This evening we visited the Tsunami Memorial near Vailankanni. Underneath the grounds of the memorial lie the remains of 6,500 people, many of them complete families.
These people (most of them not locals) had attended mass at the nearby huge Marian Shrine on the morning of 26 December 2004.
After the mass, they would all have gone to the beach, and that is when the tsunami struck.
I'm told that no one came near this area for four days after the tsunami, fearing a second one. The result meant there were bodies and parts of bodies everywhere in this area. So much so that the bodies were not identifiable and were buried at the site of what is now the Memorial.
Later we visited the Marian Shrine, a huge campus. Although this is not yet the pilgrimage season, there was a large number of people there.
