After all, there had been no warning of danger. She thought that the howling outside and the banging on her window were just a nasty thunderstorm.

Little did she know that she was listening to the 190kmh killer winds of Cyclone Nargis.

Only yesterday as rescuers searched for survivors and eyewitnesses spoke up did the scope of the destruction come into focus.

They told of horrifying scenes of Irrawaddy Delta rice fields littered with corpses, and desperate survivors homeless and with nothing to eat or drink.

The storm killed more than 22,000 people and another 41,000 were missing, the government said. It had originally estimated just 351 dead.

Ms Wang, 26, had arrived in Yangon last Wednesday on a business trip from Beijing where she works for a Chinese aluminium company.

After the cyclone, she found herself cut off from the world as all electronic connections at her hotel were dead.

'The Internet was down, the phone lines were not working. There was no TV, no satellite, no electricity.'

The hotel's standby generators allowed her to take the lift down from her 20th-floor room. When she stepped outside, the full extent of the devastation hit her.

The city centre looked nothing like it had just the day before. Uprooted trees and severed electricity poles lay across the streets in the city centre, blocking everything but slow human traffic. Dead birds lay on the ground.

'The road was like a jungle. Everything was broken,' Ms Wang told The Straits Times yesterday, a day after arriving home.

Some wealthy Myanmar people had moved their families into hotels, but many of the poor lined the streets.

'There were entire families - mothers, fathers, children - they looked so hopeless. Everything was flooded, badly damaged, or gone,' she said.

Shops and cafes stayed shut so people had nowhere to go for food and water.

The high winds from the night before had ripped heavy marble tiles off the walls of some hotels, and scraps of metal still shot through the wind like shrapnel.

Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns wielding knives and axes joined residents in clearing roads of the ancient, fallen trees that were once the city's pride.

The scenes outside the city were far worse, however.

Social Welfare Minister Maung Maung Swe told reporters that most of the town of Bogalay, one of the delta areas in the south that bore the brunt of the storm's force, had simply been washed away.

'Ninety-five per cent of the houses in Bogalay were destroyed,' he said. 'Many people were killed in a 3.7m tidal wave.'

Satellite images from US space agency Nasa showed virtually the entire coastal plain of the country under water.

Christian relief organisation World Vision said its teams had flown over the most affected regions.

'They saw the dead bodies from the helicopters, so it's quite overwhelming,' said Mr Kyi Minn, an adviser to World Vision's office in Yangon.

Video footage showed flattened villages, smashed bridges, and survivors forced to live out in the open and trying to dry their sodden clothes and blankets.

'The impact of the disaster could be worse than the (December 2004) tsunami because it is compounded by the limited availability of resources on top of the transport constraints,' said Mr Minn.

Back at her hotel, Ms Wang was told by some staff members that their homes outside the city had been destroyed and family members had gone missing.

'Some of them lost their entire homes. Gone. Not there anymore,' Ms Wang said. 'So many people were killed...They were very, very worried.'

Like many other foreigners, her instinct was to leave Myanmar as soon as she could.

The roads were cleared slowly - by hand - but Yangon International Airport remained shut for two days. When it finally opened at 6am on Monday, she arrived to find a queue of people snaking almost a kilometre inside and outside the tiny airport.

'It was just chaos. People were anxious and desperate...People were begging for tickets,' she said. Some foreigners were trying to bribe ticketing agents.

Credit card machines were also down, so it was cash only - something that not all had on them.

Ms Wang took the first flight she could home to spend a few days with her family before returning to Beijing. Relief was her first emotion as her plane took off, but she has not stopped thinking about the people she left behind.

'Food is running out. They have no electricity. They have no contact with the outside world,' she said. 'If you're right there, you see the scenes in front of your eyes, the people suffering. You feel so helpless.'

WITH INFORMATION FROM REUTERS AND AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

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