For Martin Emanuel, it started when a landslide interrupted lunch at a mountainside teahouse, a simple establishment owned by a second cousin of a second cousin of his Nepalese guide.
Half a mile in the distance, boulders and chunks of earth pounded down an otherwise idyllic slope. It was jarring — “like bombs going off” — but nothing overly alarming. They were, after all, in the Himalayas.
Then, Emanuel says, they noticed the ground had cracked beneath their feet.
“The fear was palpable,” the 71-year-old Decatur resident said Thursday. “People grabbed what they could and they ran.”
Emanuel was in Nepal last month when a magnitude-7.8 earthquake rocked the country and the region. On Thursday, the sculptor and longtime art school instructor welcomed media members into a dimly lit room at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia to explain his journey out, a tumultuous eight-day trek in the aftermath of a quake that, at most recent count, had claimed the lives of 8,400 people.
“Life’s not fair,” he said, referring to the thousands killed. “I could’ve easily died.”
When the quake hit around noon on April 25, Emanuel and his guide, Dilli Magar, were taking a detour on the Tamang Heritage Trail en route to their originally scheduled trek in the Langtang National Park. They saw the aforementioned landslide and the cracks in the ground, and the locals began to panic.
Everyone, Emanuel said, left their homes “almost instantly,” fearful that another earthquake would cause them to collapse. They gathered under a makeshift tent and had a community debate: stay put or seek safer ground down the mountain.
The villagers opted to venture out, but Emanuel, his guide, his porter and a French couple decided to stay put. They were inside a wooden building when an “even bigger quake” — an aftershock — struck around 8 p.m. The building “raised off the ground.”
In the days following, Emanuel and his guide walked, walked and walked. They navigated house-sized boulders and crossed a dangerous expanse of debris to gain entry to a suspension bridge dangling over a river.
The conditions were rough, but the scope of the earthquake’s impact was not something Emanuel would grasp for days.
“I didn’t know this was a national disaster,” he said.
Emanuel did not make contact with his family until April 29, but, back stateside, they remained calm and optimistic. Their attempts to track down Emanuel via social media and other means were extremely vigilant, but they also knew they hadn't expected to hear from him for several days anyway.
“We assumed that being outside of the city (during the quake) was in his favor,” Emanuel’s youngest son, Ben, said Thursday.
After getting word to his family from a Nepalese army base, Emanuel and his guide journeyed on to Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital city. They arrived on May 1 and, late the next night, Emanuel got word that his travel insurance agency had scheduled a flight for him out of Delhi, India.
There were a few more complications — namely finding a sober cab driver on a Saturday night — but he made it.
By Sunday he was back in Atlanta, where he realized that his “disappearance” had spread widely across the Internet and been repeatedly featured on local newscasts.
“I didn’t know I was missing,” he said with a chuckle.
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