IT COULD HAVE been a scene from a Hollywood movie. Hotel guests dashed from their rooms and raced against the clock to reach the airport ahead of a curfew that would trap them in a riot-torn city. Escape From Kathmandu: But the leading lady slept all the way through.
Raksha, a seven-month-old Nepalese girl who was abandoned by her parents, was being whisked away from the turmoil of the Himalayan kingdom by a wealthy German couple who had earlier braved street protests and driven through a sea of burning tyres to enable the little girl they love to start a new life with them.
On Thursday, lawyer Ronald Gerns, aged 45, and his wife Gabriella, a 47-year-old doctor, finally landed back home in Frankfurt with Raksha, their newly adopted daughter, 20 hours after their hasty departure from Kathmandu's Hyatt Regency Hotel. Some other guests at the Hyatt who stumbled aboard the hotel's mini-bus on Wednesday in that dash for the airport were not so lucky. Their flight with Qatar Airlines was cancelled at the last minute.
They had to check into another hotel, just beating the third curfew to grip the city in three days. They are still trapped there, and many fear Kathmandu will explode when the results of an inquiry into the assassination of the royal family are made public.
The Gerns had arrived in Nepal's capital on June 1, delighted they would finally be able to pick up Raksha from the orphanage, which had looked after her since she was abandoned in December, and take her back to Frankfurt. Most of the paperwork was finalised.
But within hours, their dream turned into a nightmare as word filtered through that most of Nepal's royal family had been gunned down in the palace. The couple first set eyes on Raksha at the beginning of January. They were told by friends who have close ties with the foreign-funded orphanage in Kathmandu that a cute little girl had been brought in. Two months old then, she had been abandoned in a Nepalese village.
