SRI LANKA/Irish experiences: An Irish holidaymaker in Sri Lanka said he felt lucky to be alive after narrowly escaping the full force of the tsunami on St Stephen's Day.
Mr Martin Lane, of Mitchelstown, Cork, said his hotel at the resort of Kalutura was the only building in the area left standing after the tidal wave had struck.
"I was just about to jump into the swimming pool when I looked up and saw a four-foot wall of water heading down the grass towards me. We turned and ran for our lives back into the hotel."
He said he grabbed his fiancée, Ms Mairead Lee, and the two fled upstairs.
"The whole bottom floor of the hotel was flooded, and everything for 100 metres to the left and right of the building was completely flattened. A village had disappeared. We saw fishing boats which had landed on the roofs of houses," he told The Irish Times.
Mr Lane, who was due to have been evacuated from the hotel last night, along with a small group of other Irish and European holidaymakers, said they had spent the last 48 hours trying to help the local community.
"We gave what stuff we had to the locals. There were people walking around in T-shirts and shorts who had nothing left," he said.
Mr Hugh Morley from Cork told Pat Kenny on RTÉ Radio 1 yesterday how he, his wife and small child had a lucky escape in Sri Lanka on Sunday.
A voluntary teacher of English, Mr Morley said that, in common with many foreigners in that predominantly Buddhist country, they had gone to the beach for Christmas.
Originally booked into a guesthouse closer to the sea they moved a third of a mile inland to better accommodation, which probably saved their lives.
It was breakfast time. "We were pouring cornflakes. Then we heard commotion. Dogs were barking, and people were shouting 'Get out, get out'."
He and his family began to run inland ahead of the sea, "chased down the road by fridges, motorbikes, everything."
They continued inland. A family of six from Cork had decided to stay behind, he said. Although they were fine he worried they might be subject to disease.
An RTÉ Late Late Show producer, Mr Bill Malone had been on holiday with his German girlfriend, Elka.
They were staying at a tree house on a nature reserve 10 kilometres north of Khao Lak, about 100 kilometres north of Phuket in Thailand.
He said they had breakfast and were putting on suncream when they heard local people screaming.
"Thai people don't get excited very easily. They don't shout, they don't get excited, and they ran towards the water.
"I was wondering what was going on there, and they ran back very quickly. I said to Elka 'Get out of here now' . We could hear this low rumble followed by a high kind of white noise, then the snap, snap of trees and buildings as they collapsed."
The tree house they were staying in was about five metres high. Both he and his girlfriend "completely naked, ran, ran, ran. A wave caught me, smashed me against a tree, and I was pinned to the tree and the water just came over my head and I actually said 'That's it'. There was nothing I could do. I couldn't get out.
"The water was terrible pressure. It had me pinned against the tree, and there was no way I was going to survive. And then the waves took a breath, kind of reversed as waves do, smashed in, reversed a little bit. And as they started to withdraw it freed me up and allowed me climb the tree just a little bit.
"I screamed for Elka, and there she was. I hit the tree, and she managed to grab it as I hit it. Then both of us were on the tree, climbed it, waited until, well, just listened, and there was just complete silence."
They jumped into the water "which was neck-high at that time and waded as quick as we could to these rocks, climbed the rocks, and the rocks led to a road. So we were actually the first people out of there."
They jumped into a passing car and got a lift to a local clinic.
Mr Donie Spillane from Kerry, who was at Khao Lak, north of Phuket, was upstairs in his hotel when he heard "a huge roar like a helicopter coming overhead. I went for a look on the balcony.
A wall of water just came down the street, pushing people and cars, an elephant, houses, pushing everything before it.
"And people were hanging on to things. We were taking people from the water for three hours. Just taking people into the hotel room all the time. It was devastation."
They had managed to get everybody upstairs from the lower floors, he said. He recalled: "The first wave went down after about an hour. Then there were two more after that. The first was the worst one.
The first one was five metres of water, just a complete wall of it.There were people stuck in cars, and trees, telephone poles." He couldn't imagine that many Thai people in the shanty house on the ground had survived.