Coconut trees used to remind me of languid beach vacations. Not anymore, since my first visit to Tacloban City in the Philippines.

Just after daybreak on Nov 8 last year, the strongest typhoon ever recorded made landfall here. Over the next three hours, a tsunami-like wall of water measuring more than 10 metres in height slammed inland and drowned thousands of people.

Tacloban's once thriving coconut industry was left in ruins. Of the trees still left standing, their fronds no longer wave but stick out in weird angles, as though frozen in a helpless flail.

It was February - four months into the recovery period, Tacloban City, once the fifth largest city in the Philippines with a population of over 200,000 residents, has regain some semblance of life.

On my third trip here since the fateful day, public transport is up and running again and makeshift stalls have sprung up selling food and provision items. But there can be no mistaking that it will be years and hundreds of millions of aid dollars before the city has a chance of returning to where it was even a decade ago.

As Tacloban City stretches out along a wide bay, there was little that was not affected. The drive from the airport to the city centre is a theatre showcasing the wrath of nature. Homes had walls battered in, school buildings had entire roofs ripped off while factories had their metal beams twisted like spaghetti.

Of the more prominent buildings, the four-storey high metrodome, which once served as the city's main typhoon evacuation centre, had its roof sheets flipped back double. Ironically, this building saw some of the highest concentration of casualties as the thousands who sheltered here from the rains were trapped by rapidly rising waters...