Ten days after the double disaster in Asia, people are picking up the pieces of their lives and the many stories of grief and woe are interspersed with the occasional tales of miraculous survival.

One fisherman man was rescued a week after his boat overturned and trapped him underneath. Unable to lift the boat off himself, he was close to death from dehydration and starvation when rescuers lifted the boat and found him. Four other sailors had drifted helplessly for five days from Sumatra to the Andaman Nicobar islands when a relief vessel spotted them. Again they were hours away from death and their boat had begun leaking badly.

The Andaman Nicobar islands are home to dozens of indigenous peoples, and some of their lands have been off limit to visitors in order to protect their way of life that has changed little since the stoneage, some with fewer than 250 members. While entire cultures are feared wiped out and their people dead, others appear to have survived. A helicopter trying to ascertain the welfare of the Sentinelese were shot at with arrows,

'I guess that means they're okay',

the pilot laughed. It was clear that the Sentinelese, a fiercely independent people, wanted nothing more than to be left alone.

Elsewhere strange tales are emerging about the sixth sense that animals appear to possess. Conservationists and environmentalists are stunned by the lack of animal corpses among the humans, there's barely a washed up rabbit. It seems that much of the wildlife somehow sensed that the destruction was coming and moved inland and upwards, saving themselves. They are currently at a loss to explain how the animals were able to know that disaster was about to strike and took steps to avoid it.

On Khao Lak, elephants became agitated around the time of the earthquake and their mahouts worked to calm them dows, which they eventually did. Then about an hour later they started to wail, an eery sound that their mahouts had never heard before, and this time there was nothing the mahouts could do to calm them. Those that were working charged for the jungle and hills with tourists on their backs, those that were chained quickly broke their bonds. Then the mahouts saw the waves. About a dozen tourists were running for the jungle also, the elephants turned and using their trunks, plucked the running people onto their backs before charging up the hill. They finally stopped, the water came close but did not reach the elephants that were now standing calmly.

In Sri Lanka, an entire village was saved when their oxen broke their tethers and headed for higher ground, the villagers, sensing that the oxen were afraid of something followed them as one, and they too were saved. Many people were killed when they saw the waters receeding and walked forwards to investigate and pick up the stranded fish. A little ten year old British girl knew better. Just before her holiday she had been taught about tsunamis. She recognised the sea receeding and raised the alarm. She saved hundreds of lives. And elsewhere, elders in tribes such as the Morgan sea gypsies had taught that if the sea retreated then the villagers must flee to higher ground, clearly, this has happened before in their histories.

One of the most curious stories concernt a mother with three young children. She realised that she could only carry two of the youngest, and that her 7 year old had a better chance of running and escaping than the others. She set off telling him to follow, but he panicked and ran toward a beach hut instead where he mistakingly thought he would be safe. The mother hadn't realised what happened until suddenly the family dog rushed past her and headed for the hut, she carried on running and when she was safe, collapsed weeping for the son that she thought she had surely lost. But the scruffy little dog dashed into the hut, and nipping and tugging with all it's worth forced the boy out of the hut and up the hill towards safety. Eerily enough, the dog had been a present from an uncle who died two years ago so they changed the dogs name to that of the uncle. They believe that the uncle's spirit had perhaps entered the scruffy mongrel and save his nephews life.

Bizzarely here in Cambodia, the retired King Norodom Sihanouk declared that his kingdom had been saved by an astrologer, who foretold of a disaster that would strike on Boxing day, the king carried out relevant ceremonies to ward off the disaster which left Cambodia unscathed. On the internet, the consipiracy theorists are having a field day with theories ranging from Gaia striking back at humanity, to the ordnance being dropped on Iraq setting off the quake.

But among the tales of miracles and the bizarre are also tales of the darker aspects of humanity. In some sense I can understand the looting, probably carried out by people who have lost everything and are grabbing what they can while they can, I don't condone it but I can understand it. Other events leave me sickened. Orphans are being grabbed by greedy relatives who hear that each child will get compensation for the loss of their parents. Siblings are being forced apart from one another, compounding their terrible loss. They will be kept until the money arrives and then probably be turned onto the street. Even more sinisterly, a young, orphaned Swedish boy was abducted from a hospital in Phuket by an older man. The paedophiles are moving in and young boys and girls are in danger of being taken away and abused. Scams are abounding, with false accounts and emails requesting money trying to get a slice of the incredible goodwill that the disaster has generated worldwide. In countries like Indonesia, where corruption is endemic, there is little doubt that aid relief is being siphoned off and will find its way onto the open market via the army and police.

But aid is getting through, as people that were unaffected take matters into their own hands and walk for days over mountains and through jungle to deliver what they can to those that need it; people work faster than bureaucracies. People in these places are always used to doing things for themselves, and now is little different.

It's just the scale, it's so vast, so terribly vast.

yechydda,

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Tsunami earthquake accounts, 26th - 31st December