Video: China's children wait to go home

When the earthquake hit Sichuan province in western China, Matt Ryan, a caving expert from Newcastle upon Tyne, was drinking a cup of tea on the balcony of his mountaineering shop in the capital Chengdu.

“The ropes and harnesses strung up on the roof of the shop started madly swinging for no reason,” he said. “The next thing we knew, stuff was flying off shelves and the whole building was shaking.”

More than 170 miles away, his fellow caver Duncan Collis, 31, from Chesterfield, Derbyshire, was sitting at his computer at home in the city of Chongqing.

“I assumed they were blasting the motorway outside my house again but the room kept shaking and didn’t stop,” said Collis, who moved to China at the same time as Ryan and was best man at his wedding.

Both men found the internet was working even though the telephones were not. As the tremors rumbled, they surfed for information. When the quake subsided, they exchanged text messages to check that both were safe. By evening, they had heard from Chinese caving friends that rope experts were needed to help with the rescue.

Two days later, Ryan, Collis and three Chinese friends were heading on foot into a valley in Pengzhou county, near the quake’s epicentre. They were ahead of the Chinese army, who had been told it was too dangerous to enter.

“We were told there could be as many as three bus-loads of tourists and an unknown number of locals stranded and possibly seriously injured up there,” Ryan recalled. The valley they entered, near the Longmenshan township, was one of the worst-hit areas. Survivors found themselves running from landslides as the walls of the mountain caved in around them.

Officially, the Chinese authorities were still refusing foreign help. But the pair were waved through every roadblock to the point where the main road stopped dead in its tracks.

As they left the clamour of bulldozers and the search and rescue effort behind them, the group of five trudged through one virtually deserted and destroyed village after another.

In one place they saw a villager being pulled out alive. In another they saw people carrying bodies. Mostly all they saw was rubble. “The silence was freakish at times,” Collis said. “We were surrounded by the remains of shops and houses and all we could hear was birds singing and the buzzing of insects.”

The decision not to stop and dig for survivors on the way was made early in the day but still weighs on their minds. “It was tempting to stop every time we came to a new building but our job was to get as far into the mountain as possible, and that’s what we concentrated on doing,” Ryan said.

Late in the afternoon, they heard they were needed in the next valley, where constant landslides barred the way for ordinary rescuers and machinery. Exhausted and frustrated, they set up camp in the playground of a wrecked primary school to sleep and await instructions.

“The only thing left standing in that school was a pair of Donald Duck rocking horses suspended on a rusty spring that creaked when the aftershock came in the night,” Collis said. “I don’t know if we realised it at the time but where we were sleeping there were definitely still bodies in the ruins all around us.”

Over the radio, the group heard that some workers were alive but trapped by debris near a power station higher up the mountain. As dawn broke over the playground, the Britons set off. By mid-morning they reached a point where the path fell away into a sheer drop. Four days after the quake, the earth was still shifting. The only way on was to follow the debris to the riverbed below.

Every now and again boulders the size of small cars bounced over their heads. Occasionally, sections of the whole slope gave way in front of their eyes.

By nightfall, they still had to ascend more than seven miles to reach the valley where the workers were cut off. When they set off before 5am the next day, they had no idea how brutal the climb would be. “At points we were scrambling up the sheer cliff faces, dodging rocks falling down. It was physically and mentally very tough,” Collis said. “By late afternoon we ran out of water but stopping was never an option. Once we’d been told people were stuck up there alive we couldn’t just turn around and say, ‘Sorry we didn’t make it’.”

They called out for hours. Finally, they realised that what they were hearing back was more than just an echo. The workers were still alive.

It took another five hours, ascending more than 4,500ft from their starting point and cutting a path through bamboo with knives, to reach a ridge where they could look down into the valley below. An hour later, they encountered the stranded workers, who had climbed towards the sound of their voices.

The group – seven men aged between 40 and 65, a 34-year-old woman and her pet dog – had clung to life on the side of the mountain for four days, frantically looking for a route down.

At least seven of their coworkers were believed to have died in a landslide. Like many survivors in remote areas, they knew there had been an earthquake but had no idea how big it had been. “Until they heard our voices, they’d given up all hope of getting out alive. When they saw the path we’d cut into the undergrowth they set off running down the mountain without looking back,” Ryan said.

By the time the group made it back down, more than 24 hours had passed since they had last slept. Collis was dehydrated and in deep exhaustion. At the foot of the mountain, they were greeted by a crowd of Chinese officials. It was a memorable moment, rich with praise and thanks.

Collis and Ryan were impressed with China’s response to the disaster and will help ferry supplies to the areas where people left homeless are living in tents. “We were overwhelmed by what we saw on the ground,” Ryan said. “We think the Chinese rescue teams deserve all the praise they can get.”

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