In another life he could have been a wine taster, but instead the 27-year-old uses his keen sense of smell to sniff out the decomposing remains of those killed in December's tsunami.

Two months after the tragedy, for the teams scouring the sandy beaches and devastated coastal villages of Indonesia's Aceh province, finding bodies has become little more than a routine.

More than 237,000 people are listed as dead or missing presumed dead following the December 26 earthquake and killer waves off the coast of Sumatra, and almost have the bodies have yet to be found.

The full glare of the international media may have shifted away since the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, but several hundred decomposing bodies continue to be recovered every day.

Darianto, 27, recently graduated with a management diploma, not that you'd guess it from his stained and torn white overalls, rubber boots and face mask.

He starts work at 8am with a dozen other volunteers from the Indonesian Red Cross. Today they are to survey Rima, a shattered village that has been turned into a tract of brackish marsh dotted with dead coconut trees, their brown palm leaves swaying gently in the breeze.

Moving around in such an apocalyptic wasteland is difficult. Ideally they would have a bulldozer to clear through the fallen trees, or a shallow boat to cross the new inland saltwater lakes, but instead they have to move around on foot.

"You often slip and fall into a hole," Darianto says. Sometimes they cut themselves on the nails sticking out of planks of wood washed up from the wreckage of smashed homes.

They find the bodies through instinct, they say, though mostly that means through their sense of smell.

All of the bodies that were out in the open have been collected. Now the volunteers' task is to search the water-filled pools of the upturned root bowls and the shadowy spaces under fallen trees.

They stick their heads in and have a good sniff.

"Human bodies smell differently to animal carcasses," says Darianto, known among his fellow workers as having a good nose.

When they find a body, wedged under a fallen branch or buried in the viscous clay, the recovery team brings over a body bag and collect whatever they can.

Handfuls of sludge they remove can contain bits of bone and flesh.

"Our priority is to get the head, then the torso, then the legs. Often we can't get everything, like the fingers," he says, matter-of-factly.

The bodies that have been festering in water have decomposed faster than those that have dried out in the sun.

If they can find jewellery, they are often able to identify the sex of the victim. Gold necklaces, bracelets and earrings are handed over to the team leader.

"We sell them. The money will go towards building a mosque," explains Fauzi Huseini, 36.

He says that despite the work being thankless and often gruesome, the team of eight under his supervision get frustrated if they don't find a body. But that rarely happens, with the team on average finding 40 to 50 bodies a day.

"I don't know how many months this is going to carry on. At first we thought it would be two months, but if they give us new areas to search, we will carry on," Huseini says.

The Indonesian Red Cross has said the process could take six months.

Darianto says the work often makes him feel nauseous. He admits that he would like to find the body of somebody he knew. He says it would make the job he is doing seem even more worthwhile.

Winding down at the end of the day is hard, but they manage it, joking around, comparing each other to the dogs that roam the beaches -- animals they as Muslims consider to be impure.

When night falls and the dead have been buried, they end up showering in antiseptic.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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