It’s not until we return from the Jungle, that we realise the significance of the earthquake in Nepal. We are completely stunned, as we watch the footage on the BBC and the full story emerges. Kathmandu has crumpled. Our first thoughts of panic go to Karma and his family. Are they still alive? Every beautiful, old site in the big city that we saw on our recent visit in November has virtually collapsed. We learn very quickly through the Nepal Safe Site on  FaceBook, that Karma and his family are alive. FaceBook for this moment alone you are worth your weight in gold. Karma’s house is out of the hub and centre of the city, it has been deemed too dangerous to live in and he and his 5 children are living under plastic amongst rubble and dust.  It is unimaginable. His family’s village, the beautiful village of Shafru Bensi high up in the mountains, where we spent 5 memorable days at the end of our trek, washing our grubby clothes, and watching over the fields and seeing the rice being harvested and the land being tilled with ploughs and oxen, has been reduced to a pile of rubble. The village, perched high on a ridge, with snowy mountains gloriously overlooking it, is in ruins. It is incredibly hard to imagine that in one fell swoop, the entire village, house by house, like a pack of cards has collapsed.

Karma’s parents’ house, where we spent many an hour in the kitchen watching as meals were being prepared.  The pink hotel opposite Karma’s. The little house where the knifeman laboured over a hot fire, overlooked by his son in rags and their dog, kneading the metal so diligently to make Gabriel his special Nepalese knife. All gone. Centuries of existence – Gone.

The whole village are living under tarpaulins in the very fields we so admired and photographed. Only the food and help is not getting through to them. It was remote then, a 3 hr walk from Shafru to the nearest village on the road, which was then a 7 hr journey by four wheel car from Kathmandu, over treacherously steep Rocky Mountainous scree roads, but the roads are impassable now.

I cannot imagine the extent of devastation.

The process to recovery is going to be incredibly slow and hard for these poor, beautiful, spirited people. I cannot even imagine what the future of tourism is, when all the old old trekking routes have disappeared.

I have never been so affected by the news of an earthquake, and it is hard to look back on our truly wonderful  happy special time there, when It simply doesn’t exist anymore. And all the people we met, who took such good  care of us so, are suffering so much, if they managed to survive these terrible after quakes.

The village of Langtang, which we missed by a days’s walk, which met the Tamang Heritage path where we suddenly bumped into crowds of people, and I was so rude about overly large bottoms and high tech hiking equipment, has been completely flattened by an avalanche of snow and rocks 3 Kms wide. Nothing, no one survived, except bizarrely 1 guesthouse.

If you wish to stand by our friends and make a HUGE difference to help rebuild this small community, please donate to this website and entrust our wonderful  friend and wise Lama. Karma 

please copy the link below, as I can’t work out to link on this website

Http://igg.me/at/4jNFCJxN35s