The day I woke to the TV news showing images of planes flying into the World Trade Center, I received a postcard in the mail from my best friend, who was travelling in the United States, with a photo of the twin towers stretching high into the sky above New York.
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I was dancing in the Sari Club after having pre-drinks at Paddy’s Irish Bar a year before both nightspots were bombed in another act of terror.
And 23 years ago, I was supposed to trek the Great Wall of China, but yet another twist of fate redirected me to Nepal when SARS broke out.
Instead of China, I went trekking in the beautiful Langtang region of the Himalayas, where last week, on August 26, a huge chunk broke from Lirung Glacier, sending a force of water through the Lhende Khola, Bhote Koshi and Trishuli River valleys.
Water reportedly rose up to nine metres in 30 minutes in some places; some news reports suggest the surging wave was 30m tall at some points as it cut its path of destruction.
We take unknown risks daily that sometimes just place us in the wrong place at the wrong time, becoming victims of freak accidents, violence, disease or devastating natural disasters.
We’re born where we’re born, we travel where we travel and we live where we live.
But that’s not always by choice, sometimes it’s out of necessity and with no opportunity to ever leave.
Life in the Himalayas is hard by Western standards, with many places accessible only by foot, meaning furniture and household goods get shipped in by ‘human trucks’; many homes are built with thousands of rocks that have had to be gathered and carted by people power, and crops are still cut with hand tools, like sickles and scythes.
I don’t know exactly how far things had advanced in the Langtang region in the past two decades, but when I visited, there was no hot water, no electricity and no phones.
Though challenging for the people, perhaps many never even considered, much less yearned for, a different or easier life elsewhere.
They live in one of the most picturesque landscapes of the world, surrounded by some of the warmest people of peaceful faiths I’ve ever spent time with.
It’s hard imagining wanting to give that up, despite their struggles.
An excerpt from the book Easy Trek: The Lower Langtang in Nepal’s Himalayas by Sarosh Pradhan and John Harrison, which I picked up in my travels all those years ago, says it best: “The serenity of the Langtang and the kindness of the Tamangs will change your life forever.”
They did and that’s why watching last week’s catastrophe unfold across the news and social media made it largely impossible for me to look away.
It’s hard to fathom the sheer terror in the moments of impact and immediate aftermath, and then the scale of loss and recovery now and into the future.
Around 2500 to 3000 people are unaccounted for according to local disaster response agencies, with a further 500-plus missing in Tibet (China).
Sadly, at least 800 people have died, with that toll expected to rise.
Hundreds of the missing are foreigners, including more than 40 Aussies.
Today I reflect on the memories of my trek of Langtang, dubbed ‘the easy trek’ by locals because of its lower altitude in comparison to other treks in the Himalayas, not because of the terrain itself, which had relentless steep ascents and descents.
Before our trek even began, our bus ride was cut short due to a landslide during the monsoon two months before we arrived.
We piled off the bus and scrambled over dangerous new paths of loose rock for the two long hours it took us to navigate just a 4km stretch.
We then picked up our route on one of only three local buses that were left on the Dunche side when the landslide happened.
There were about 80 people in a 40-seater bus, some sitting on the roof, some on the window frames, many on top of each other.
It was at that moment I realised I was heading into one of the wildest and most remote places in Nepal – possibly on Earth – and I was at the complete mercy of Mother Nature, which we all are at all times anyway, but this environment made that impossible to ignore.
Langtang village was at 3430m altitude (11,253 feet).
I trekked there with 12 other Australians on Guide Dogs Victoria’s first ever charity challenge in 2003, through forests, villages and terraced fields, stopping to rest and refuel on Tibetan bread and noodles at tea houses, crossing suspension bridges over waterways that have now been forever changed.
On Day eight, our ‘rest day’, we had the option of resting or climbing to Kyangjin Gompa to see Lirung Glacier at 4300m (14,107 feet).
It was the steepest and scariest ascent of the entire trek, but had I not done it, I wouldn’t have seen an avalanche across the mountains, which started immediately after I’d just reloaded by Pentax SLR with a brand new roll of film.
We sat around at Lirung Glacier for quite some time that day, taking in the view at the highest point we would reach on our trek, immortalising the vision of the glacier in our memories with no idea that one day, 23 years in the future, a large chunk would break off it and cause the shocking Central Nepal Floods.
I don’t know what I can do to help right now, other than donate a bit of money and use my words to encourage you to consider doing the same.
The control we think we have of anything is largely an illusion and moments like this remind us of that.
It is but a helpless conundrum to be human sometimes.