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This year, an annual summer trekking expedition for a group of Information Technology professionals from Mangaluru packed more adventure than what they’d bargained for.
On April 25, the group were witness to the earthquake in the Himalayan ranges from close quarters, as they were barely 50 metres from a landslide.
Naren Koduvattat, co-founder and Managing Director of Mangaluru-based LIGA EduTech Pvt Ltd, and nine of his friends had planned a trekking expedition to the Kongde mountain ranges in the Khumbu region of the Himalayas.
(Koduvattat, had served in a senior position at Infosys a few years ago before launching his entrepreneurial journey.)
Describing the close encounter with an earthquake, Koduvattat told BusinessLine that his team reached Thame valley on April 24. On one side of the valley is the Kongde mountain and the other, the Sumdur mountain.
At around 5.30 am on April 25, nine members of the team started their expedition to Sumdur, as one decided to stay back in the lodge at Thame. When the team reached 4,200 metres (the mountain is 5,500 metre high), two members decided to return.
When the seven others reached a height of 4,511 metres at around 11.45 am, the ground was covered with heavy snow, and the team decided to go back to the warmth of the lodge.
“We turned back, and in two minutes the earthquake happened up there in the mountain. Then the mountain shook, and we came to know that a landslide is happening. We could not see the landslide, though we were very close. It looks like we were 50 metres away from the landslide.
“Then there was a second shake, and there was a second avalanche. You could hear all these things. But we could not see,” Koduvattat recalled.
It took two hours for them to climb down to reach the lodge.
Rescue copterThe group got stuck in Thame for a day, and managed to hop on to a rescue helicopter to Lukla the next day.
Again, they had to spend two days at Lukla before reaching Kathmandu on April 29. From there, an Indian Air Force flight brought them back to Delhi.
A family member of one of the IT professionals contacted Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, seeking help.
Chandy was quick respond, contacting the trekkers on phone at Thame.
“After that he personally called my family,” said Koduvattat, who also thanked the representative of the Karnataka government in Nepal, Pankaj Kumar Pandey, for his help during the crisis.
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