So began an ordeal Mr McGrath will never forget. He was due to leave the next morning for a surfing trip to the nearby Mentawai Islands, famed for their large, clean, barrelling waves. The charter boat captain who had just left his room after negotiating a fee died in a bathroom downstairs. ''He was missing body parts. He was totally messed up,'' Mr McGrath said yesterday A female hotel worker suffered horrific injuries, pinned down by a broken pillar for eight hours in the hotel's foyer. ''It's almost a sickening feeling thinking about the girl out the front,'' Mr McGrath, 21, said, staring at the wreckage of the Hotel Dipo. ''This has just totally mentally destroyed me. Mate, I just want to get out of here.'' His escape was just as extraordinary as the footage - obtained by The Sunday Age - that he shot. ''I just turned around and picked up the camera and started video recording. ''I looked down and there was a huge crack where the wall used to be. I didn't know where to go because the staircase had collapsed and crumbled in … It happened in a matter of seconds. I went into panic … I was just thinking about how I would get out because the staircase had crumbled in. I was that far up. How was I going to get down?''

In the end, Mr McGrath leapt a metre-wide chasm in the building, jumping on to another landing. A miscalculation from a 10-metre height would have left him badly injured. He then scampered down through the rubble. ''Everything was covered in dust - you could barely even breathe.'' When he finally emerged, the scale of the devastation was apparent. ''The whole front of the hotel had collapsed in and there was a lady bawling her eyes out the front. She was covered in rubble - up to her shoulders with rubble. We dug it and dug it.'' In the end it was fruitless effort; a pillar that was pinning her down from the hips was too big to remove. It took eight hours to find a truck to pull it out - the woman survived. Outside, the scene around Mr McGrath was apocalyptic. Collapsed buildings, rubble everywhere, and the constant pleading cries and screams of victims. The Ramayana Mall, two hundred metres down the road, was engulfed in flames.

''You could hear the building collapsing from the inside. God knows how many people were inside,'' he says. After three hours wandering the streets carrying only his camera and a mobile phone that didn't work, his shock and bewilderment gave way to panic as the city descended into pitch black, the only lights coming from vehicles ferrying victims to hospital and the flames from burning buildings. ''The reality sunk in. I realised how bad it all was and I knew that no one could really help me.'' Mr McGrath then made a decision that he concedes was risky, but one he doesn't regret. He returned to the hotel to retrieve his passport and ATM card from his third-floor room. ''I had a torch, but it was so dusty. It was really hard to see. I got into the crack where the building had split in half and climbed up. It was really unstable. There was lots of loose tiles. It was really slippery at the edge where I had to jump. It was just so hectic.''

Loading He got his passport and ATM card and, a day later, he even retrieved his surfboards. But he couldn't contact his family. ''They went into a total panic, just trying to make sure I was all right.'' Contact has been made, and Mr McGrath got a flight to Singapore yesterday. He won't be coming back to Padang. ''It's been too much,'' he says. But he hasn't lost his zest for travel. He's going to hook up with his father, Peter, in the Philippines. The waves are waiting.