A rescue mission to ensure more than 260 elderly and vulnerable
passengers were able to return home from India was almost
thwarted when a Foreign Office team found themselves racing
against the clock to change a tyre after becoming stranded in the
middle of a tiger reserve.
Deputy High Commissioner Jeremy Pilmore-Bedford and his team of
five drove 12 hours from Bangalore to Cochin, while another team
embarked on a 13 hour journey from Chennai to Trivandrum, to help
British nationals board their charter flight home on April 15.
The groups had been stranded across Kerala and Tamil Nadu for
four weeks after flight options in Southern India abruptly ceased
when the pandemic escalated.
But on twisty and notoriously rough Western Ghats mountain roads
on the way from Bangalore, the Foreign Office rescue team picked
up a puncture in the middle of Bandipur Tiger Reserve. The
reserve, which recently featured in the Sir David
Attenborough-narrated documentary Wild Karnataka, is home to the
second-biggest tiger population in India, with nearly 400 big
cats believed to be roaming in the area.
With the team standing lookout, the Deputy High Commissioner
raced to change the tyre under the blazing sun and rising
humidity of the tropical forest. To add to the adventure, the
road also runs through the middle of an elephant migration
corridor, and the group encountered a female elephant during the
ordeal.
“The breakdown was definitely a low point in our journey,” said
Jeremy, “But we had so many people counting on us, we couldn’t
end up as a tiger’s tiffin. Changing tyres isn’t your average
diplomatic activity, but there was nothing we weren’t prepared to
do to get our people home.”
After successfully changing the tyre, the team ploughed on to
Cochin, arriving just in time to help the 260 stranded travellers
onto an emergency Foreign Office flight - many of whom had spent
between six and 12 hours on transport arranged by the High
Commission to meet the flight.
Meanwhile, a group of 42 students and teachers from an
international school, stranded in the hills of Ooty, also in the
Western Ghats region, negotiated a tough 8-hour journey across
state borders to meet an exhausted FCO staff member, who had
driven 36 hours and 2,000km from Chennai to Kerala to meet the
group and hand-deliver an emergency travel document to allow them
to fly.
Protocol Assistant at the Deputy High Commission in Chennai,
Rajesh Bhaskaran, who made the gruelling journey said: “Though
the journey was arduous and riddled with multiple police
checkpoints, at the end it was a hugely satisfying experience to
help stranded British nationals from remote parts of southern
India fly back home safely.
“But almost zero traffic during the lockdown made me feel like a
‘King of the road’ to deliver emergency travel documents in the
nick of time.”
Despite the extreme efforts to get British travellers home from
Cochin, the team’s work did not stop there, and on return to
Bangalore, they supported a further three charter flights to get
around 400 British travellers home. British eight-year-old Mayzia
Richardson, from Derby, who was among the travellers, summed up
the jubilation of travellers on their way home, singing ‘A
Million Dreams’ from hit film the Greatest Showman at the
check-in desk of her Foreign Office charter flight home.
