Mike went from enjoying a trip around the world to picking up dead bodies

Exclusive: Michael Tyrell was a 21-year-old enjoying the simple life on Thailand's Phi Phi Island after spending about eight months travelling around the world.

One morning at breakfast, the screams started.

Then he saw crowds of people running from the shore.

Tyrell heard what he assumed were helicopters whirring above and thought there had been a terrorist attack.

In reality, it was the Boxing Day tsunami.

When he looked closer towards what people were running from, he noticed buildings were exploding.

He doesn't remember what he saw next but it was enough for him to turn and join the stampede.

"I'm running past people and I got to a little intersection where I could have kept going parallel to the beach or I could have gone away from it and I turned left," he told 9news.com.au.

"There was a little hill and someone was up high. Mum reckons it was an angel because I never found him again. But he said 'You can come up here, get up here, it's high ground'. It was in an American voice.

"By the time I scrambled up a little bit and turned around, the whole thing was upside down."

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A tsunami caused by a 9.1 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Indonesia in the Indian Ocean had struck the island.

Waves continued to lash the island, with survivors screaming from rooftops that another one was coming and to brace for impact.

Tyrell waited for what felt like 30 minutes for the waves to finally subside.

He stepped down from the hill and was confronted with a woman's body on the ground in front of him.

Realising what had happened, he and the remaining survivors went down and began to pull people who were stuck to safety.

Tyrell and three others used a broken door to carry the dead and wounded to where a makeshift hospital had formed.

"A sheet must have come across me, I was like this is the new norm, it's a whole new world," he said.

There were not too many people left where he was. About 2500 of the 5000 people on the island had died.

"My therapy was pitching in and pulling people out. I couldn't live with myself if I just stayed at the top of that island," he said.

When he finally went to sleep late that first night, he could feel all the island's insects that had retreated to the hill crawling over him.

"That's what haunted me for years after it. I'd wake up feeling those things crawl over me," he said.

The next day, he found a young girl who had been stuck in mud overnight and helped pull her to safety.

Tyrell never forgot the roar of the wave he ran from. He was also wracked with guilt for running and surviving while thousands of others died.

"Having the chance to run from the wave and get to safety but also run past a lot of people, that definitely traumatised me in terms of nightmares for years after it," he said.

But he also knew he had a second shot at life, having avoided becoming one of the more than 225,000 people killed worldwide that day.

Tyrell eventually returned to Australia and worked as a lawyer, fighting for the elderly, disabled and mentally ill. Then, he decided to take over his father's business, Survival, selling first-aid kits for emergency situations.

He returned to Thailand for the 10th anniversary of the disaster, where he encountered a man who he had carried to safety after his back was broken in the tsunami.

"We had this emotional embrace," he said.

"It's pretty emotional when you see someone that you actually carried out and they survived."