Tulshi Patel, a Pharmacist from Milton Keynes, England, has been looking for her mother, Hemangini Jitendra Patel, and her aunt, Hema Sunil Amin, who went on a pilgrimage to Tibet. Patel last spoke to her mother and aunt on Monday, received a photo of them on Tuesday and their last known location came from a GPS signal from the tour group at a place called Friendship Bridge at the Nepal-China border. The two women have not been traced since the deadly flood but Patel said she did her own deep-dive research and found a TikTok video that showed her mother and aunt and three other people from the tour at the border waiting to cross. She said the video was probably made by a local tour guide before the flood.“It was Wednesday morning, just before 6am, Nepal time,” Patel said to LBC News, hoping that her mother and aunt were probably somewhere safe and would see their messages once there is signal.The flood is believed to have occurred after a magnitude 5.2 seismic event near the border between Nepal and China on Wednesday at 8.37am local time, according to the US Geological Survey.“They were supposed to have crossed the border on Tuesday, but I guess due to weather conditions, or whichever it was, they got delayed and unfortunately crossed over on Wednesday,” Patel said.“This was something that they were both looking forward to. They’d been talking about this from the beginning of the year. It was something that was on their bucket list that they really wanted to do.”Patel said she had messaged the two women “in the hopes that maybe we’ll see a tick to say they’ve seen it or read it” and had attempted to contact the tour guide. “We’ve messaged the tour guide in case he has a signal because he’ll have a local Sim as well.“Every day we’re calling via WhatsApp … We’ve not given up, but, from our end, all we can do is research, but we just need kind of eyes and ears there from our side to basically get them out. Get all of them out and safe.”Patel said the family had considered travelling to Nepal to join search efforts but had decided against this as they did not know how close they could get to the region in order to help.
