Mike's trip around the world ended with him pulling dead bodies from the Boxing Day tsunami deluge

Michael Tyrell was 21 years old and enjoying a simple life on Phi Phi Island in Thailand, about eight months into a trip around the world. One morning, as he was having breakfast, he suddenly heard screaming.

He then saw crowds of people running from the direction of the beach. Tyrell heard what sounded like a helicopter hovering overhead, initially thinking it was a terrorist attack. But it was actually the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

As he looked more closely at the direction people were fleeing, he noticed buildings exploding. He doesn't remember what he saw next, but it was enough to make him turn and join the fleeing crowds. "I ran through the crowd and got to a little crossroads where I could either keep running parallel to the beach or run away from the beach, and I took a left," he told 9news.com.au. "There was a small hill, and there was someone up high. Mum thinks it was an angel because I never found him again. But he said in an American accent, 'You can come up, come up here, it's high ground.'"

"When I got up a bit and looked back, everything was upside down." A tsunami, triggered by a 9.1 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Indonesia, had hit the island. Waves continued to pound the island, with survivors screaming from rooftops that another wave was coming and to brace for impact. Tyrell felt like he waited about 30 minutes before the waves finally subsided.

He came down from the hill and saw a woman's body lying on the ground in front of him. Realizing what had happened, he and the remaining survivors began pulling trapped people to safety. Tyrell and three others used a broken door as a stretcher to carry the dead and injured to a makeshift hospital. "A sheet must have gone over me, and I thought this is the new normal, this is a whole new world," he said. Not many people were left where he was, with around 2,500 of the island's 5,000 residents having perished.

"My way of healing was to get involved in the rescue, pulling people out. If I had just stayed on top of the island, I couldn't have forgiven myself," he said. When he finally went to sleep late that night, he could feel all the island insects that had retreated to the hills crawling on him. "That's something that has plagued me for years. I'd wake up feeling those things crawling on me," he said. The next day, he found a young girl who had been trapped in mud overnight and helped her to safety.

Tyrell will never forget the roar of the wave he escaped. He also feels guilt for escaping and surviving, while thousands perished. "Having the opportunity to run from the wave and get to safety, but also running past so many people, it's definitely been something that's been traumatic for me in the form of nightmares over the years," he said. But he knows he was given a second chance at life, avoiding being one of the more than 225,000 victims that day globally.

Tyrell eventually returned to Australia, becoming a lawyer advocating for the elderly, people with disabilities, and those with mental illnesses. He then decided to take over his father's business, a company called "Survival" that sells emergency first aid kits. On the tenth anniversary of the tsunami, he returned to Thailand, where he met a man he had carried to safety after the man had broken his back in the tsunami. "We hugged each other and got emotional," he said. "When you see people that you actually carried out have survived, it's very moving."

On today's 20th anniversary, Tyrell returned to Phi Phi Island with his wife and two young children, retracing his steps from that day. "The kids are very sensitive. They actually cried a few years ago when they learned the truth, and they asked those questions," he said. "They're always asking, 'What's a tsunami? What was it like?' They were very keen to go and see what it was like and hear the story and experience it while we were there."