Banda Aceh -- Everywhere you look, there are destroyed cars, mattresses, furniture, motorcycles and pickup trucks piled up in the streets in huge heaps. Fishing boots have crashed into buildings right in the middle of the city, kilometers away from the sea.

But the most ghastly place in Banda Aceh is the Peunayong Bridge, once an idyllic spot on the Kreung Aceh River. The tsunamis smashed the colorful fishing boats that are a symbol of this city against it. The other side of the bridge is marked by masses of rubble and dozens of corpses in a eerie example of the destruction: men, women, children, babies. Their bodies are bloated and black, their faces unrecognizable.

Relief workers here have pulled some from the water and now many bodies are lying in plastic bags on the bridge. The arm of one man is stretching out towards the skies as if he was trying to stop the masses of water at the moment death struck him.

The surviving residents have been plying the streets on motorcycles and in cars. With the threat of disease growing, people are wearing masks to protect themselves from the smell of death and the rubble. Young men are unable to hold back their tears as they stand among the bodies on the bridge and see others in the water below.

An Army tank stands guard in front of a brightly colored office building that miraculously survived the flood. But the shopping center next to it has collapsed. Indeed, the earthquake here destroyed entire streets. And in neighborhoods that once teemed with life, there is now silence. And though the city's main mosque survived the tidal wave, its minaret suffered severe damage.

On Thursday, two Transall military cargo aircraft landed in the city with the first relief goods. But the aid workers bringing supplies to the city center had to pass a macabre site on their way into town: soldiers shovelling a mass grave. And in front of the mosque, people are scrambling to study the list of names of the known dead.

In front of one gas station, there's a line of cars and people with canisters. And in the divide between the streets, countless people have set up temporary housing under tarpaulins -- many whose homes survived the quake and tsunami fear they could collapse at any moment and feel safer here in the open air.

All of the businesses here are closed -- there's just one woman on the edge of the street selling tomatoes. There is no power, and fuel supplies are short. The one operating generator is being used to provide electricity at the governor's palace, where the main relief center has been set up. International aid organizations and authorities here are still frantically trying to assess the scope of the damage -- but they're already talking about quintillions of rupees (hundreds of millions of euros).

Said Fahmi, an English teacher, is standing with his daughter Sharifah in his arms next to a wrecked fishing boat in from of the Medan Hotel. He lost his parents, three kids and his wife. "The earth shook for 20 minutes," he recalls. "Then the water came. There are bodies everywhere."