But 10 years on, Putri and her friends — the children of the northern province of Aceh, where 167,000 were killed — have returned to the ocean.

“I am a lucky one,” Putri’s mum Annisah said. “Because I still have my baby.

“When we ran from home to the hills the wave was right behind us. When we got up there the water was rushing all around us on the hill. We feel we were saved by angels.”

Putri spent the first two months of her life with hundreds of other Aceh survivors in a tent city built on the mountain.

Today she has little concept of the tsunami she miraculously escaped.

“I have heard about it, but I can’t imagine it,” 10-year-old Putri said.

Tsunami baby Putri (right), now 10, miraculously survived as her mother fled up into the mountains carrying her, the waves rushing after them. She is pictured with her mum Anisah and younger brother Fathin. Picture: Alex Coppel Source: News Corp Australia

Putri (right) and her friends Amrul, Merlinda, Rudy, Raisla light candals on the Aceh beach where the Tsunami hit to remember family and friends they lost. Picture: Alex Coppel Source: News Corp Australia

Aceh itself, ground zero of the disaster, has also moved on.

Hundreds of thousands of homes have been rebuilt as part of the biggest global recovery operation in history, funded by $14 billion in private and government donations. There are new schools, highways and hospitals.

Much of this was made possible by a post-disaster peace deal between Aceh separatist rebels and the Indonesian government, whose war had cost 15,000 lives over the years before the tsunami.

The improvements have seen Aceh’s population swell, with people from other provinces moving to the better-functioning peninsula.

Australian authorities have praised the region’s turnaround. “Aceh today is significantly more stable and secure than it was 10 years ago largely as a result of the ending of its long-running civil war,” said a DFAT spokesman.

Delisa was just seven when the waves took her mother, her sister, and her left leg. Today the 17-year-old is smiling, confident, top of her class and able to walk.

But not all the tsunami problems have been solved. Delisa’s family home has not been rebuilt and she does not know where her next prosthetic leg will come from.

“Before the tsunami I was just a little girl. After the ­tsunami I was forced to grow up,” Delisa said.

When the 2004 disaster struck, Delisa and her older sister, Sri Risky, were at home with their mother Salamah opening presents sent from their father in Jakarta. They fled but the monster wave hit them as they crossed a bridge, sweeping all three away and leaving only Delisa alive.

She scrambled to safety on the hull of an upturned fishing boat. But when she saw a huge barge surging towards her on a swell she leapt back into the water, slashing her foot and leg on a piece of tin.

The next day, after the water had receded, a Red Cross volunteer found Delisa injured and unconscious on the ground 8km from home.

She was taken to an army hospital where Australian doctors ­amputated her leg to stop her dying from infection.

Delisa’s father Bachtiar ­returned to Aceh from Jakarta and was frantically looking for his family. After five days of searching, he finally found her in the military hospital.

Delisa with her dad Bachtiar who found her after a five-day search. Source: News Corp Australia

Delisa, 17, is now a celebrity after a movie about her experience. Picture: Alex Coppel Source: News Corp Australia

Delisa remembers being thrilled to see her dad “but sad because I didn’t know whether I was still safe”.

Her incredible survival story has been made into a book and a film, but Delisa has none of the usual trappings of celebrity.

“So many people know me but … you know, look at my life,” she says, looking around the small shack where she lives with her dad and his new wife.

She and her father are still waiting for the Government to rebuild their old house.

The rice farmers working barefoot in the paddies 3km from the coast are once again tending clean crops that were contaminated by the disaster.

“The tsunami brought stones from all over,” farmer Maimun, 37, said as he worked the fields with his wife Munira.

“The land was salty. It was very ­expensive to make it better with fertiliser. But after four years the land was OK.”

Larger operations, like Ramli Suteyo’s trucking company, are also back in business. Eight of Ramli’s relatives were killed in the tsunami, including a brother, a sister and one of his parents.

His firm’s 70 trucks were washed away. They were found, eventually, but were too battered to be repaired. Two of them now sit on poles outside his rebuilt business.

“Two years after the tsunami I didn’t think we would come back,” said Ramli, who now has 30 replacement trucks and 80 workers.

“Slowly but surely we won back trust from investors and banks. And the tsunami won’t happen in the same place again.”

Ramli Suteyo has rebuilt his trucking business, with two reminders out the front of the 70 vehicles he lost in 2004. Picture: Alex Coppel Source: News Corp Australia

The monster wave of ­destruction changed the map of Indonesia, with 800km of Aceh’s coast destroyed and over 3000ha of land washed away or inundated.

But today, colourful fishing boats bob serenely on the brown inlets that flow from the sea into the temporarily drowned city of Banda Aceh, and the commercial district is clean and humming again.

At the biggest of the city’s cemeteries, a sculpture of giant waves looms over unmarked lawns that are home to 46,718 of the tsunami’s victims.

Aceh’s people today generally look back at the mass ­destruction as God’s will and something that put an end to the civil war.

At picturesque Lampuuk beach, where the land was devastated, a new forest has covered the ground. The ­locals are again swimming on the coast, including the lucky ones like Putri.

But some are not so lucky, even now. Putri’s mum, Annisah, lost 40 relatives to the waves and is now frightened by even small earthquakes.

“It is still so sad,” Annisah said. “Because so many families lost so many people.”

liam.houlihan@news.com.au