John, a 12-year old Sri Lankan, waits at a refugee school in Jakkur, 30 km from Bangalore, for news from his family in the tsunami-ravaged island. (AFP)

Colombo, Jan. 2 (Reuters): A week after a deadly Indian Ocean tsunami devastated coastal Sri Lanka, the country is counting the cost of a disaster from which it will take years to recover.

With a final death toll likely to exceed 30,000, government and relief agencies are concentrating for now on providing immediate aid to an estimated one million made homeless by the series of waves triggered by an earthquake off Indonesia.

But those affected by the disaster will need help for years to come, as a journey around the worst affected areas showed. Starting out less than 24 hours after the giant waves hit, a team of Reuters journalists travelled for more than 700 km around the southern coast ? from Colombo in the west to Batticaloa in the east ? surveying the damage caused.

Whole communities have been wiped out by the killer waves, and the country?s rich foreign exchange-earning tourist industry dealt a body blow from which it will take a decade to recover. The tsunami has shattered already fragile infrastructures along the whole coast, destroying roads, bridges, railway lines, schools, hospitals and government offices.

Many of those most affected are from the poorest communities in the country ? small fishermen, market gardeners and thousands of people working in the service industry. But it has also badly affected a segment of the population on which Sri Lanka has been pinning its hopes for the future ? the young entrepreneurs.

Tilik, a 30-year-old father of two from a small village near the tourist town of Unawatuna, is typical of many small businessmen along the coast.

The son of a fisherman, he worked hard to become a diver and then a dive instructor, making enough money to buy a small plot of land on the beach. In the last five years, he has opened a dive shop, a five-room budget beach hotel with restaurant and an Internet cafe. Almost all his family, including his parents, worked in his growing empire.

Now he has lost everything. ?I had an overdraft of Rs 1 million (about $10,000) but I was confident I would be able to pay it off by the end of the (tourist) season,? Tilik said.

Like tens of thousands of small Sri Lankan businesses, Tilik had no insurance. He says it would take him about a billion ru pees ($10 million) to get back to where he was.

Tilik is not in need of immediate food aid or shelter. His family has been quartered with inland relatives and he spends his days trying to clear his plot of the rubble left by the sea. But he has nothing with which to start again. ?I can?t see the government or aid organisations giving me help,? he said. ?They will focus on the fishermen and rebuilding the schools and things like that.?

His story is repeated in Dondra Head, Tangalla and Hambantota further east, all tourist areas that have suffered a body blow from which they may never recover.