Without water or food for six days after a tsunami, villagers on a remote southern archipelago are starving and desperate for relief to reach them, survivors and officials said today.

Even as the people of the isolated Andaman and Nicobar islands told harrowing tales of fending off starvation and hungry crocodiles thrown ashore by the towering tsunami, they vowed today to go back to their tiny islands and start all over again.

Rescuers followed the stench of death to find rotting bodies in jungles on India’s remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, where thousands are believed to have died, while people fled their homes today amid warnings of possible new tsunamis following fresh quakes.

A string of Indian islands were rattled by aftershocks today while emergency aid was rushed to survivors of the tsunami waves that killed at least 4,300 people along the nation’s south-eastern coast.