Lambaro

It doesn't make for sunny postcard fodder, but travelling over oceans to mourn the dead is a profound gesture of sympathy. Seeing the place with your own eyes allows for personal and sacred memorials and helps feeble imaginations understand the scale of a disaster.

Many of the most moving images of the tsunami will be erased in the coming years: the freighter ships deposited miles inland will be disassembled, the empty landscape will be rebuilt, the amputated families will form new connections. But what will remain is an ancient human custom: housing the dead so the living can remember.There are four mass graves in and around Banda Aceh where the dead in the province were buried. The largest site is Lambaro, located on the road to the airport, where 46,000 unidentified bodies were buried. Other grave sites include Meuraxa, Lhok Nga and Darusalam, where another 54,000 bodies were interred. Families who wish to mourn the loss of unlocated relatives choose one of the mass graves based on possible geographic proximity; they have no other evidence of where to lay their prayers.