'But perhaps you'd like to go to Banda? There are four flights a day from there to Medan and we cannot guarantee you the flight you want in the next few days.'

So an Australian-built Nomad aircraft flown by the Indonesian air force on dawn patrol picked me up from the bivouac tent terminal the following day and headed northeast, across morning mists lingering in exquisite valleys waking to the intruding sun. Such beauty, but the signs at Banda Aceh airport were ominous enough, if you could read them.

Aceh is a province, beset with a minor guerilla war, that has been mostly closed to the general public.

Now the airport seethes with a peculiar mix of foreigners, all carrying folders and hugging Acehnese as they leave, perhaps considering they have 'aided' enough.

Shiny, new UN vehicles fill the drop-off point, while bespectacled engineering types in sweaty shirts make last-minute gesticulations to earnest-looking locals. Eager-eyed European students buzz around, embracing, laughing, weeping. The rangy, hard-travelled model carries cool, single-strapped Red Cross shoulder bags, and the very overweight American woman, with a Jesus Saves lapel button, flaunts unfathomables in a land of sharia and martial law that has been granted a temporary humanitarian dispensation.

Foreign aid was being asked to leave when the second quake hit. It returned quickly, two and more-fold after the second catastrophe.

Indonesia must now sit back, slightly uncomfortably, as the infidels invade - many with the best of intentions. Yet the rumour mill grinds out daily doses of intrigue and third-hand gossip about how the aid agencies squabble over their patches. Bizarre accounts abound of non-co-operation between them, and the media talks of public spats about which government members and departments the aid agencies won't trust their millions of dollars to.

Halfway along the 30km drive to town, the taxi driver casually flicked his thumb left, and said: 'That's where the dead are buried.'

It's a rough, recently turned acre-sized field in suburbia. I knew the tsunami had killed about 150,000 people in Banda Aceh. More than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. There are no crosses on the field. It is a mass grave. There are no signs or memorials.

First Simeulue, then the airport, now the grave. Yet life buzzed around. Scooters, tricycles, trucks dice with each other. Street markets hum and pavements are stacked with local merchandise.

Heeding warnings of accommodation overflowing with foreign interlopers, I pick the Hotel Sultan from an advisor's list and grab a scarce room for $600. You wouldn't pay $200 for a similar room in Hong Kong. I feel gouged. I get the impression this is 'crisis price'.

The call to midday prayer sounds out, the muezzin's tones float over roofs, seep down lanes, beseeching the town to reaffirm its faith.

I wait for the overhead sun to pass and venture out to find a motorised tricycle taxi. A friendly, balding driver in his 50s merely nods when I, somewhat coarsely, say: 'Show me tsunami'.

From the hotel region, all looks fine. The ice cream shop across the road is open, as is a neighbouring fried rice canteen. Around two or three corners, and I get my first inkling of what is to come. A pavement floats on a raft of debris, disconnected from the road or its shops. There is a metre-wide crack in the earth beside it.

The security shutters of small shops grow more disfigured as we slowly rattle along. This is where the wave stopped. Not strong enough at that point to smash buildings, it still left its mark, battering at the doors. Further along, the shops have no fronts at all.

Suddenly an apparition. A boat on a pavement. It is an ocean-going fishing trawler. This is 3km from the beach and about 1km inland from the local river. No one gives it a second glance.

Homes are cracked and broken, every third house collapsed. Every other house looks like a mechanics diagram, or a see-through dollhouse, the front walls gone. Beds, bathrooms and kitchens are all laid out, as if the builder had run out of bricks. Small blue aid tents have been erected in living rooms. Portable water tanks stand under the few eaves that are still able to catch any rain.

As the road winds, the shells of houses become unlivable wrecks. Two walls, a few crumbling corners. Crazily cantilevered edifices, empty, soulless.

Then there is nothing. Thin roads between rubble. Nothing higher than half a metre. The floors and roads, bent and wrenched, are all that remain.

Flat squares of concrete spread out as far as the eye can see. I venture on to one. The relic of a ground level squat evokes thoughts of past privations and padded soles. On each house floor, a large plumbing hole disappears into the ground.

I had been so intent on looking at the devastation, it was as if I had shut off my other senses. But now, in the quiet, I can hear the mutterings. Pitiful sounds flittering around me. Unseen beings seemed to be running from floor to floor, house to house, seeking safety, a place to cower in a corner, or under a staircase.

But there is no shelter, of any kind. The road had reached as far as my eye had seen. Yet still the rubble stretched on, and on and on.

Flotillas of boats still lie gutted along the Krueng Aceh River, into and over which had poured the succession of tsunami.

I pass a cemetery that looks like a macabre tossed salad, green weeds between skewed headstones wrapped around protruding coffins. Everything seems lurched, and covered in a dressing of dust and dried mud.

I cross a twisted bridge to gain vantage, and see kilometres of devastation. Slowly I head west to the beachhead where the sea had risen to strike and smash. The long road is in fairly good condition, and I notice a rise in traffic levels. Motorcyclists and passengers throng the road, looking at nothing.

We all trundle along at a funereal pace. Perhaps this is a daily form of cleansing, a pilgrimage. Is this a communing with the dead, with pasts, an attempt to restring strands of history?

'That was where my favourite rice shop stood.'

'That was where uncle Dak lived. We went there on public holidays.'

'That was the beach on which my [deceased] father met my [deceased] mother.'

It seemed an attempt at reconciliation - with life, death and perhaps the guilt of the survivor - a paradoxical effort to overcome the past, yet be constantly ravaged by it.

The survivors park on a bridge to a small island - the frontline on that mad day - that can only be termed a monument to death and seething terror. It is empty of life. As everywhere else, there are no rats, no cockroaches, no crows, no birds, no food.

As the sun sets over the water, the survivors stare, vacantly, choking on the dust, choking on the passing heat, on emotion, on their past, on the future.

The bridge of sighs and tears weighs heavy with dispossessed and dislocated spirits, lost survivors. An orange hue settles on the pilgrims and heads slowly turn to the wide open ocean. I avert my gaze.