Nearly four days after a tsunami swept through here and smashed everything in its path, rescuers are left with the awful task of retrieving bodies.

Fairfax Media joined a rescue team of volunteers who had flown in from Jember, Malang and Banyuwangi on the island of Java on Tuesday as they carried on the search.

We sat on unused body bags in the back of a Toyota ute and surveyed the coastline with the volunteer team, before arriving at our destination.

At times, the smell of dead bodies was almost overwhelming. The air was thick with sand and dust from the destructive wave and earthquake.

Boats, 30 metres long, casually deposited 100 metres from the water lay overturned by the roadside, next to houses and businesses that had been wiped out.

The beachfront was strip mined of all life when the wave came through sweeping up hundreds of people - many of whom were attending a beach party.

Cars have been flipped and thrown dozens of metres. Motorcycles lay crushed. The contents of a bathroom, bath and all, lay out in the open - thrown by the wave - alongside a kitchen cupboard.

At one house, somehow, four cars had been forced through the front door and ground floor windows by the wave, their metal bodies twisted and jammed into the building.

After picking through the wreckage at several houses and finding bodies of dead animals, but no people, the team moved on.

But at a shop on the water, two bodies are found.

The first, a young woman, is carried out gingerly.

Her body is twisted like a Francis Bacon painting, starting to change colour, stained with her own blood.

Gingerly, wearing face masks to cut out the awful smell, the rescuers struggle to place her semi-rigid body inside one of the bright orange bags.

For a few minutes, her left foot sticks out of the bag - bloodied, yellow - as the rescuers grapple with her head and shoulders.

Finally the bag is zipped up.

She is gone.

Locals look on, several of the women crying as the awful job is completed.

The rescue workers place cardboard on top of the body bag to try and shield her corpse from the worst of the sun.

Someone will be along to pick her up in a while.

Udin, the brother of the shop owner, tells us she is not part of his family. He thinks she is a tourist.

Then the rescue workers shout again.

Another body has been found in the shop.

A man, they think.

Udin turns to us and says matter of factly: “With these two bodies, that’s now 76 bodies I have helped find”.

Locals estimate that about 12km of Talise beachfront was wiped out by the tsunami. The wave, they say, swept somewhere from 500m to a kilometre inland.

Further down the beach, 16-year-old Ayu picks her way through the wreckage before stopping to talk to us.

She lives by the beach with her aunt. Both of them are safe but many of their neighbours are gone.

She describes the moment the major quake hit on Friday night.

“First we felt the ground shake and immediately we know, we had to go. We heard the water [of the tsunami] a couple of minutes later,” she says, smiling incongruously.

“We both ran to our scooters and just go.”

The volunteers in Palu, Donggala and Sigi have come from all over Indonesia.

The team Fairfax Media joined on Tuesday are all self-funded. The money to do what they do comes from selling their local coffee, grown around Jember, in the central island of Java, and from their own pockets.

Yoga, 22, from Malang in East Java, is typical of the dozen volunteers in his team.

His day job is working as building contractor.

When he heard about the earthquake he dropped everything and joined a team - without even letting the boss know.

“I did the same with Lombok”, he says with his easy smile, cigarette hanging from his young lips.

“I don’t care about being fired or not, the work I am doing here is working for God and the payment is more satisfying than any work I could be fired from.”

Soon, more help will come from around the world - Australia, the United States, China and other countries have pledged aid and this time - unlike Lombok - the Indonesian government has accepted it.

It can’t come soon enough.

All over Palu, people shelter in tents and scramble for food.

Petrol is being rationed to five litres per day. Shops have been emptied - not looted - as the central government has encouraged taking to ensure people remain fed, and have promised to pay back shop owners.

Outside the mayor’s office, perhaps 1000 people are gathered, men women and children, sleeping under the stars.

It’s the same story outside the governor’s residence, and all over the city.

Flying in to Palu, the devastation that has been wrought here is difficult to discern at first.

It’s hard to tell which roofs have collapsed flat onto the foundations of houses and which are still standing.

But as the ground approaches it’s clear that house after house has been smashed by the earthquake.

Some streets have been flattened, but in others one house has survived, while its next door neighbour is gone.

What also stands out, from the air, is the sheer volume of sand and mud that has been swept in from the ocean, and the river that runs through the city, and deposited hundreds of metres inland.

Palu airport is in chaos. Scooters and cars stand parked everywhere, aimless, out of fuel.

A woman limps by on crutches, one leg working and the other broken and wobbling unnaturally.

A 10-year-old girl struggles to push a man who looks like her grandfather up a ramp; one of the wheels on the wheelchair is about to fall off, but she persists.

Hundreds of people mill about, waiting for family members to arrive or waiting to leave themselves.

Many simply have nowhere to go.

To donate, visit Red Cross Indonesia Earthquakes and Tsunami Appeal, Oxfam Australia, World Vision, CARE Australia