked the driver of a motorized rickshaw to recount how his daughter died, and stood in silence as he pointed at a hospital photograph of a corpse and said tearfully in English: "This is my daughter, sir."

Yet the man recovered his composure in an instant, and seemed grateful that someone would listen to his story. I felt uneasy pushing him to clarify the circumstances of the girl's death. "So was she dead when you found her, or did she die at the hospital? How could you tell she was dead? How did you try to revive her? How do you know she is the one in the hospital photograph?"

Nor did I feel comfortable asking one of my translators — the young man with goatee — to get these kinds of details from his countrymen, knowing he had lost a sister in the disaster. "What to do?" he said impassively in English. I didn't ask him what he felt.

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Living and dead jumbled together and — at last — a small sign of renewal

By MIRANDA LEITSINGER
Associated Press Writer

KHAO LAK, Thailand (AP) — Covering the devastation inflicted on the resorts of southern Thailand, I was struck by the constant jumbling of the living and the dead — extremes colliding, mixing and separating.

Khao Lak, normally an idyllic vision of long, sandy beaches set before rolling green hills, had become a horror: uprooted palm trees, flooded and smashed cars, jagged scraps of wood piercing the earth like shards of glass, luxury hotels shattered, fish dead on the ground 500 meters (yards) from the sea. I had the sensation that hundreds of tornados had swept through, hundreds of times, over and over, churning all life into death.

Health workers carted bodies wrapped in white sheets, zipping back and forth in trucks on the two-lane road through Khao Lak. Wildlife advocates toiled to save a dolphin that had been thrown into a lagoon by the raging sea; human corpses floated nearby.

Thais cremated loved ones at a Buddhist temple that had been turned into a field of death — 2,000 corpses — while forensic experts from dozens of countries worked in searing heat taking DNA samples from the dead. Trying to slow decomposition, workers put dry ice on the bodies. As a fog rose, I watched in disbelief as some Thai workers began posing for pictures in front of the bodies, smiles and all — Thailand is a country where people are taught from childhood to smile in every situation, including anger and grief.

Over and over, life mingled with death.

On my first night in Khao Lak, I went to a resort where a German search-and-rescue team thought there might be a survivor. The work lights and the outlines of the coconut palms against the backdrop of the moon had the look of a movie set. But as I got closer, I saw corrugated iron roofing that looked like crumpled aluminum foil and the exposed shells of smashed bungalows. It was my first time to smell the unmistakable odor of death hanging heavy in the air.

The search had just been called off — no living or dead to be found. A team member pointed to the tops of coconut trees with leaves yellowed by salty seawater. He said that meant the water had been nearly 13 meters (40 feet) high for 15 to 20 minutes. A miracle survivor under the rubble? He didn't think so.

I remember feeling relieved when I saw a truck loaded with watermelons on the Khao Lak road — a sign of everyday life.

But people still lived with the dead every day. I ran into a father outside a Phuket hospital brought to tears by an imagined vision he had of his 3-year-old, pigtailed daughter running to him. She was missing from a Khao Lak hotel.

A man who came from Europe with his brother-in-law to look for a niece searched for days at nearly every area hospital. Forensic experts finally confirmed a body as hers. He was angry and sad. While answering my questions, he told me he felt she was in the same room with us. I asked, here? He pointed to the goose bumps on his arm.

Thai television reported many people were seeing ghosts on the beaches. I felt the photographs of the missing posted at City Hall stared back as hard as those looking for missing relatives: Where is my loved one, the living asked. Find me, the dead said.

Some people didn't seem to acknowledge the presence of the dead. On New Year's Eve, I went to Bang La Street, which juts off popular Patong beach. Revelers partied, girls danced on bar tops or tried to lure in men, people sprayed aerosol string on each other, techno music boomed out of bars. The partygoers insisted they did think of the dead, but that life had to go on — and that Thailand needed tourists.

There was some truth to that, but the scene seemed very wrong, very disturbing. The end of the street near the beach was still covered with shattered glass and rubble. Just before midnight, on the beach, a couple lit two orange Buddhist candles stuck into beer bottles. As the surf gently rolled in and the candles fluttered in the breeze, the two said they were disappointed others hadn't come to pay respects to the dead.

Amid the rubble with its stink of death, I reached a point where I wanted to see some hope, no matter how small, a sign that people would start their lives anew and rebuild.

I found it on Phi Phi, when I met Luciano Butti, owner of the Ciao Bella restaurant. It was the first time he had come down from his hilltop home after barely escaping the churning waves, which he described as "a terrible machine."

He was with one of his Thai waiters, an Italian chef and his girlfriend when he ran into his Thai business partner for the first time since the tsunami. Their restaurant was gone but for the floorboards — but Butti took this foundation as a sign he must rebuild.

And so he and his friends wrote on a bedsheet, "CIAO BELLA ALIVE," and hung out this banner of hope for the world to see.

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AP photographer Gemunu Amarasinghe.

By GEMUNU AMARASINGHE
AP Photographer

AMBLANGODA, Sri Lanka (AP) — The twisted limbs of the frail girl in a blue dress were caught in a garden fence by the sea. She may have already been dead, but no one stopped to chec k– there was too much tragedy going on all around, as the water kept coming.

When the tidal waves hit southern Sri Lanka, I had gone to the seaside to drop off my parents at a Buddhist ceremony. Sunday was the "Poya," or a full-moon day. We Buddhists believe that Buddha was born, attained enlightenment and died on a full-moon day, so such days are a time for his followers to spend in reflection.

It was after I dropped my parents off at the shrine in Amblangoda and I was driving back to the capital, Colombo, that I got a message on my cellular phone that some parts of coastal Sri Lanka had been hit by unnaturally big waves.

I didn't need the message to tell me. People were running everywhere, and the first waves hit the road.

The first waves were not huge, not too destructive. They brought fish to the shore, and people rushed to collect them. Smiling young boys ran with fish dangling in their hands.

But then another set of waves crashed ashore, much more powerful.

I parked my SUV and climbed on its roof, thinking I was safe there. I started taking pictures – my cameras are always with me in the car in case I stumble across a news picture. But the water kept rising. And rising. In a few minutes my SUV was submerged and I suddenly slipped into the water.

I struggled through the water, joining the crowds running for higher ground, some of them carrying their dead and injured. White-capped floodwaters raced over the streets and between houses.

I counted 24 bodies in a stretch of just under four miles. Bodies of children were entangled in wire mesh used to barricade seaside homes. Bodies were carried up to the road, covered with sarongs and laid out for relatives to find. Rows and rows of women and men stood on the road, asking if anyone has seen their loved ones.

I was still in a daze, and the enormity of the tragedy still hadn't dawned on me until I came upon the girl in the blue dress, caught in a fence.

It was only when the flood waters began to recede, that it was possible to check and make sure. The girl, who appeared about 4 to 6 years old, was dead.

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AP photographer David Longstreath sits amongst destroyed remains of a hotel resort in Khao Lak, Thailand, Jan. 6, 2005. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

DAVID LONGSTREATH
AP Photographer

The call came while I was on vacation in northern Thailand. It was bad, very bad, my co-worker Apichart Weerawong said. "A massive flood in Phuket." A flood in Phuket. How is that possible, I kept asking myself. Phuket is an island resort area popular with foreign tourist especially northern European nations like Sweden and Finland. Then while watching the early reports on BBC it was learned: earthquake, tsunami.

My daughter from America was with me. She and her boyfriend had planned to be in the Phuket area on Dec. 27th. She had mentioned the hotel they booked, “a great little place on the beach.”

Early on Tuesday morning as I stumbled through what had been Khao Lak, Thailand, the hardest hit area, it was obvious. A wall of water three stories high and moving at more than 60mph had swept everything up and away. The dead were everywhere, on the beach, under piles of rubble, even caught in trees.

In big stories for more than 20 years I have always been able to put my emotions aside. I will think about this later, the dead and the destruction I have seen all seem so unreal. Especially in a place that looks so much like paradise.

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AP photographer Vincent Thianis prepares to take off in a helicopter to photograph debris of houses destroyed by tsunamis in the seaside town of Galle, Sri Lanka, December 29, 2004. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

VINCENT THIAN
AP Photographer

Ring, ring … bit bit… Call after call and text after text, communications were nonstop the Sunday morning after Christmas. A local newspaper photographer called me and told me an earthquake had struck Banda Aceh. Four hours later, Apichart Weerawong, a Bangkok-based AP photographer, called and told me to be on stand-by to cover tidal waves that hit Phuket.

After I got approval from Asia Senior Photo Editor Chikako Yatabe in Tokyo to help in Phuket, I rushed home to pick up my gear and a few clothes. Half way to the airport, Chikako called again asking me to go help in Sri Lanka and also to bring two of the Kuala Lumpur bureau’s DCS 520 digital cameras. I finally got on a flight to Singapore at 9:45pm and tried to connect to Colombo after midnight from Singapore.

When I arrived at the Singapore airport, the death toll, which kept climbing, was at more than 2000. When I arrived in Colombo, the locals told me it was 10,000. Thirty minutes later Elizabeth Dalziel, AP's chief South Asia photographer and the New Delhi photo editor arrived and we met with Gemunu Amarasinghe, our chief photographer in Colombo, at his home to plan for coverage.

Getting to the affected areas was a great challenge with most of the roads damaged or blocked. Our first location was Galle, after more than five hours we finally arrived at a hospital. Most of the bodies were taken to a hospital in Karapatiya.

Here I witnessed the most heart-wrenching scenes. Bodies arrived in all sorts of vehicles. A van brought in eight bodies, each piled on top of the other. At another corner a couple held their daughter’s body and cried aloud. This scene moved me deeply. I lifted my camera and captured the moment. This was not just another picture I needed to submit; it was the story of this grieving couple. I wanted to share this painful story with the world through my lens.

As a photojournalist, I cannot be emotional. Had I chosen to cry during that moving moment, I would have missed a truly moving picture. I would have let down the people of Sri Lanka. Despite the stress and danger, seeing my picture appearing on newspapers and websites worldwide was a great consolation. I know I have not let down the people who suffered and lost so much in this tragedy. I know I have recorded their experience the best way that I could.

During this tsunami coverage, one of the most difficult problems was communications. With no sat phone, we had to wait three to five days before someone could hand carry three Bgan sat phones from London. Otherwise, we could have gone to East and North of Sri Lanka with more deep reports.

Among the photographers who came in to help, I was the first one to arrive and also the last to leave Sri Lanka for the tsunami coverage.

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ELIZABETH DALZIEL
AP South Asia Photo Editor

I thought the day after Christmas would be one of leisure, so I prepared as a stack of music CDs to burn on my Ipod. I got saw headlines scroll across the televsion screen that indicated Sri Lanka was hit by floods.

Since the tropical island off the southern tip of India is part of my territory as South Asia Photo Editor, I called down to Colombo to check on the reports.

Gemunu Amarasinghe, our chief photographer in Colombo, was down south to drop his mother off for big buddhist holiday in the area and got trapped, he had his camera with him and began shooting.

By the time I logged on to the wire to check, the death toll had risen to 120 in Sri Lanka.

I tried to get in touch with Gemunu but he was out of range. A message said he was in a house that had collapsed and might have been hurt, popped on my computer screen shortly after I logged on to the AP network.

Within an hour, I was booked on a flight from New Delhi to Colombo, as the death toll kept climbing and news reached that areas of southern Indian were also being hit by large waves.

Our desk editor Sebastian John was on duty that day. Gurinder Osan, another New Delhi-based photographer, and I began looking at the map and determining which photographers should go where. Our first call was to M. Lakshman, our photographer in Madras, the capital of southern Tamil Nadu state, and told him to get to the scene.

Gurinder booked a flight to join Lakshman; still no word from Gemunu.

Eranga Jayawardena, another Colombo-based AP photographer, traveled to the closest coastal area and came across with photos that we put out on the wire early, in time for Asian deadlines.

AP was the first one to have pics out of Asia, and it showed in the play the next day, when Eranga managed to get 100 front pages with the first photos of the Boxing Day tsunami, one of the largest natural disasters of modern times.

Logistics, mobilizing people and safety are major components of my job. Over the first few days of the unfolding drama, we would have to deal with Gemunu's digital body and wide-angle lens being lost to the sea, as well as Gautam Singh's camera also lost to the flood waters in Tamil Nadu. Eranga's camera stopped working and our sat phones would not connect properly to our laptops, forcing us to drive for seven to eight hours in gridlock, back to Colombo to send images to our control bureau in Tokyo.

My first day on the ground in Sri Lanka came some 16 hours later. Pyasena, our trusted driver – essential in such calamities – picked Malaysian photographer Vincent Thian and myself up at the airport at 2:30 a.m. on Monday. We first drove to Gemunu's house, who had managed to get back to Colombo. He wobbled down the stairs of his home with a bandaged knee, which he had hurt when the house he was standing in collapsed. He briefed us on the situation and from that we huddled to map out where we would go.

We made a brief stop to buy a generator for backup electricity if the power was down along the coast and then set off for Galle, Sri Lanka's largest tourist town in the south.

We arrived about 8:30 in the morning, Vincent and I agreed to go in to the hospital in Karapatiya, near Galle, where all the bodies from the tsunami were being taken to, and meet back at the car in half an hour.

When we walked into the hospital, we had to take care to not trip over bodies; dazed survivors streamed in like ghosts, stumbling through the maze of halls and rooms trying to recognize missing loved ones, or hoping not to.

A loud cry pierced the improvised morgue as a mother found her child, a curl of foam rising from her small, gaping mouth. A woman began to faint as she saw her father with a plastic tube still attached to his throat, a medical attempt to save the drowning man; he was dead.

The grief and stories to photograph and show the scale of the destruction were as tumultuous as the amount of victims lined up for possible identification at the improvised morgue.

Vincent and I then headed to the beach, again agreeing to meet in 30 minutes so that we could get on the road to transmit.

Boats and cars had been flipped like bathtub toys, onto the road or on top of houses.

Sea water had inundated living rooms and shops with mud, leaving furniture in disarray, driving palm trees through windows. In a very eerie way, one could get a glimpse of what people might have been doing several minutes before the tsunami hit.

After a short ride along the coast we set up the sat phone and computers to edit and transmit. We managed to get a good signal from a French satellite over the Indian ocean, but when we dialed up to try and get a connection, the line was dead.

Murphy's Law: Logistics proved to be more challenging than shooting. So we set off again, back up to Colombo along a riddled road to be able to get the images of the tragedy that the huge waves brought to Sri Lanka out to the world.

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SUZANNE PLUNKETT
AP Photographer

When I heard about the earthquake in Aceh Sunday morning, I knew it would be difficult to get clearance to go since foreigners have been barred from traveling there for some time, as it has been a war zone since 1976. Because of this I sent one of our Indonesian stringers to Aceh with a sat phone. Since we weren't getting any reports out of Aceh, we weren't sure of the situation.

So by Sunday evening, Chikako (Asia senior picture editor) told me to get on a plane to Phuket. When I arrived, in Phuket, there was no mobile phone service. All I had was a text message from Bangkok photographer Apichart Weerawong saying "go to Patong." I spent Monday shooting the destruction on Patong beach and then Tuesday I begged my way on to a boat bound for Phi Phi Island to retrieve remaining survivors and the dead. I wasn't prepared for what I would see there.

As we approached, the normally tranquil tourist island looked like it had been put in a blender. Boats were towing in dead bodies tied behind, there were dead bodies washed up on shore, on rooftops, trapped inside piles of rubble, all baking in the tropical sun. Grown men were cringing while they fished a dead child out of the water. The smell was unbearable. I had to shoot pictures by keeping one eye closed and telling myself that I was just composing shapes, not bodies. One woman who had washed ashore, without clothes, had an expression of absolute horror on her face.

I was down by the World Trade Center on 9/11 when the first tower fell. It was the most terrifying moment of my life, but when I opened both eyes, and saw that woman's body and expression – not just as a shape, I felt like I had just seen the most terrifying image I had ever photographed.

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