A local couple’s travel adventures turned far more adventurous than they’d expected.
Kelly Van Ommen and Emily Wrench from Salmon Arm arrived in Nepal on April 19, after enjoying two weeks’ hiking in Thailand. They set off on a popular trek in the Annapurna Mountain range, heading successfully to the top of the Annapurna base camp.
On their way down, their route took them through an avalanche area where six people from China had died just a month earlier.
As Van Ommen and Wrench walked along the river, in the vicinity of a group with two Sherpa guides, Van Ommen felt the ground begin to shake.
“I saw inukshuks starting to fall over – I didn’t know why. When I saw the shaking, I didn’t know if it was something from the river.”
As he was the first one to feel the shaking, he tried to tell the guides what he’d just felt.
“Once they felt it, they just starting running, and we ran with them,” he says, explaining that’s when he began to feel a little scared. They were in a bad place, in the bottom of a valley.
“We ran all the way down the river, across the bridge to a safer spot.”
There a group of about 20 people stood together, watching the mountain.
“We didn’t want to get hit by rocks. It was very foggy, you couldn’t see 20 or 30 feet above you, and there were 400- or 500-foot cliffs.”
As they stood, they saw an avalanche come down, with a big boulder ending up in the river.
It wasn’t until that night they heard word that this wasn’t just a small earthquake. They also realized, with the avalanche and rock slide above them, if they’d started out a half-hour later, they would have been stuck above it at least for another day.
“We got out just in time.”
As it was, the couple was still two days away from Pokhara, the popular trekking village that had been their starting point. Their flight home from Kathmandu, about 100 kilometres from Pokhara on twisty mountainous roads, left in three days, so timing was crucial – given that the country was reeling from Nepal’s worst earthquake in more than 80 years.
Although Van Ommen had used someone’s phone in order to text home to assure he and Wrench were OK, the text didn’t get through. When he returned to Internet access a few days later, he was surprised by all the questions about his safety.
Because a little domestic airport at Pokhara was shut down and they couldn’t get a bus on time, they decided to hire a taxi to get to Kathmandu. They saw bus after bus filled with people trying to leave the city.
While waiting at the wildly busy airport for their flight – delayed by five hours – they saw international support, mostly in the form of the Indian Army. They also saw the German Red Cross as well as Canadian and United Kingdom search and rescue planes.
Van Ommen says the best way to help from here is to give money.
“They need money, water and food.”
Overall, their experience was “pretty crazy. We’re happy to be back.” But it hasn’t changed his mind about travel adventures. Earthquakes can happen just as easily in Vancouver, he notes.
“I was in a lucky place at the time.”
