NO HELICOPTERS. Almost no boats. Floods and fallen trees on the roads.

Relief workers are far from reaching most of the hundreds of thousands of people without food or safe drinking water in cyclone-devastated Myanmar, organisers said on Friday.

The international Red Cross said the combined effort of relief agencies and the government took aid to only 220,000 of up to 1.9 million people in the first six days after the storm, including those left homeless, injured or subject to disease and hunger.

'There are problems to get the aid inside (Myanmar), and there are problems to get the aid out to the delta area,' Danish Red Cross Director Anders Ladekarl said in a satellite telephone interview from Myanmar to Danish broadcaster DR.

'We are simply lacking transportation. There are almost no boats and no helicopters. This is really a nightmare to make this operation run.'

The Military Balance 2008, a widely recognized assessment on armaments around the world, says Myanmar's armed forces have a total of 66 helicopters, most of them small and old. It was unclear how many were operational.