Tom Vater reports from the heart of the Indonesian disaster.

<b>30 12 04. Polonia Airport Medan, Sumatra.</b>

Medan, Indonesia's third city is quiet, 4 days after the giant quake. Traffic is intense as always, further slowed by gangs of kides who line the streets with cardboard boxes collecting donations for Aceh, the worst hit area of the tsunami, just to the north of Medan. Otherwise there is little sign of the immense catastrophe that is steadily unfolding just a couple of hundred kilometres to the north.
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At the airport, minor chaos rules. Regular passenger flights are delayed by six to eight hours, the terminal is crowded and the single runway is busy with incoming and leaving cargo planes from Australia, Singapore and Russia. From Medan, these planes are heading for the airport of Bandah Aceh.

We manange to buy a ticket for Penang, in hard cash across the counter and by nightfall we are over the Andaman Sea, on an almost empty passenger plane heading for Malaysia.

<b>31 12 04 Penang Malaysia</b>

Penang General Hospital. Penang counts 51 dead and 203 injured admissions. A further handful or two have been admitted to private hospitals. This morning I spoke to several families now housed in tents on the West coast, where the tsunami hit. Damage, compared to other countries in the region, is minimal. Still, several families lost their homes and belongings and the beach front is littered with wrecked fishing boats and flotsam.

At the hospital, a carpenter tells me about a wave 4 storeys high that pulled him out to sea and swept him around in a vortex for 5 hours, crushing his kidneys in the process. In the early evening (the tsunami hit around 1pm in Penang) he was thrown back onto the beach. The ocean did not want him.

A 3 and half year old boy was swept from his mother's arms and later found on the beach, his lungs full of sand, but after four days in ICU it looks like the child will survive.

As Muslims bury their dead quickly, the mortuary at the hospital is already empty, further bodies are not expected to be found. The city, on the surface at least, is retunring to normal.

<i>more to follow</i>