Earthquake Days 7-9: Walking out of Dobhan // Home


Advertisement
Nepal's flag
Asia » Nepal » Himalayas
May 5th 2015
Published: June 8th 2016
Edit Blog Post

My flight is set to land at 9:15pm in Montreal. I've been flying since 7:35am Kathmandu time, so for like a whole 24 hours. Pat is probably already in London.



Sunday, Day 9: We took a bus from Arugaut to Kathmandu. Sandy and Nir left without sying bye because Pat and I were paying the hotel charges. The Russians who were in Dobhan also walked out and we saw them a bit along them way. In Arugaut they rented a jeep and had no room for us so Pat and I took the next bus but I did not feel safe doing that because of the one that flipped over the cliff on our way here. That was before the earthquake so what would the roads be like after!? I made a bunch of phone calls to friends and family in Arugaut and everyone said to be careful in Kathmandu. When we arrive in Kathmandu the city was mostly fine, there was a lot of broken buildings but ratio wise, compared to all the buildings in the city, it was fine, they built for the Earthquake. One local said the foreign news focuses too much on the city when the aid should be going to people in the moutains. This is true, the mountains were way more damaged than those in the city. The British Embassy was not that helpful but I managed to book a flight anyway which my insurance said they would reimburse. That night we finally got Pat his beer because we said he could only go home once I buy him a beer (now we can!). We had our nice final dinner at the hotel across the airport then slept at Toptown Guest House next to it and woke up at 4:30 for the airport.



Friday Day 7 and Saturday Day 8: The days we were walking out were quite traumatic. All the roads were covered with rocks and dirt, but at like a 70 degree angle, meaning you could slip and fall to your death at anytime. I had this one incident where I was holding on the the roots of a fallen tree and was loosing my balance so Nir had to come carry me down on his back otherwise I probably would have fallen in the river below. Everything smelt like death, death smells gross. There were bodies under ruins and donkeys everywhere which got thrown into the river. At one point there was a very tiny space on the mountain to walk, you could only fit one foot at a time. We could not take our time walking across because there were rocks and a landslide area right above us. But we could not go too fast incase we lost our balance. One guy got hit by a rock and fell in the water below, his friend had a twisted ankle and so I gave him some aspirin but eventually we had to go ahead of him because he was slowing us down. Bhim and the teachers took a different path than us so I do not know whatever happened to them. There were times when everyone told me to hurry up, but I was not as skilled at hiking as they were. It was annoying because telling me to hurry up was only making me feel worse. I did see a cute puppy on one of our rest spots, that brought my spirits up, it followed us for a few blocks until it couldn't climb anymore! I also had a very sore ankle on the second day because of a slip on the rocks so I picked some wild weed and smoked it. The whole time walking I was thinking of how I had a wedding to go to with the guy I liked in a few weeks and what I was going to do with my friends when I got back, this helped get my mind off the fact that we could die at any moment with landslides or aftershocks.



When I got home the sound of airplanes reminded me of the helicopters and I always had this instinct to almost run after them. I also had dreams for a couple of weeks of people fighting over a red car to get out of the city. Sometimes I would have nightmares but my friend slept with me for a couple of days.

Advertisement



Tot: 0.076s; Tpl: 0.009s; cc: 12; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0461s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1; ; mem: 1.1mb