‘You can’t put the pain into words’

The smell of burnt flesh hung in the air at the scene. Hospital staff said many dead were charred beyond recognition.

Tourists spoke of leaving for home on the first available flights. Airlines officials said some airlines were planning extra flights or or bigger planes.

Visitors included a number of Australians celebrating the end of various football season competitions. An Australian Air Force transport plane carrying about 30 burned survivors arrived in Darwin as part of a major evacuation following the attack. Four Air Force Hercules were being used to ferry victims of the bombing from Bali to hospitals in Australia.

‘‘There were bodies everywhere, people burned were walking around in shock,’’ Amos Libby, a 25-year-old American, told reporters on Sunday at the airport, where he was looking for a flight out. Libby, who was walking nearby at the time, was blown off his feet by the blast but escaped unscathed.

‘‘It’s nothing quite like anything I’ve ever seen – there was more blood, the smell of burnt skin and the pain that they were in, you can’t really put that into words,’’ Melbourne tourist Martin Lyons told Australia’s Nine Network Sunday programme.

Richard Poore, 37, a television presentation director from New Zealand, said hundreds of revellers were inside the nightclub. Poore, who filmed the aftermath, had tried to get into the club 20 minutes before the blast — but it was full.

The main blast at the Sari club, one of two explosions, blew a hole in the ground. One visitor said terrified tourists had left their hotel rooms last night to sleep in open areas or on the beach after the attack.

Windows were blown out in buildings within a 500-metre radius of the Sari club and wrecked up to 15 cars whose mangled wreckage littered the streets.

A US Embassy spokeswoman in Jakarta said a car bomb outside the Sari nightspot in the teeming Kuta Beach nightclub district did most of the damage. She said a third explosion occurred 50 metres from the honourary US consulate in Sanur, another tourist area about 30 minutes from Kuta. No one was hurt in that incident.

Earlier, a suspected home-made bomb knocked over the gate and smashed windows in the compound of the Philippine consulate in the Indonesian city of Manado. No one was hurt.

Britain slapped a travel warning on Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago where Islam is traditionally moderate and bloody ethnically based separatist violence has seldom targetted foreign nationals.

Tour operators said it could take the picture postcard paradise years to recover from the carnage. Drawing comparisons with a Muslim militant attack in Egypt’s Nile resort of Luxor five years ago, British agents said tour operators would scale down operations in Bali in the immediate future and the full impact of the attacks could last much longer.

Condolences poured in from around the globe, with French President Jacques Chirac denouncing the explosions as “blind terrorism”, while Britain described them as an “appalling terrorist act” and offered to send a counter-terrorist teams.

British PM Tony Blair, a staunch supporter of Bush’s “war on terror”, said he was “horrified”. Australian PM John Howard spoke to Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri on phone and said authorities in both countries were convinced the bombings had been carried out by terrorists.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer described the blasts in remarks to reporters as an “abhorrent crime”.