A Dubai resident escaped the 26 August flash flood at Nepal’s Gyirong border crossing by a single day’s scheduling difference, watching from a city hours away as the building housing the Isha Foundation Kailash pilgrims was engulfed, leaving 77 pilgrims and three staff from the S3 group unaccounted for.
Raj Mehta, 35, had completed the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra a week earlier as part of a separate batch. His close friend from Spain, identified only as GDA, was in the S3 group, which began its crossing from China into Nepal through Gyirong Port on the morning of 26 August.
One day’s difference, a lifetime apart
Raj’s batch had been scheduled from 15 to 29 August; the S3 group started a day earlier, on 14 August. That scheduling gap placed GDA’s group inside the Chinese immigration building at Gyirong at the moment the torrent hit. BBC News reported that the immigration system recorded its final transaction at 08:35:03 local time on 26 August, less than 10 minutes before flood debris appeared on CCTV footage at the crossing.
‘This was the same building that I was going to be in in the next 24 hours,’ Raj said. ‘It was only because of the scheduling difference that I wasn’t with the group in the building at the time.’
He was in the city of Saga when he noticed GDA’s WhatsApp messages had stopped arriving with double ticks. Local guides were watching footage of catastrophic flooding on their phones. When Raj reached social media, he saw the immigration building (a structure he had passed through days earlier) destroyed by landslide debris.
‘That’s when I knew that there’s a good possibility that they were crossing that same building,’ he said. ‘That got me very much worried.’
The scale of the Isha Foundation Kailash pilgrims’ disappearance
The S3 group comprised pilgrims from 19 nationalities. In addition to the 77 pilgrims, three staff members (including volunteers and a doctor) were also unaccounted for, according to BBC News.
Confirmation came only after Raj spoke to an official at Sadhguru’s office. All members of the S3 group were missing. Raj and his remaining fellow pilgrims were then stranded in Tibet for several days, unable to cross through the destroyed border post. When a crossing finally became possible, Chinese officials questioned them for seven hours on a journey that would normally take one.
Back in Kathmandu, Raj used a Nepal SIM card he had bought for GDA before the trip to try to locate the group. The phone’s location showed beneath rubble. ‘Right now their location is showing under a lot of rubble, that is of like 10 or 20 feet down there,’ he said. ‘On top of that, there’s a lot of debris, rubbles and boulders and all this mud and water.’
Sadhguru, founder of the Isha Foundation, met personally with affected families. ‘He assured us that his support will be always with us,’ Raj said.
A disaster of unprecedented scale
The flood was triggered by a glacier collapse. As of 29 August 2026, Reuters reported at least 669 people killed in Nepal and seven in China’s Tibet, with nearly 3,000 people still missing, including approximately 2,426 in Nepal and 554 in Gyirong County, among them at least 540 foreign nationals. Nepal’s Finance Minister said the country would need between $4 billion and $5 billion to rebuild.
Gyirong is Nepal’s largest land border crossing with China and its single biggest trading link with Tibet. BBC News Live reported that $632 million worth of goods crossed the port in 2024, representing roughly 30 per cent of total China-Nepal trade that year.
Rescuers who reached the site on 29 August had to navigate forests and cliffs on foot after roads were destroyed, with more than 50 workers combing through boulders and mud, according to Reuters. China’s Ministry of Resources also warned of a high risk that a dam formed during the landslide could breach and cause renewed flooding downstream at Gyirong, CNN reported.
Raj estimates the recovery operation at the site may take another 10 to 15 days to reach the mortal remains of those lost. His overriding thought, he said, is not about his own escape. ‘What were the last moments of these people? What they were feeling at that last moment? That would give me a closure.’
