Map of Nepal showing where the earthquake hit between Kathmandu and Pokhara. WWW.USGS.GOV
“I was strolling past an open storefront on a Pokhara street with my brother and our sherpa when I suddenly realised something was very wrong.”
So begins the heartpounding dispatch from Myanmar Times journalist Cathering Trautwein, who was on vacation in the Nepali city of Pokhara when the 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck on Saturday about 75 kilometres to the east, resulting in more than 3,400 deaths.
Trautwein describes being hustled out of a shop and looking for safe ground, writing that the “walls along the street seemed to start chattering as if they were cold.”
She and her brother were unharmed, though they had to spend the night outside in sleeping bags and were awoken at 5am by the “terrifying alarm clock” of a new tremor.
They were told that the airport in Kathmandu was still closed. She concludes the piece, which was published on Monday, by saying that “it looks like we could be here for a while.”
