Tsunami

A beach near Aitape where bodies have been hastily buried under piles of wood.
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In mid-August 1998, the inhabitants of Aitape on the north coast of Papua New Guinea felt a mild tremor underneath their feet. Thinking nothing more of it, they carried on with what they were doing. 20 minutes later, the same people were scrambling for cover as a 10-metre high wall of water headed towards them.

10,000 of them got away, only to be left homeless and destitute in a mass graveyard full of bloated corpses. 3,000 were not so lucky. But the real horror was the lagoon in the path of the tsunami, which trapped all the bodies which would otherwise have been washed out to sea. With cholera and typhoid a constant threat, with dogs digging up hastily buried bodies and with the stench of corpses trapped in palm trees and mangrove roots, the place was eventually abandoned. All the houses had been washed away anyway.

10,000 people got away, only to be left homeless and destitute in a mass graveyard full of bloated corpses

Our team outside the Lutheran Guest House with one of its staff.
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Hundreds of miles away in the Highlands, we were finishing our last days in Kainantu and heard the news. It didn't seem that serious at first, and we made our way to our holiday spot in Madang without too much worry.

But the scale of the damage became clear when we got to the north coast. As the nearest major city, Madang was the base for all the emergency services going to Aitape. With two of our group training to be doctors and the other two wanting to help, our goal was to get on the first plane out there.

Playing waterpolo as the sun sets on Siar Island and the coast of Madang.
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It wasn't so easy. No-one wanted to take responsibility for a random group of travellers who had been in PNG a matter of weeks. In the course of an anxious day, where the chicken part of me desperately hoped we wouldn't be able to go, we must have made 15 phone calls. But it wasn't meant to be.

So, instead of burying bodies and bandaging wounds, we were forced to go on with our holiday (not without a touch of guilt). We decided to head for Siar Island, with its unspoilt beaches, heartbreaking sunsets and cyan waters. There's one budget guesthouse on the island which gave us bed and breakfast for about 5 pounds a night. The accommodation was basic but clean and there were only two other people staying there.

The rest of the tiny island was deserted except for one Papua New Guinean family we spotted fishing. It was classic tropical paradise - vines you could swing on, waters full of stunning coral, sunsets that made you overuse the word 'beautiful'.

Madang was a great holiday town too, with a posh (but affordable) club by the marina and small enough to wander around. We stayed there for a few days, then headed back to Port Moresby for our flight home.

Madang, and the whole of PNG, was beautiful, welcoming, intriguing and bizarre all at the same time. But I still wished, as the plane lifted us off the island, that the chicken part of me hadn't had its way. I would have liked to have given something back.