After a bad week on Nias, Tim Palmer had a rare journalistic moment when everything fell into place.

We were more than ready to leave Nias when news of the crash reached us. For the whole week we had been sleepless and plagued by technical problems. And three spells in Aceh had left us worn out, distressed and ravaged by bites from the vermin infesting the coastal ferry, which we’d taken as far as Calang on the West Coast before leaving its rats, bedbugs and mosquitoes behind.

At home I’d tried to do normal things: read a book or clean the house. But the surgical mask I used to ward off the dust smelt just like the ones we’d worn all day in Banda Aceh. The sickeningly clean, chemical odour of the mask dragged out memories of those putrid streets. I could smell again the biting camphor we’d smeared inside the masks to try to overcome the stench of thousands of decaying bodies.

It was a relief to get back to work really, even if work was the sweaty soap opera of the Schapelle Corby trial. But only a few hours after we set up in Bali, the calls came in that another earthquake had ruptured the seabed off Sumatra.

I filed all night and stayed up to do AM at three in the morning. We planned to head off to Nias as soon as we could get a flight. The desk decided we should cover the Corby case and then make a decision.

At five in the afternoon we belted a couple of inconsequential minutes out of the Kuta satellite uplink and made a dash for the airport. By late night we were back in Medan, and we drove the next 12 hours through a Sumatran torrent, right across the island to Sibolga.

We scrambled together a story on the quake before boarding a frighteningly overcrowded ferry that brought us to Nias. My cameraman Dave Anderson and I discussed which Pelican case we’d grab if we ended up in the water.

From the foredeck, Gunungsitoli’s ramshackle seafront buildings were collapsed in a concrete and corrugated-iron cascade. It looked as if the whole town would spill over the seawall with no more than another light jolt from the earth.

Once ashore, though, the story felt annoyingly predictable. The crushed streets of Gunungsitoli and its mourning residents were a lesser, painful repeat of the agony of Aceh. We felt guilty, but we couldn’t avoid the feeling that after Aceh this was small beer.

It was hard work, too. Monsoonal storms would trap us under awnings that were now trapezoid shaped, and seemingly ready to collapse in an instant.

The satellite feedpoint was at the airport, a painful 50-minute ride away on the back of a motorcycle zigzagging the earthquake-ripped road. There the BBC was providing live coverage from the uplink a few metres from the runway.

“Pretty grim in town,” I volunteered to a reporter finishing her cross.

“I wouldn’t know,” she replied. “I’ve been stuck here going live since we landed.” Such are the dangerous demands of 24-hour news, that give viewers unbroken updates of nothing at all.

With the death toll unlikely to go over 2000, the interest in the story back home was faltering. Still, the Australians were coming. HMAS Kanimbla and its exhausted crew were steaming in from Singapore. We were to stay to cover that.

So we filmed their commander coming ashore and moved pictures of helicopter aid flights. Without diminishing the extraordinary effort of the Kanimbla crew, after months of the same sort of pictures from Aceh, it seemed ordinary as a news story.

All the Australian television crews and nearly every press reporter planned to go aboard Kanimbla that afternoon. But we felt there’d be little journalistic return out at sea.

In any case we’d heard that a man had been found alive after five days trapped under his three-storey shop-house. We made a deal with the Nine crew – they’d give us their pictures from Kanimbla; we’d cover for them ashore.

Late that afternoon it seemed to have paid off. The man was rescued by Singaporean and Mexican experts. There were tears, cheers and that crucial element, grabs in English – a rare thing in Nias.

We prepared to file and pack up for Jakarta. Then came the calls from Sydney. Had we heard anything about an Australian helicopter crashing?

Australia’s aid agency representative in Nias was running around telling other countries’ aid representatives not to tell reporters anything. She was too late.

Hungarian rescuers had already given The Sydney Morning Herald pictures of the crashed Sea King, and within hours we’d bought a few seconds of video of the burning chopper from a freelance journalist who’d been on another aid flight.

So we had something in the can. But we were gripped by the terrible feeling we were in completely the wrong place. Our colleagues aboard the Kanimbla would be getting the whole story, we thought.

Then came the phone calls foreign correspondents dread. Editors in Sydney, who hours earlier had been happy to approve our decision to stay in Gunungsitoli, were now ringing asking me to explain again why we’d decided not to go aboard Kanimbla.

We stayed up until 3am trying to work out how we might get to the crash site. No Australian official would even give us information on exactly where it was, but we had a reasonable idea to know it was about five or six hours on a motorbike – impossible with all our satellite-phone gear.

With Reuters, the Herald and a Seven Network stringer we ran through the options – even costing a helicopter in Singapore. In the end we all decided to go our own way. We went to bed facing an hour’s sleep and the certainty that those aboard the ship would be on the scene not long after daybreak.

In the morning we still had to file some sort of holder story with the pictures we had, eating up time while the story trickled out our ISDN satellite phone.

Then we packed to go. Those on the ship had the rails run we thought. The Herald reporter and snapper, travelling light, had set out on motorbikes at 4am. The Seven stringer headed to the main airport to take an aid shuttle to Teluk Dalam, then a shorter motorbike trip up to the crash site.

Then our luck changed. At the football field in town we were trying to convince an Indonesian Army lieutenant to let us on one of the ageing Iroquois they were flying to the scene, when we saw a huge UN-marked chopper land.

It seemed their next trip would not only overfly the area where we thought the helicopter had crashed, but would end only a possible hour’s bike ride from the scene.

The South African pilots strapped us in saying they might try to do a pass to let us get some aerial shots if the site wasn’t out of the way.

We swept down the emerald hilly spine of Nias, over village after village where a cluster of houses would be crushed and only a church spared, or vice versa, in the patternless destruction that would feed local superstition endlessly.

After 20 minutes we saw it. Indonesian choppers had landed near a few buildings, and off to the left in a large clearing stood the surprisingly small pile of debris that had once been the big grey helicopter.

The pilots circled once while Dave rolled. Then again, this time lower. Finally a third time, low enough to see a wide circle of Indonesian soldiers holding taxiing batons and signalling the pilot not to land.

A final pass and our chopper lurched in a crosswind to a hill only a hundred metres or so from the wreckage. I glimpsed another soldier giving landing signals, and then we were on the ground.

The South African pilot turned around pointing at the chopper’s GPS. “Can you believe it,” he shouted. “These are our coordinates.”

Dumbstruck, we grabbed the gear and slid the door open, only to see a furious Australian Embassy defence official striding through the long grass towards us. He was furious that we had in his words “compromised the crash scene”. He told the pilots they were grounded and accused them of ignoring “no landing” signals.

The pilots shot back that they’d been directed into the landing site and it was a significant distance from the scene. In any case, they insisted, they’d been tasked by the UN to this very location (in the end our interviews with eyewitnesses and aerial footage of the crash site became evidence at the inquiry into the crash). We left them behind arguing on the hill and walked towards the crowds of residents fenced back from the scene.

It appeared we were the only journalists there. Hours later the Herald reporter and photographer would ride in, and after that the Seven Network stringer. And that night we found out that the entire journalistic complement on board the Kanimbla had been virtually confined to quarters after the crash, then told there was no boat available to take them ashore that day.

We had been elevated from feather duster to rooster in a few minutes.

The next few hours were frantic. It was blisteringly hot. The only shelter was a corrugated iron lean-to. Then as we began to interview witnesses a huge aftershock struck. Everyone fled as the whole hillside seemed to flex and then unroll again for what seemed 20 or 30 seconds.

One woman wept as she described how the Australian chopper had apparently seen them waving for help on the first pass, circled, approached to land, and then suddenly dropped nosefirst into the clearing. She felt she had called them to their deaths. It was the first evidence suggesting a disastrous mechanical failure.

I filed some radio stories down a hand-held satellite phone. When Commander George Maguirearrived from HMAS Kanimbla to view the scene, then gave a compelling interview on the loss of his friends, the story was complete.

We began the painfully slow job of compressing and sending our pictures down the satellite phone from a laptop perched on the side of a hill.

There was a lastminute panic asboth computer and sat-phone hovered at the last bar of their batteries and the voice had not yet reached Sydney. We ran down the hill and recruited the driver of a battered bemo – an old van converted into a multi-seater local bus. We plugged into his 12-volt supply. Minutes before the Sydney bulletin it was all there (we’d even got as much as we could to Nine to honour our deal, despite the pain of letting them run the pictures first).

A flotilla of motorcycles carried us through the green hills and along the famous surf breaks of Lagundi and Sorake, where the bungalows built for Australian board riders lay flattened to a metre high.

When we caught up with the Kanimbla party, waiting on the dock for their launch, we were given a second invitation to come aboard.

After days of tinned sardines and biscuits we ate schnitzel and ice-cream in the mess. Around us the ship’s crew were still in shock, and in their grief and fatigue seemed guarded about the presence of outsiders, especially journalists. We kept to ourselves, and we kept quiet. But we couldn’t help feeling good. It was one of those rare journalistic days when everything just fell into place.

Tim Palmer was the ABC’s Indonesia correspondent from 2002 to 2006 and won the 2005 Gold Walkley for his reporting from the region. He is now executive producer of The World Today.