SAURPANI, Nepal — Five hours by car from Katmandu, then by foot for several miles past the spot where the road is blocked by boulders and mud, people from the villages near the epicenter of Nepal’s powerful earthquake are burying their dead, despairing of help arriving anytime soon.On Monday afternoon, Parbati Dhakal and several dozen of her neighbors walked two hours down a jungle path, carrying 11 bodies attached to bamboo poles. They stopped at a riverbank where they lowered the dead into holes.One of the villagers pointed to the people gathered there and identified them, one by one: “Father just buried; mother just buried; sister just buried.”Back in Saurpani, an ethnic Gurkha village at the epicenter of Saturday’s quake, Ms. Dhakal said, Two days after Nepal’s worst earthquake in 80 years, the official death toll rose to more than 4,000, and humanitarian aid was starting to flow to the capital. Katmandu’s airport had been so overloaded by aid and passenger planes that incoming flights sat for hours on the runway. Nepali expatriates were flying in, desperate to track down family members, and setting off down the airport access road on foot, rolling suitcases behind them.But outside the capital, many of the worst-hit villages in the ridges around Katmandu remain a black hole, surrounded by landslides that make them inaccessible even to the country’s armed forces.
The Nepali authorities on Monday began airdropping packages of tarpaulins, dry food and medicine into mountain villages, but an attempt to land helicopters was abandoned, said Brig. Gen. Jagadish Chandra Pokharel, an army spokesman.
The government is only gradually getting a grasp of the destruction in these isolated places. It is nearly impossible to identify which villages are most in need, and how many may be dead or injured, said Jeffrey Shannon, director of programs for Mercy Corps in Nepal.“Right now, what we’re hearing from everybody, including our own staff, is that we don’t know,” he said. “As people start to travel these roads, to reach these communities, you run into landslides. They’re simply inaccessible, the ones that need the most help.”The chief bureaucrat in Gorkha district, Uddhav Timilsina, said rescue crews were unable even to distribute relief, because they are confronting as many as eight to 10 landslides between one village and its nearest neighbor. He said 250 deaths had been reported so far, but that it would take more time to get an accurate count.“Phone lines are down, electricity is out, roads are blocked, so what can we do?” he said.In interviews, residents of hard-hit villages said their plight had not been in the foreground during the early days of the crisis. Prakash Dhakal, a native of the village of Saurpani, was in Katmandu when the earthquake struck, and visited a government office on Sunday to plead with an official to send help.
SAURPANI, Nepal — Five hours by car from Katmandu, then by foot for several miles past the spot where the road is blocked by boulders and mud, people from the villages near the epicenter of Nepal’s powerful earthquake are burying their dead, despairing of help arriving anytime soon.On Monday afternoon, Parbati Dhakal and several dozen of her neighbors walked two hours down a jungle path, carrying 11 bodies attached to bamboo poles. They stopped at a riverbank where they lowered the dead into holes.One of the villagers pointed to the people gathered there and identified them, one by one: “Father just buried; mother just buried; sister just buried.”Back in Saurpani, an ethnic Gurkha village at the epicenter of Saturday’s quake, Ms. Dhakal said, Two days after Nepal’s worst earthquake in 80 years, the official death toll rose to more than 4,000, and humanitarian aid was starting to flow to the capital. Katmandu’s airport had been so overloaded by aid and passenger planes that incoming flights sat for hours on the runway. Nepali expatriates were flying in, desperate to track down family members, and setting off down the airport access road on foot, rolling suitcases behind them.But outside the capital, many of the worst-hit villages in the ridges around Katmandu remain a black hole, surrounded by landslides that make them inaccessible even to the country’s armed forces. 
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