Mobile mortuaries, some of them at Buddhist temples, have sprung up around Phuket island. They are terrible places.
The bodies of people killed in the tsunamis are stored in refrigerated containers and taken out onto trestles in the open air by gas-masked forensic experts, where the doctors take photographs and take samples of DNA, fingerprints and dental records for identification.
Forensic teams from 19 countries are working to identify them through dental records and DNA testing. But the search for bodies is winding down and the Thai authorities have ceased search operations on Phuket.
It is feared that many of the dead at Phi-Phi island just off the coast of Phuket may never be found or identified. Hundreds of tourists were suffocated or swept out to sea when the tsunamis swept across the 28-square-kilometre island.
When I visited Phi-Phi, made famous by the 2000 film The Beach, days after the tsunamis, it was a scene of devastation, with scores of bodies being shipped off the island.
Thailand's national disaster centre said 5,104 bodies - 2,459 of them foreigners - have been recovered from the wreckage of the southern Thai disaster area. The Prime Minister, Mr Thaksin Shinawatra, said the number could rise to between 7,000 and 8,000. Around 4,000 people are still missing - nearly half of them foreigners. Mr Dan Mulhall, Ireland's Ambassador to Thailand, who is co-ordinating Irish diplomatic efforts to help find missing Irish people and also helping relatives who have travelled out fearing the worst, is not giving up hope.
"I'm basically trying to give every support I can to the relatives so that the identification of the bodies can come to a successful conclusion and so the families can know where the bodies of their loved ones are," he said.
"The relatives are coping as well as can be expected under very difficult circumstances. We've gone through various processes to see what points to an identification of the body. We're doing various things to trace the families' loved ones," he said.
Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper carried a remarkable story about an Irish banker working in Hong Kong, whose wife was still missing, but who was himself discharged from hospital in Phuket after recovering from leg injuries.
Mr Kevin Quinn (36), has a British passport and holds a Hong Kong identity card, was caught with his wife Rachel (34), on the beach at Khao Lak.
They had been on a four-day beach holiday at the Sofitel Magic Lagoon Resort and Spa when the disaster hit, his older brother Mr Gareth Quinn said.
Walking down to the shore, the couple noticed the tide was unusually low and they saw crabs and fish on the sand.
Hotel staff warned them to get off the beach but the waves were already upon them. Mr Quinn held on to his wife but the two were pulled apart by the force of the wave, which pushed him onto the first floor of the hotel apartment, his brother told the newspaper.
He went under the waves as the water burst through balcony windows, and he next found himself on the second floor.
He survived by grabbing onto one of the floor's balconies. "The thing was so fast, he just went with the flow," Mr Gareth Quinn said. He said he had had looked for Ms Quinn at temporary mortuaries in temples where bodies had been laid out but could not find her.
"As you would expect, he's upset. Very upset, you know." Mr Quinn was due to travel with two of his brothers to Dublin, where his parents live.
The Thai authorities now want to keep the families of missing foreigners out of the morgues to allow forensic experts get on with the job of identifying the bodies using DNA samples.
"Friends and family members must refrain from visiting the tsunami-affected locations, temples, mosques, all operational grounds, including DNA gathering sites and autopsy sites. We have to get organised," the Thai police said.
Foreign volunteers now have to register with police in an effort to better co-ordinate relief efforts. They have also appealed for help to increase the amount of refrigerated containers to store bodies while they try to identify the bodies. Identifying the huge number of victims is a massive task.
Thai authorities had to exhume 300 victims after they discovered the bodies were incorrectly labelled in the rush to bury the dead before they decomposed in the heat.