‘Did you feel the earthquake?’

I wrote the following 10 days after the 2015 earthquake, when my friend and I had been evacuated back to Australia. It’s just one account of five minutes of events, which would stretch to five days of survival, and take me the better part of five years to process.

April 25, 2015

Super View Hotel, Kyanjin Gompa, in Langtang Valley, Nepal. The final village in the Langtang trek before you double back and descend in altitude.

Ngaire and I are on a rest day, spending two nights in Kyanjin Gompa, and planning to start our descent tomorrow. We've taken a little longer than is usual to reach this point, on account that I am recovering from a cold on the day we started the trek, and that Ngaire has just started suffering from the same cold. So we rose late this morning, and ate our porridge alone in the dining hall (the four mountaineering Italians who had shared our hotel having left at a more 'sensible' hour). 

It is a cold day, but thankfully not windy, and there is a low, thick fog over the village and surrounds. For a couple of hours we go out and explore the misty riverbanks just up-valley of the village. The low cloud cover means it isn’t worth making the small ascent to look at the nearby glacier, or to head up the mountain of Kyanjin Ri, at the foothills of which the village sits. I'm hoping that in the afternoon it might clear up, so that we can see the glacier, and the cheese factory. Just after 11am, we return to our hotel, and settle in to read until lunchtime. I scoff down 2 muesli bars, just to tide me over.

It's nearing noon. I adjust my seating posture on the bed to stretch my legs, and turned a page in 2001 a Space Odyssey. The book is missing its final 20 pages, but I pulled it for free from a hostel book exchange and figured I can just Google the ending back in Kathmandu. The wind outside suddenly howls; an incredibly deep, low sound. I've never heard wind like it before, it’s like standing inside a jet engine. It’s so strong that the hotel seems to move. 

Ngaire and I looked up at each other, and I ask quizzically; 'wind?' But it isn’t wind, and the hotel is moving. And suddenly- all of this really taking a matter of just seconds- the movement isresonant, and being directly upright becomes a question, and one of us yells 'earthquake', and we scramble from our covers and out of the room.

Down the hallway, bouncing off the walls. Behind us the sound of large, crashing stones. Keep low down the stairway, pumped with adrenaline. My brain races. In the event of an earthquake, seek out strong architectural features, like door frames. I reach the front door and for a frantic moment brace myself inside it, staring out into the open yard.

Open yard. 

I run outside and to the far end of the courtyard. The single story kitchen building to my right, made of the same stonework as our hotel, crashes and crumbles. Our hoteliers, a local couple, cling to each other by the crumbling fence. Everything is noise. We run again, past the front of our building to a larger open space where more people are gathered. The world rocks and bucks and screams, and the buildings around us shed pieces of themselves like scales until suddenly they don’t.

A young man near us is doubled, blood streaming from a head wound, his friends pressing a scarf to his scalp. Absently I unwind my own scarf to offer it, before rewinding it again. I need something to do, some way to help. I am barely aware of anything else. Ngaire and I move toward each other. I think we touch. I think we check each other are alright. 

But I’m not sure, because the next moments probably define that we live. The next moments are when I thought we were gone.

Someone cries out. There is a new sound, a lower sound (can you really sound lower than the crush of tectonic plates?). It has a frantic, rushing insistence, and I turned to my left. Smoke pours with incredible speed down the slopes of Kyanjin Ri. Smoke, my brain calls it, and for a millisecond I feel comforted by the softness of that vaporous idea. In the next moment I worry that the smoke will choke me, and then someone screams out its true name. Avalanche! The cold crush of snow, ice, and mountains. 

We are running again. We run, even as a feeling somewhere in my backbone whispers you cannot win. This is the end. You are about to die here.

Nothing has ever moved so fast. The billowing white cloud defies gravity. No wave at the beach can achieve this speed. I circumnavigate the hotel to its farthest side, and whip around to find that  Ngaire is nowhere to be seen. I scream her name as the front of the avalanche rockets past my bare hiding place and by the grace of a thousand gods she is there, in the face of all that snow, and she joins me.

Before our first trek to Annapurna Base Camp 5 weeks prior, Ngaire had come across a list of things to do in an avalanche. We digested it with due diligence, but we had mainly chuckled. We thought it best not to mention to certain parental figures that avalanches could occur where we were travelling. But we respected that nature has plans that disregard us, and so we read the list.

Pressed against the hotel wall I suddenly recall it. Make a space in front of you to trap oxygen; you can breathe for up to 30 minutes. Keep one hand elevated, for rescuers to see, and to help you dig. 

Snow and ice plummet over and past me. It screams past us full of corrugated iron, so dense that even barbed wire fences are flattened to the ground. The noise is the white noise of a television set on full volume, but it is in my head, it is my life in the balance. 

Where is Ngaire?! I turn and see her, face shielded, but stood back from the wall.  A rock twice the size of my fist falls from somewhere above, striking her head. I pull her back into the wall screaming 'make a pocket for oxygen!' One arm around and over her, both arms creating a pocket, one arm up to help digging. We are going to die like this. My mind is blank with the thought. We are going to die, and it isn’t going to be fast. It will be slow, and cold, and we will die together. I know I will fight. I will dig. 

But how will I dig with lungs full of snow?

There is a window above us, on the second floor. Feeling the snow gathering around our bodies I think, we need to gain height. We are scrambling as I try to boost Ngaire up and through that window when we realise with a shock that there is another woman behind the hotel with us, calling out for her husband. Her shoulder-length hair is whipped horizontal and held in place with ice and snow, and for a bizarre moment my mind skips suddenly to Kate Winslet, clinging desperately to a wardrobe door in Titanic. I entered a downstairs room through the broken window, and tried the door only to find it is locked from the hallway outside. 

The wind has stopped. The world is suddenly quiet. How long has it been? It is impossible to say. My voice is shaking, and my fingers are foreign objects. We’d run out without our shoes. I've never felt so cold. I run my hands over my head and face, checking it is all still there. I’m missing an earring. We are alive.

Kyanjin Gompa still stands, barely. The majority of buildings had been built of stone, and are shattered like Lego. Almost every roof is gone.

We emerge from behind the hotel and find a large group in the front hall. It’s a group of young Israelis; they’re still bandaging their friends' heads. The woman behind us has found her husband, and we bundle into the few blankets we find in the dining hall. The Buddhist shrine I photographed earlier there that day is in a shambles, spread all over the floor and seating space. The woman who runs the hotel is wandering in and out of the downstairs rooms, deep in shock. 

Uncomfortable in the dining hall with the weight of a broken building above us, I move Ngaire and I to the stairs. Here our body heat can press closer together, and we are right by the front door for a quick escape. Someone beats the ice from Ngaire's hair as I clear my own. I know that our boots were what we need most. By sheer luck we have left them in the hallway after our walk, not wanting to track mud into the room. But our bedroom is in the corner of the building facing the mountain, and it is partially caved in. A quick glance up the hallway shows the large rocks of what had been the pitch of the roof, piled around the splintered wall of our room and scattered into the hall.

Someone puts beanies on both our heads, from a selection labelled 'local Tibetan handicrafts' in the next room. I cross and pick up mittens and a scarf for Ngaire. My gloves are still in my pockets, and I thump my hands together impatiently, willing feeling back into the sausages that are stuck uselessly onto my palms. 

A first aid kit appears, and the Israelis are binding their friend's head. I clumsily wad toilet paper and press it against Ngaire's scalp, where remarkably little blood is seeping from the 1.5cm laceration where the rock had struck her. I tell her that she has ‘a small laceration’, and wonder why my language is so formal. I tell her I’m going upstairs for our shoes. She begs me not to go, not to take the risk. But we need our shoes. And no small part of me needs my camera. I need something to do. Some way to help.