Tsunami - 10 weeks on: The pride of making a difference in disaster zone

Doctors walk through ice which helps to preserve the bodies. Picture / Brett Phibbs

The New Zealand flag hardly moves in the zephyr as the Kiwi forensic team eat sandwiches in 47C heat.

Their outdoor lunchroom is a short walk from a makeshift mortuary at a Buddhist temple in Phang Nga Province, which has been taken over by international forensics teams.

The New Zealanders have stripped off boiling white protective suits for a well-earned break from the morning's gruesome work of helping to identify hundreds of bodies of tsunami victims.

It is a job most people would not be able to contemplate but which they do willingly and with pride.

This is Rotation Four - a pathologist, a forensic dentist, a fingerprint expert and various police officers.

Each rotation of New Zealanders spends three weeks here - it is long enough, they say - then is replaced by the next group of volunteers.

When Rotation Four arrived at their hotel, Rotation Three greeted them with a haka.

Rotation Three knew exactly what the new team were in for and were showing utmost respect.

At the temple, known as Site I, the bodies have been lying for more than two months.

Thousands of them were retrieved in and around the devastated Khao Lak area.

The first New Zealand team encountered the chaos of the temple then. Bodies lay on every available space. The smell was so bad it clung to hair and clothes and grasped at the back of the throat.

The temple was a throng of relatives looking for bodies, international media teams, officials, Thai civilian helpers and foreign tsunami survivors, all volunteering. In the middle of it all were stray dogs and chickens.

The chickens are still there - one laid an egg in the Australian lunchroom - but it is a much calmer place and more orderly.

The relatives and the media have all but gone and the bodies - nearly 600 here and a further 500 stored at a nearby site - are zipped up in body bags in refrigerated containers awaiting examination for clues as to who they were.

They are taken out and thawed in the sun, then wheeled on hospital trolleys into the morgue area.

The foreigners have been transferred to a new, streamlined, purpose-built morgue near the airport in Phuket and the bodies left at Site I are supposed to be Thai.