As we flew in to Banda Aceh that morning none of us had any idea of the extent of the devastation that had been wrought on Aceh by the tsunami.

It quickly became evident. There were many thousands of bodies, everywhere, uncovered and bloated in the sun.

The city was a wasteland of rubble, areas near the coast had been completely washed away and the closest thing to a functioning hospital was a place of dreadful suffering. Dead people lay on the floor next to the living, fluids and flies covered the floors and the sound and smell of sickness and death was everywhere. There were few doctors and nurses and even less medicine.

For the first few days I, like everybody there, was in shock – at the extent of the disaster and the scale of human suffering. It was everywhere. Faces of the dying, begging for help, will stay with me forever. So too will the haunted look in the eyes of those who survived but lost everyone and everything. Also that smell, of death and decay, is something that has never left me.

Ten years later it is heart warming to see that Aceh’s soul is more vivid than ever. The Acehnese, who endured 30 years of deadly civil conflict before the tsunami, are resilient and the Aceh of today, rebuilt and bustling, is testament to their wonderful spirit.

The destruction

GUNAWAN Husny orders his crew to cut the fishing nets.

Instincts borne of 32 years at sea tell him something is wrong and heavy, fish-laden nets could be a burden.

An earthquake is rocking their 23-metre fishing boat, pitching it around violently. Crewmen grasp railings and each other to stay upright. Coral is suddenly unusually visible and it looks like the ocean is being sucked away.

Before he can think further Gunawan sees it — a giant wave 30 metres high is just 50 metres from his boat and bearing down on them.

Then there is another, coming from a different direction, this one even bigger and more ferocious.

He needs to get to deeper water to escape the mountainous seas around him. Taking the helm, he zigzags through the waves, keeping the boat upright, as his crew of 20 scream and pray.

He weaves in and out of the waves to get out to sea. The waves are not the same shape, some are like tornadoes, others just like a vacuum cleaner. The biggest was not the first wave but the second.

As he steers the boat and a relative navigates for him, the rest of the crew huddle together terrified.

They have never before seen this. Five or six metres was about the biggest they got in a good storm out at sea. These waves are unruly and wild.

Maybe this is the end of world. Over his shoulders Gunawan catches sight of what look like barricades of waves colliding with the land. Coconut trees snap off, a wooden jetty explodes like a bomb.

Khairuddin Sofyan is getting ready to open his small warung or shop near the waterfront in the suburb of Lampulo when he feels the earth beneath him rumbling, moving and shaking.

Paralysed from the waist down since the age of two as a result of an immunisation, Khairuddin walks with crutches, dragging his legs along.

Worried about his mother, Khairuddin decides to head around to her house to check on her. But he has barely started out when people run past him shouting “run, run. Water is coming”.

Khairuddin moves as fast as he can with his crutches but the swirling black water behind him is too fast and ferocious. He is pummelled over and again by the filthy water, now carrying the remains of houses, vehicles and the debris of whole villages swallowed along its relentless course.

The wave is like a mountain. Boats are washing onto the land. People are on top of a two-storey house but Khairuddin can’t grab on because he is too far away. The water is like a whirlpool taking him from one village to another. He keeps trying to get to the surface, which is covered in debris. He grabs onto whatever he can.

Khairuddin is swept through three different villages before he is eventually swept out to sea, where he finds himself floating and flailing about in the open ocean.

The waves which had so terrified Gunawan and his crew are wreaking havoc on Aceh — sweeping across the city of Banda Aceh, on the tip of the Indonesian province and slamming with full force into Aceh’s west coast, obliterating the towns of Calang and Meulaboh and everything in between.

But out at sea it is remarkably calm. After steering his boat through the waves, about one and a half miles out, Gunawan says the ocean is as flat as a tabletop. There is no sound, just water lapping the boat and the sound of crewmen crying and praying.

Further away, in a different part of the ocean perhaps 50km to the northeast, somewhere between Banda Aceh and Sabang island, Khairuddin is clinging to a piece of wood. Another man from his village is there as well.

“How are you?” he shouts to the man, Budi. Budi replies that he is very weak and can’t stand it much longer.

Khairuddin sees a ladder floating near him in the debris and grabs that, along with a plank, and makes a rudimentary raft. For the next three or four hours he floats on the raft, occasionally catching sight of Budi as the current takes them in different directions.

A helicopter flies in the distance but is too far away for him to hail.

Seeing a boat he grabs a piece of foam and begins waving it desperately, screaming for help.

Khairuddin wonders if it is the end of the world. He doesn’t feel hot or cold, thirsty or hungry, as he floats on his makeshift raft. He is out of words, like there is nothing left to say.

Finally, late in the afternoon, a fishing boat comes. It had been out at sea and had no idea what had just happened. Its crew thought a ferry had sunk and the bodies floating were from that.

Khairuddin is hauled on board. So too is Budi, who survived. In the boat an old woman is cradling her dead grandchild to her bosom like the child is still alive. Eyes are full of fear.

It is the same everywhere. People think the end of the world has come.

Teacher Abasiah’s home is being swamped. The water is reaching the second storey and is already chin height. Abasiah and her four children take sanctuary there. She prays for God to give her a chance to fix her faults and sins. Other people, neighbours and strangers, come to the house to seek refuge on its second floor.

Abasiah sees fishing boats drowning in the swirling water in front of the house but has no idea that one of them is floating her way to perch itself precariously on the roof of her home. Someone shouts out for her to get on the boat. Salvation. She and her children clamber on board. Altogether 59 people are on the boat. They are saved from the swirling waters below them.

For five hours they stay on board, too terrified to move, reciting the Koran and praying. When the children become thirsty in the stifling heat, someone grabs some coconuts which float by and a knife from the debris to cut them open and give them a drink.

Abasiah is certain that without the boat she would not have survived. When the second wave came it was bigger than the first wave and there was no way to run away from it. They were too close to the sea and the launch pad of nature’s fury.

It is 2.30pm and they have been waiting for more waves and more water but none comes. So they decide to clamber down and walk to anywhere they can for help.

At 4pm fisherman Gunawan Husny tries to return to Lampulo, his village just down the road from Abasiah’s house but everything is smashed up and he can’t bring his boat in. He is forced to travel 40km further down the coast to Lloknga.

As he nears land, the only thing standing is the majestic Lampu’uk Mosque. Everything around it has been swept away and the area is now a wasteland. Before there had been villages and communities, now there is nothing, just a mosque rising up from the devastation. There are bodies everywhere. The shattered remnants of people’s lives are scattered indiscriminately. The scene is cataclysmic. Beyond words.

“Oh My God.” It is all Gunawan can say. The word tsunami is yet to be vocalised.

A few kilometres away Umardiansyah, a member of the mosque community, is clinging to the top of a coconut tree, sharing the space with a rat and cat. The three shiver in fear together. From the tree he sees that the only building left standing in his whole community is the mosque.

Umardiansyah heard the waves coming. Boom, boom, they exploded onto the land. Then there was the sound of an aeroplane. He ran, the water close behind him, before it swallowed him and so many others. He prayed and sounded the call to prayer. Somehow he managed to grab a door and clung to that before it hit a coconut tree and he clambered onto that.

He was not a climber, had never climbed a coconut tree before and has no idea how he managed it.

Gunawan sees the flattened villages of Lloknga and Lampu’uk and thinks perhaps the damage is isolated here and that the rest of Banda Aceh has escaped.

Gunawan’s entire family had gathered to farewell their matriarch, who was heading off the next day on a pilgrimage to Mecca. They were all together, except Gunawan, who is out at sea fishing, and his daughter Suci, who is at work training course in Bali

He realised it hadn’t when he finally found his way to Lampulo and what had been his home. Turning over bodies, he didn’t recognise any of them.

For the next 15 days Gunawan searched everywhere but he never found any of the 26 members of his family. His wife, son, daughter and extended family were gone. Only he and Suci Landon, his eldest daughter remained.

The 9.1 magnitude earthquake had struck before 8am on December 26, 2004. It sparked a massive tsunami which killed more than 230,000 people in 14 countries. Aceh, closest to the earthquake epicentre, was hardest hit. More than 170,000 died.

Among the survivors searching the tent cities and barracks that sprung up to help house the 500,000 left homeless was Bachtiar Hasibuan, looking for his wife and four children. An education department official, Bachtiar was in Jakarta when the tsunami struck and rushed back.

He could find no-one from his family at any of camps and gave up hope of finding any of them alive. The last place to search is the hospital and morgues, looking for the bodies. At least if he found a body he could give them a proper burial.

It is a dreadful job. The town’s main hospital is not functioning at all. The wave had washed through it, killing patients and staff. The children’s ward is a place of dreadful horrors, little children’s bodies stacked up against a wall where the water has washed them. Babies in cribs who stood no chance.

Desperate, Bachtiar goes to the military hospital. That at least is functioning since the Australian Army arrived and started working there. Out the back, in the car park, is a temporary morgue where bodies of the dead are being stacked up ready for the trucks to take them away to the mass grave.

Wandering aimlessly, he bumps into Didi Augustinus. “I am here to look for the bodies of my family,” he tells the stranger. “I was in Jakarta.”

“Where do you live and what are the names of your family members?” Didi asks.

Suddenly Didi is hugging the man he has never met.

“So you are the father of Delisa. Your daughter survived. She is in surgery now. I am sorry, I didn’t ask your permission first but she is in the surgery. The doctors told me that if she wasn’t operated on to have her leg amputated she would not survive.”

It is like a miracle. Bachtiar’s little Delisa Fitri Rahmadani is alive. Rushing to the operating room to wait for her to come out, he cries. Her left leg had to be amputated at the knee but she is alive. Her mother, brother, sister and foster brother are all gone.

Dina Astita prays for a miracle. Finally, after 20 days she and her husband have managed to get back to their hometown of Calang, on the west coast of Aceh.

She races first to the family home. It’s gone. Everything in the village is gone except the mosque. There is no trace of her three beloved boys, aged four, six and seven.

Dina, a local high school teacher, and her husband had left Calang early on Boxing Day to drive to Banda Aceh for her brother’s wedding. They left the three children at home in Calang with a babysitter because at the time the three decade old separatist conflict was raging and the road between Calang and Banda Aceh was dangerous. The army and GAM, the Free Aceh movement, were waging battle and it was best that children not be caught in the middle of it.

Dina and her husband were driving on the outskirts of Banda Aceh when the earthquake struck. They went to her parents’ home which was far enough from the ocean not to be affected by the waves. Reports were flooding in about how badly Calang had been damaged. Dina was desperate to get back to her children but all the roads and bridges back were destroyed. Eventually a boat takes them down the coast.

Complete devastation greets them. Dina goes from refugee camp to refugee camp, looking in all the tents, but the boys she loved so desperately are not there.

Her heart aching, Dina climbs a hill and looks down on the place that was once her town and home. It is time to accept that her darling boys are gone.

There and then, on the hill overlooking the remains of the town, Dina makes a decision. Rather than searching aimlessly, she accepts that perhaps it was God’s will that her children are gone. She will keep looking for them but she will also volunteer her skills to help the relief effort.

A teacher, she sees that the children are attending a makeshift school in a tent but it’s not really learning, it is mainly singing and dancing and playing. And all different age groups are lumped in together.

“I am a teacher, I should be able to co-ordinate this,” she thinks and decides to go to the next relief co-ordination meeting.

She braces herself and says: “I would like to make a suggestion. It is not good to let all the kids, of different age levels, in one tent. So how about we put the different ages and classes together?”

Everyone agrees. So at the next co-ordination meeting Dina puts forward her list of needs — more tents for classrooms, dormitories, sanitary napkins for the female students, books, supplies.

She goes door to door to the non-Government organisations, asking for materials. She is relentless in her quest for help.

“Education is important even though the town is gone,” she tells anyone who will listen.

Just six months after the tsunami, in June, students at Dina’s tent school, sit the national exams and not only pass but with flying colours. Dina’s school is an inspirational success and the Education Minister comes to visit. By September they are housed in a temporary building.

Back in Banda Aceh, Indonesian Red Cross worker Fauzi Husaini worked from 8am to 7pm, seven days a week, in charge of a Red Cross body evacuation team.

Every day they drive out in a truck and retrieve bodies, often from waist deep putrefied water. They load them into the truck and take them to the mass grave where they are deposited for quick burial. With so many thousands of bodies lying everywhere authorities want to avoid the risk of disease and want them buried quickly.

People like Fauzi are true heroes. Initially, the Red Cross, whom Fauzi worked for since 2000, wanted him to do different post-tsunami jobs but he refused. He had been in charge of body retrieval during the civil conflict and he wasn’t going to retreat from it now. It was his duty, both as a human being and as a Muslim.

About 45,000 bodies were deposited in a mass grave on the outskirts of Banda Aceh. In the early days it resembled a horror scene, bodies dumped from trucks which backed in and tipped up, the bodies tumbling into the ground like grotesque, bloated rag dolls. The stench was dreadful.

Today, the area is a memorial to all those buried below. The tranquil setting, with a wave memorial, a mosque for prayers and pathways and trees, belies what it was like a decade ago. Several other graves around town also hold the bodies of those engulfed by the wave.

By fate Rasyidah was not in her home village of Ullee Lheue, by the sea in Banda Aceh, when the tsunami struck. The rest of her family who were there, including her daughter, all died. Death was not foreign to her. Rasyidah’s husband, a police officer stationed in East Aceh, had been shot dead during the separatist conflict and Rasyidah herself was injured. She was due to come back to Banda Aceh that day for medical treatment but could not get a car and delayed her return by a few days.

When she did get back it was to a wasteland. The only body she ever found was that of her sister. Rasyidah moved into one of the barracks that was built in her village to house the displaced and immediately realised the barracks were beset by 1001 problems.

Women were not being represented. Like Dina in Calang, Rasyidah went from NGO to NGO looking for donations and support and ways of helping the women victims.

The men were being given boats and job opportunities but the women were getting nothing. If they had cooking facilities they could bake and make cakes and sell food to make a living.

Rasyidah heard about a Japanese consortium providing support so she took herself to one of their meetings and, the only woman there, boldly asked for help. They gave it willingly and Rasyidah was known universally as “Mummy Barracks” for her work in running things in the four barracks in her area.

Rasyidah still lives in the same village and her baking endeavours continue to receive funding from Japan. Not far from her house is one of the 16-metre high tsunami evacuation towers, with a helipad on the roof, which have been built post-tsunami and are intended as places of sanctuary should anything like this ever happen again.

Moving on

In 2005 Dina Astita and her husband went on the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. “We wanted to make peace with our heart.”

And three years ago they were blessed with another son, Munji Nauval Ahmady. His name means saved by God. So far Dina has only shown him photographs of his lost siblings once. Once is enough, she says.

Dina, whose gentle smile and kind eyes belie her pain, is no longer in the classroom. She has been promoted to the head of early childhood education in the Education Department’s Aceh Jaya district.

Fisherman Gunawan Husny no longer goes to sea. After 32 years he has retired and now works as a broker at the fish market and can be regularly found in one of Aceh’s famous coffee shops, which he dubs his base camp. He still lives near the water — a new home was built on the foundations of his old one which washed away with his family and so many of his memories.

The faces of Aceh

He is no longer the sea commander for Banda Aceh, and now serves as an adviser relating to cultural sea laws.

He carries a faded photograph of the family he lost in his wallet every day. They are always in his heart. But now he has renewed vigour — a grandson, Suci and her husband Nigel’s 15-month old boy, Sean Thariq.

Khairuddin Sofyan too still lives near the sea, on the waterfront at Lampulo. He drives a specially-modified pedicab to cater for his legs and runs a small shop with his wife Rahmiati and adopted three-year-old son M. Fatih Azimi. They pray they will be blessed with their own child soon.

Delisa Fitri Rahmadani has just turned 17. She has two wishes — to win a scholarship so that she can study accounting at university next year and get a new prosthetic leg which fits properly and is comfortable. This, she says, would change her life.

Umardiansyah still lives at Lampu’uk and is regularly seen calling the Azan or Call to Prayer at the Mosque. He works on a provincial program for village development.

The fishing boat is still on Abasiah’s house. She and her husband live elsewhere now but the boat has been left in its final resting spot as a memorial to the tsunami and the power of nature. It, like a floating power barge which was washed 5km inland, are now tourist attractions.

The fighting, civil war and martial law which had dominated Acehnese life for 30 years before the tsunami and left between 10,000 to 30,000 dead and turned neighbours and friends against each other, ended with the tsunami. A peace deal was finally brokered and signed and many say it was the biggest positive to come from such devastation.

10 years later - Aceh today

Nigel Landon has a unique perspective.

One of only five westerners living in Aceh before the tsunami, he was working for a company called Halcrow on an Asian Development Bank funded project, building irrigation schemes for farmers.

He saw Aceh before and after the tsunami and went on to work for the UNDP post-tsunami.

Governments and people around the world opened their hearts and purse strings to donate $7.2 billion to help the people of Aceh and to rebuild.

More than 140,000 houses were built, 1700 schools, 3600km of roads, 36 sea and air ports and 363 bridges. The slogan of the reconstruction agency was “build back better” and despite some hiccups, like houses which were not well built and schools in the wrong places which are now vacant, the view is that the reconstruction was a success.

“I have seen Aceh during martial law, I have seen Aceh before the tsunami, I have seen Aceh now and Aceh is a better place. The government and the aid community aimed to “Build Back Better” and I believe they achieved a lot of their goals,” he says.

“Especially when compared to other global disaster responses, Aceh can and is being held up as a benchmark. Many of the recovery response mechanisms employed in recent disasters came out of Aceh.

“One of the biggest silver linings to come out of the tsunami was the peace deal after three decades of separatist conflict. I honestly don’t believe there would have been a settlement if there wasn’t a tsunami. It would have festered on for years.”

On shorelines down the coast, tree stumps snapped off by the waves 10 years ago are silent statues at the water’s edge. But Aceh’s soul is not silent.