THAILAND: A month to the day that the tsunami devastated shorelines in southern Asia, Clifford Coonan returned to the Thai island of Phuket.
There are a number of DVDs of the wave which devastated southern Thailand on sale at various outlets on Phuket Island, amateur videos shot by witnesses which have been roughly hewn into incredibly moving documents of the disaster.
In one, from the heights above the devastated beach of Khao Lak, the camera shows how the tide was sucked out in the minutes before the wave struck, leaving scores of bewildered-looking tourists floundering on the beach.
The cameraman shouts "run, run, get away" as an enormous swell seems to build up offshore, topped by small white caps. Then the boiling mass of water surges in, taking everything in its path. One figure, possibly a small boy, turns his back on the wave as one would any breaker on any holiday beach. Then he is gone.
It's one month today since the Andaman Sea rose up in a tsunami and bore down on southern Thailand and Phuket Island, killing thousands and driving away the region's main breadwinners, the tourists.
Bodies are still being discovered - a Thai police motor patrol boat was unearthed this week from the sand beneath the sea, and more bodies were found below it. No one reckons the search for victims will be over anytime soon and there are many, many missing, including two Irish people.
The scale of the disaster means that fresh efforts are afoot to streamline the identification process. The bodies of still-unidentified tsunami victims are being moved to Ban Mai Khao, near Phuket, with the temporary mortuary at Yan Yao Temple closing. Around 1,800 bodies, believed to be those of western victims, will be moved initially. The remaining 1,500 Asian victims will either be moved or kept near Khao Lak, the beach where thousands of foreigners died, and which still looks like a war zone.
On the road to the new mortuary at Ban Mai Khao, the vegetation is scorched by the searing 35-degree heat. Driving there, you see the usual traffic interspersed with pick-up trucks carrying newly-excavated hulks of trucks and cars.
Work on identifying the bodies is being carried out using Interpol's Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) system.
Workers are busy building a huge mortuary with refrigerated containers. On the road into the mortuary building, they are constructing a long Wall of Remembrance, which includes a memorial to the Irish victims.
Forensic experts, most of them from Sweden which was one of the worst-affected western countries, walk through the building site, waiting for the first bodies to arrive.
But moving the bodies from the devastated beach of Khao Lak is a difficult process. "We're expecting five containers today. We're trying to build a lot of containers to hold all the bodies. It's complicated to move so many bodies," said Inspector Sam of the Royal Thai Police.
The search for the Irish missing continues. Mr Michael Smith, of the Irish embassy in Kuala Lumpur, knows Phuket Island well, which makes trawling through the wreckage even more difficult. He says the Irish efforts are focused on supporting the DVI process as well as seeing how the devastated areas can be rebuilt.
An Irish fingerprint expert was the first such expert to be assigned to the DVI centre.
"If bodies are recovered, they will be identified. We're also looking at how to rebuild some of these communities and what they've lost. One school we went to, their needs were immediate - seats and desks. We have lots of support, we have to see how that can be best channelled," Mr Smith added.
The concentration of consular offices in the hotels of Phuket town has eased somewhat. Now the Thai government is keen to focus efforts to identify bodies in one place, a high-tech centre on the outskirts of Phuket Town which used to be a telecommunications company headquarters.
There are so many different search efforts ongoing that the Thai chief of police from Bangkok has stepped in to unify efforts, a move welcomed by the international community.
"Our job is to try and assist the families in finding missing members and ensure repatriation as soon as possible," said Detective Superintendent John O'Driscoll, of the Garda National Support Services Evaluation Team, which has been in Thailand for nearly three weeks. The Irish presence ensured that one of the Irish victims, Mr Conor Keightley, was one of the first bodies to be repatriated under the DVI protocol.
The three main criteria used for identifying bodies are fingerprints, dental records and then DNA testing. In this way the Irish have been luckier than some nationalities as this information was easily available.
Others were less lucky. The Thai papers are full of stories of Burmese migrant workers or unregistered Thais who will never be declared missing, as they are officially "non-persons".
Since the wave, an astonishing amount of work has been done to fix up the region's beaches and renovate the resort hotels.
"What I hope, and what many of the locals are asking, is that people can forget the horror somehow. Anyone who's been here before has a fondness for the place and will come back. I've been blown away by the generosity of the Thai people, people dropping everything to help others and even becoming victims themselves," said Mr Smith.
The Thais are very keen for the tourists to come back. "You didn't shut down New York after September 11th, why are you shutting us down?" they ask.
And in many ways they are right. The damage on Phuket Island is centred on a couple of beaches, where most of the damage has been cleared up.
Bangkok taxi drivers laugh when you tell them you're going to Phuket, urging you to head to Chiang Mai in the north or the beach resorts on the eastern coast instead, though they admire your courage for going to the Andaman coast.
"We're looking at a second tsunami now - the retreat of the tourists," says Howard Digby-Johns, whose pub, The Green Man, is a focus for the expatriate community in Phuket and a staging post for relief efforts. "The people here have been given first aid. But they've no jobs and that's a major problem."