'I'm going to be buried alive' - AFP South Asia photo chief

Roberto Schmidt, AFP’s South Asia photo chief, and Kathmandu bureau chief Ammu Kannampilly had just arrived at Everest base camp on assignment on April 25 when an avalanche - triggered by the earthquake that has killed more than 5,000 in Nepal - thundered down the mountain leaving at least 18 people dead. This is the story of their near-fatal experience.

WE had just arrived at the base camp after a nine-day trek. It's a tough hike and difficult to comprehend the impact on your body but it's an amazing place - truly breathtaking in both senses of the word.

I was just taking all sorts of pictures and then went looking for our tent. We hadn't been there more than 10 minutes we just felt this rumbling, this moan. Ammu said to me: 'What's that?' I said it's the earth moving, it's an avalanche.

I grew up in Colombia where we used to have many tremors but never heard anything like this. We went out of the tent and then we heard this most horrifying sound. It was like a train but came from so deep, just so powerful.

It was so cloudy, Ammu went into the tent and I remember looking to my left and suddenly saw this, this wave, with the rumble and I just thought 'Holy shit'. It was so big, the pictures don't really do it justice.

I grabbed the camera, just pressing the shutter, I got three shots and then it was right over us. I jumped in and went under the table.

You have this wind and then it's like a wave crashing, we were swept up, you don't know whether you are upside down or what. You are just tumbling.

Finally I came to, resting on my back and then I felt this tack, tack sound of falling rocks and you know I just felt, 'This is it. I'm going to be buried alive'.

They kept on piling on top of me and then finally there was this stillness, this complete stillness, and I knew I was alive. I knew I was conscious and I had to work out how I was going to breathe.

You're trying to clear everything away, trying to get some air ... and then suddenly I felt this hand pulling me up and it was our sherpa, Pasang.

Ammu was bleeding and the nail on her left hand had been completely torn off.

We were lucky as I think our tents were next to a rock which stopped us from being completely swept away. I said I need to find my camera and Pasang just handed it over to me, encased basically in a block of snow. The camera was fine, the lens wasn't even broken.

We went out of the tent and people then started appearing out of the blue, all very dazed. I started shooting and then you think, should I be taking pictures or helping people?

In the next hour, you could hear more than half a dozen other avalanches in the vicinity. They were close but you couldn't see them as it was so cloudy. The sound was very scary, very haunting, you didn't know if it was coming your way.

I started helping down a Nepalese guy who had been injured and I remember talking to him about our families and saying we would both see our sons again, it was a nice moment, a human thing, amid all of this.

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Roberto Schmidt is AFP’s South Asia photo chief based in New Delhi.