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The distance from the airport to the centre of town is just seven miles by road, but the journey can easily take six hours. To get to Tacloban, the small city in Leyte province in the Philippines that was flattened on Friday by typhoon Haiyan, you have to manoeuvre through piled-up bodies, uprooted trees, jagged pieces of debris and survivors staggering around searching for food, water and supplies.
The coastal city of 222,000 inhabitants bore the brunt of 195mph winds as the strongest storm ever recorded tore off roofs and destroyed evacuation centres.
Storm surges of up to six metres in height turned roads into rivers of sewage and seawater, landing whole ships on top of houses and obliterating bridges and roads.
At least 10,000 people are thought to have died so far in Leyte province alone, with the toll expected to rise.
On Monday the first US military plane carrying relief supplies and a contingent of marines left Manila headed for Tacloban, loaded with bottled water, generators wrapped in plastic, a forklift and two trucks, Associated Press reported.
Without clean water, food or medicine, Tacloban's survivors have begun raiding houses, shops and malls to find supplies, with video footage showing residents scrambling out of a mall with electronic goods that they were probably hoping to barter for food.
One shop owner was photographed defending his premises with a pistol, while reports emerged of aid convoys being hijacked and cash machines being looted. Local officials warned the Philippine president, Benigno Aquino III – who visited Tacloban on Sunday – that residents from nearby towns were entering the city to steal supplies and pleaded with him to declare martial law.
Even Tacloban's airport was reduced to a shell. But survivors, authorities and media all crowded into the building through ragged gaps in its walls.
The airport is both a makeshift command centre – from which the army finally began, on Sunday, to deliver much-needed supplies – and the only way out for many survivors, who are queuing hundreds deep in an effort to leave the chaos behind.
More grimly, the airport has been turned into a makeshift morgue for the growing number of bodies, found stacked in churches, snagged on tree branches or underneath rubble. Mass graves have been dug to accommodate the corpses, with police chief Elmer Soria reckoning that most victims either drowned or were crushed to death by crumbling buildings.
"It was like a tsunami," said Philippine interior secretary Mar Roxas, who visited Tacloban on Sunday by helicopter. "I don't know how to describe what I saw. It's horrific."
With communications still inoperative across vast swaths of the hardest hit areas, it is impossible to judge the scale of the destruction. Aid agencies warned they could not reach all those affected, with airports and harbours across the Philippines either closed or badly disrupted.
Emergency teams have been forced to try to reach survivors on foot, in many cases walking for hours over debris to access remote and ravaged areas.
Speaking from Samar island, Aya Lowe, who drove to Tacloban from Manila to assess the damage, said the roads in and out of the city were at a standstill. "We came across the main bridge towards Tacloban and there was just a huge traffic jam to come in or out," she said. "There were people coming in on mopeds and families trying to find their loved ones, and people coming out with boxes of shampoo and mayonnaise and random stuff."
Luiza Carvalho, the UN's resident and humanitarian coordinator for the Philippines, said it was vital that aid agencies reach those who are stranded in isolated areas. "They are at risk of further threats such as malnutrition, exposure to bad weather and unsafe drinking water," she said.
But with the typhoon having swept across a number of cities – one Filipino official said the storm "island-hopped" – Tacloban is just one town among many that will have to be rebuilt from scratch. If the death toll is as high as is feared, Haiyan could emerge as the deadliest natural catastrophe in the Philippines' history.
More than 350,000 people are awaiting supplies in 1,220 evacuation centres, with 4.3 million people across the country affected by Haiyan, said Orla Fagan of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha).
Rescue teams deployed in Bogo city and San Remigio, on the island of Cebu, said some buildings have been flattened, with significant damage to both homes and sugar plantations, which have served as many residents' primary source of income in this agricultural area.
She added that some areas were still 80% under water.
UN teams have been dispatched to the areas south and north of Tacloban and to Iloilo, to the west of Leyte and Samar islands, to assess the damage there.
"We haven't been to the west of the Visayan islands yet so we have no idea what's gone on there," Fagan said. "We could be replicating what happened in Tacloban."
President Aquino has come under fire for an initially slow relief effort, but argued that logistics prevented emergency supplies from reaching devastated areas any sooner. International aid, however, is on the move, with the US flying in Marines on Sunday with the aim of providing much-needed logistics, and the UK announcing £6m in initial emergency aid and the EU €3m for immediate relief. The US embassy said it would provide $100,000 for health, water and sanitation support. Australia said it would provide an initial 15.5m pesos ($358,900) in relief supplies. The World Food Programme will also be sending food, communications equipment and logistics to Cebu, just west of Leyte, with a number of military planes departing on Sunday from Villamor Airforce Base in Manila with food, fuel, generators, body bags, runway lights, search and rescue teams and police."Our priority right now is sending out security – Philippines national police – to deal with the violence," spokesman Colonel Miguel Okol told the Guardian.
While a number of Tacloban residents aimed to board the military planes headed back to Manila, hundreds of friends and family crowded together at the air base trying to make the opposite journey in order to find relatives they feared may have been killed by the typhoon."Until now, I have had no contact with my family in Tacloban, so I have been here since 5am," said Almar Rosal, 21, one of some 20 university students at the base. "I just want to check on them to make sure they're OK, but we were told the planes stopped because people were hijacking supplies. So now we are going to drive to Leyte. It will probably take us 24hrs to reach Tacloban city."
Another Tacloban native, Rochelle de Leon, said she was planning to fly from Manila to Cebu, then take a boat to Leyte island, where she would have to take a van and walk, carrying supplies. "I'll dress in camouflage so we won't get mobbed," she said by phone from Cebu. "I just want to know that my mum is OK. She was home alone when the typhoon hit and, well, I haven't heard anything since."
Thirteen people were killed and dozens hurt in Vietnam as Haiyan approached the coast, state media reported, even though it had weakened substantially after hitting the Philippines.
Vietnam authorities have moved 883,000 people in 11 central provinces to safe zones, the government's website said. A further 150,000 people were moved to safe areas in northern provinces, authorities said.
