Newington resident Miguel Camelo Rosas had a camera mounted on his handlebars while doing some solo mountain biking in Nepal on April 25, and when he felt a tremor, he started recording.
Camelo said he remembers thinking, "You know, this is kind of cool."
"And then all of a sudden I see a rock fall, and I'm like, 'Well, no, this is not cool,'" he recalls.
Camelo was biking in the Himalayas before volunteering with Engineers Without Borders when a deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook Nepal's capital, toppling monuments and prompting landslides in the mountains. The death toll has climbed past 7,000 in the days since.
The video Camelo recorded shows dirt and dust, then boulders and chunks of earth flying through the frame. Though he didn't know it at the time, something broke Camelo's bike helmet.
"I just crouched, getting as close as possible, trying to avoid anything hitting me. And I see huge chunks, huge rocks, boulders flying over, then there's a big slide that goes right over me," he said, after returning home to Newington on Sunday. "Finally it stops, the big shaking stops, and it just becomes aftershocks. But because there were a lot of these aftershocks, I stayed there for about two hours."
Camelo said he then carried his bike over fallen rocks for about an hour, passing bodies on his way to a nearby village. There he found tarps the locals had put up for shelter after the quake destroyed their homes.
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They took in a group of tourists, including Camelo, until he found a seat on a helicopter evacuating people from the area.
"Unfortunately, the locals are still there, so they don't have a chance to get helicoptered out," he said.
He set up a youcaring.com account to raise money for the family that did so much for him.
After his brush with death, Camelo knew there was something he had to do – a purchase to make at the airport in New York – before returning home to Connecticut on Sunday.
"I bought a $10 men's size six ring, because it was the smallest thing they had," he said, expecting his girlfriend, Sarah, to welcome him back to the U.S. "Then when I first saw her, we hugged each other and cried and whatnot, then I went down on one knee and proposed and she said yes, so now we're engaged."
Camelo hopes to return to Nepal in the fall to work on the water project that brought him there in the first place, and to do what he can to help rebuild the ravaged country.
