They Took a Vacation, Now They're Dead

Oct. 16 -- Bare, browned shoulders quivering with grief, their team caps pulled low over teary faces, the surviving members of a visiting rugby team made their way down the main street in Kuta, Indonesia, to pay their respects to the dead.

They were rugby players, surfers, honeymooners, families and friends, most of them killed because they did nothing more than take a vacation.

There are still no firm numbers of the dead and injured in Saturday night's bomb blasts at the Sari Club, a happening nightclub in Bali's Kuta resort area. Only one thing is for sure — the death toll is getting higher every day.

Officials estimate that nearly 200 people were killed in Indonesia's worst terrorist attack, many of them Australian citizens enjoying the sapphire beaches, sun-drenched white shores and relatively cheap prices of Bali, a tourist paradise otherwise known as the Island of the Gods.

But the gods seem to have frowned on Bali, indeed the entire region, this week as grieving loved ones dashed from hospital to hospital hoping for a miracle, stunned tourists gathered at candlelit vigils, volunteers rushed ice into morgues to preserve bodies in the tropical heat and stretchers bearing the wounded were wheeled down the tarmac at Australian airports.

Clinging on Hope

Australia today is a country in mourning. Four days after the blast, the loved ones of the missing are still clinging onto hope although they know their loved ones probably are among the dead.

A split second of footage on the television news gave the family of Michelle Dunlop hope that the 30-year-old Australian woman was still alive.

A fuzzy image of an injured woman under a green sheet in a Bali hospital convinced Karen Cook that the victim of the bombing was her sister and that she was still alive.

"Her little finger is splayed out, away from the rest of her fingers," Cook told The Age, an Australian daily. "That is the way Michelle always holds her hand and it is the same as in this picture."

Although official sources have not been able to provide information, The Age reported that Dunlop's family have taken matters into their own hands, calling hospital after hospital for information.

A 'Second Wave'