Mixed Blessings for Thais

The newly constructed warning towers on Patong and Kamala beaches are virtually the only hint that these popular resorts on Phuket island were devastated by the boxing day tsunami.

The debris has long since disappeared, hotels and restaurants have reopened - some as soon as early January, and tourists are starting to return, although foreign arrivals are 65% down on last year. "We've made an excellent recovery," Phuket's governor, Udomsak Uswarangkura, told the Guardian. "We're not quite back to normal but we're almost there."

But that confidence is not universal. Viparat Kuamoon, who runs a restaurant on Kamala beach, said she had received little help to restart her business. "Our losses were hundreds of thousands of baht but the government only paid us 20,000 baht [£280]," she said. "They're now forcing us to move next to a cemetery. Who wants to eat by a grave?"

The situation in Phangnga province, north of Phuket, is much worse. Only 500 of the 6,000 affected hotel rooms in the Khao Lak district have reopened, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation.

"I don't think the government have [deployed] enough staff to work with the communities," said Anchalee Phonkling, a field coordinator with the aid agency Care International.

She cited the Moken people, who for generations have led a nomadic lifestyle along Thailand's west coast, as a typical case of a neglected community. "Many of them have never had identity cards or birth certificates so they're finding it very hard to get any assistance as the authorities aren't interested in them," she said.

Where agencies have stepped in, villages have seen their living standards rise. "Thanks to the tsunami our village is loads better, it's 10 years advanced," said Chet Saithong, the chief of Ban Nai Rai village in Phangnga. "But life is not back to normal. It's now very clear that the disaster really changed people, their lives and their behaviour. We're still traumatised."

The number of confirmed dead in Thailand is 5,395, with some 80% of the fatalities occurring in Khao Lak. About 2,700 of those killed are believed to have been foreigners - of whom 129 were British.