Bidur, Nepal: Relatives of a missing Australian family have arrived in remote Nepal in the desperate hope of finding their loved ones among the survivors rescued from last Wednesday’s deadly floods.
The four brothers spoke to this masthead from an army camp at the Nepalese town of Bidur, as helicopters – often carrying injured or shaken survivors – landed roughly every 10 minutes from obliterated regions upstream.
Missing is their eldest brother, Sreedharan Iyer, 53, his wife Lakshmi, 49, and the couple’s two sons, Rudhra, 20, and Rishab, 23.
The family, from the Sydney suburb of Cherrybrook, was travelling with a group of about 15 Australian friends to the Hindu sacred site of Mount Kailash when an ice avalanche near the Nepal-Tibet border sent water surging downstream, wiping out villages and leaving more than 2000 people dead or missing.
“Not a single person, be it from the embassy, army or rescue team operations have been able to give us a lead concrete enough to say, ‘my family is there’,” Ganesh Gopalakrishnan said on Saturday.
“[But] they have been very helpful. And we have positivity.”
Ganesh was at work in Bangalore when he first learned the shocking news that a disaster was unfolding exactly where his family members were travelling.
“We didn’t have the itinerary with us so we had to start from scratch, starting with the tour operator,” he said.
“From there we found the itinerary and the place they spent that last night and morning, and then when they would have checked out. That was 8.45am.”
The timeline meant the tour group was leaving the Hotel Kalaish only minutes after the avalanche upstream.
“They were on their way towards the border check post [to get to Mount Kalaish],” Ganesh said. “It could have been they were face to face with the floods coming at them, and we just hope they managed to park their cars and escape to an elevated area.”
None of the 52 people on the tour, which includes 35 Australians, have been found. Nor has any of the 11 vehicles they were travelling in.
The combined death toll in Nepal and Tibet rose to 676 on Saturday, but it is likely to rise sharply because almost 3000 people, including 41 Australians, are still missing.
More than 3700 people have been rescued in Nepal so far.
Lakshmi runs the Leap Pad Early Learning Centre in Riverstone, the brothers said. Sreedharan is a mortgage broker. Their eldest son, Rishab, is a doctor, while Rudhra is studying medicine at a university in Sydney.
“It is [Sreedharan’s] dream to get his children to become doctors,” Ganesh said. “He’s been very successful in getting two fine boys.”
Australians in need of emergency consular assistance should contact the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s 24-hour Consular Emergency Centre on 1300 555 135, or +61 2 6261 3305 (if calling from overseas).
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