Nepalese authorities have been asked to help search for a Taiwanese couple missing since March 3 while hiking in the Himalayas, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
Liang Sheng-yue (梁聖岳), 21, and Liu Chen-chun (劉宸君) left on Jan. 17 for India and Nepal and had kept in contact with relatives through Facebook until Feb. 27, Liang’s father said.
The couple traveled to Nepal by rail on Feb. 18 and the last time they were in touch with relatives was on March 3, he said.
Screengrab from Facebook
They had originally planned to contact their families again on March 10, when they would be about to access the Internet, but failed to do so, probably because Internet connections were disrupted due to extreme weather conditions in Nepal, ministry spokeswoman Eleanor Wang (王珮玲) told a news conference in Taipei.
Taiwan’s representative office in India was contacted by the pair’s relatives on Wednesday and Thursday last week, asking for help in locating them, she said.
The office then turned to the Nepalese authorities and Nepalese travel agencies and hiking associations to help in the search, she said.
Wang said the office would do everything it could to help, and that the ministry would assist the couple’s relatives to travel to Kathmandu.
Liang’s father said this was the first time his son and his girlfriend had gone hiking in the Himalayas, and they had planned to hike without a guide since the trails they planned to use were less than 5,000m.
It is possible that they are stranded in a remote village because of snowy weather and unable to contact the outside world, he said.
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