Out of nowhere the earthquake hit and brought down snow, rocks, houses, everything, temporarily burying Australian Camille Thomas under the snow.
When the 18-year-old managed to pull herself out, villages around Langtang, just north of Nepal's capital Kathmandu, were gone.
"From where we were, after it there was nothing you could see. All the villages were gone," she said.
"It was just white snow for as far as you could see."
Ms Thomas and her best friend Grace Graham initially thought the earthquake was something small and sort of laughed when the guest house owner urged them to find cover.
"We ran and hid under some stuff and it all started coming down. Snow and rocks and just everything, houses, everything. An avalanche," she told 3AW.
Ms Thomas, from Apollo Bay in Victoria, said the snow hit her in the head and back, covering her.
"After it all came down I just stuck my head out and kept pulling myself up."
She knows she and her friend are among the lucky ones.
More than 850 Australians have been confirmed safe in Nepal but many families are still struggling to make contact with their loved ones.
The 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck on Saturday, triggering a series of aftershocks that continue to terrify residents.
"It's still happening all the time. We're just really on edge and can't sleep or anything," Ms Thomas said.
Confederation of Australian Motor Sport president Andrew Papadopoulos was in a Kathmandu hotel for a conference when the room starting shaking and someone yelled "earthquake".
"You see the movies on earthquakes and we all think they're exaggerated but I can tell you being in the middle of it, it was very surreal," he told 2UE.
"It was horrific."
People were screaming as they tried to run out of the room.
"It was trying to run while you're drunk," Mr Papadopoulos said.
"The ground was moving, things were sliding all around you, glass was breaking around you, chandeliers dropping, tables moving around the floor, and all you wanted to do was get out of there."
Mr Papadopoulos and his five Australian colleagues then had to get back into their rooms, where walls had collapsed, to get their passports before they made it onto one of the last flights out of Kathmandu on Sunday afternoon.
"It was almost like a demolition site," he said.
People forced to camp out after the quake reduced buildings to rubble were jolted by Sunday's 6.7 magnitude aftershock that compounded the worst disaster to hit the impoverished Himalayan nation in more than 80 years.
There is widespread damage in remote areas, Plan International Australia CEO Ian Wishart said.
"Sometimes 80 per cent of villages have been knocked over," he told ABC TV on Monday.
"We have reports that people are literally pulling apart the fallen debris with their hands, anything they can remotely lay their hands on to try and move rocks and so forth."
Many of the mountain villages are beyond the reach of even government officials because roads are impassable, he said.
"The families are sleeping outside. The houses are gone or they're too afraid to go back."
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