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

Michael Tyrrell is a 21-year-old who was enjoying a simple life on Phi Phi Island, Thailand, after traveling the world for about eight months. However, his peaceful existence was shattered by a sudden disaster, changing the course of his life forever.

One morning, while eating breakfast, screams suddenly erupted. Immediately afterward, he saw a large crowd of people running from the direction of the beach. Tyrrell heard a roaring sound overhead, similar to a helicopter, and initially thought it was a terrorist attack. But in reality, it was the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

When he looked closely at the direction people were fleeing, he noticed buildings collapsing. He couldn't remember exactly what he saw next, but it was enough to make him turn around and join the fleeing crowd. "I ran through the crowd, came to a little junction, and I could either keep running parallel to the beach or away from it, and I turned left," he told 9news.com.au.

"There was a small hill, and there was someone up high. Mum said it was an angel because I never found him again. But he said in an American accent, 'You can come up, come up here, this is high ground.' When I climbed up a little bit and turned around, everything was upside down." A tsunami, triggered by a 9.1 magnitude earthquake near the coast of Indonesia in the Indian Ocean, had struck the island.

The waves continued to batter the island, and survivors on rooftops were screaming that another tsunami was coming and to prepare for the impact. Tyrrell waited for about 30 minutes before the waves finally receded. 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 went down and began pulling trapped people to safety.

Tyrrell and three others used a broken door to carry the dead and injured to a makeshift hospital. "A sheet must have covered me, and I thought this is the new normal, this is a whole new world," he said. There were few people left where he was. About 2,500 of the island's 5,000 residents died.

"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 fell asleep late on the first night, he could feel all the insects that had retreated to the hill crawling on him. "That bothered me for many years. I would wake up and feel those things crawling on me," he said.

The next day, he found a young girl who had been trapped in the mud overnight and helped her to safety. Tyrrell will never forget the roar of the wave he escaped. He also felt guilty that he had run and survived while thousands had died. "Having the opportunity to run from the wave and get to safety but also running past so many people, it definitely traumatized me and gave me nightmares for years afterwards," he said.

But he knew he had been given a second chance at life, avoiding becoming one of the more than 225,000 victims worldwide that day. Tyrrell eventually returned to Australia and became a lawyer, advocating for the elderly, people with disabilities, and those with mental illness. Then, he decided to take over his father's business, Survival, selling 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 fractured his back in the tsunami. "We had a very emotional hug," he said. "When you see someone you actually carried out is still alive, it's really moving."

On today's 20th anniversary, Tyrrell has returned to Phi Phi Island with his wife and two young children, retracing his steps from that day. "The kids are really sensitive. A few years ago when they found out about it, they really cried and asked a lot of questions," he said. "They always ask, 'What's a tsunami? What's it like?' They were very keen to go and see what that place was like and hear the story firsthand while we're there experiencing it."