Room with a view

Moving along the coast of Aceh we were passing through areas that would have been hardest hit by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

It's quite difficult to comprehend the extent of the destruction that killed a quarter of a million people around the Indian Ocean. Whole villages were wiped off the map and have been rebuilt with the same style of house. Nothing is older than 8 years. You can see here that some fast growing trees have been planted as a coastal buffer but the land behind is still a kind of wasteland, previously either productive farmland or intact forest. Elsewhere the mangroves are still essentially stubs.

A sombre moment to contemplate all of this as we sipped on fresh coconut juice.