The Foreign Office rescue squad falls f lat in tiger reserve
A DIPLOMAT on his way to rescue Britons stranded in India found himself in a spot of bother – after getting a flat tyre in the middle of a tiger reserve.
Deputy High Commissioner Jeremy Pilmore-bedford and a team of five were on their way to help 260 elderly and vulnerable people fly back home.
The British nationals had been stuck in southern India for four weeks after flights were axed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Jeremy and his team were embarking on a 12-hour drive from Bangalore to Cochin to make sure the Britons boarded the emergency charter flight home.
The Foreign Office team had to travel through the Western Ghats mountain roads, but were hit with a puncture right in the heart of the Bandipur tiger reserve.
Nearly 400 big cats are understood to roam the area, which has the second biggest tiger population in India and was recently featured in the Sir David Attenborough documentary Wild Karnataka.
To make matters even more tense, the road runs through the middle of an elephant migration corridor, and the group later encountered a female elephant.
To tackle the puncture, the team stood lookout while Jeremy raced to change the tyre under the blazing sun and rising humidity of the tropical forest.
He said: “The breakdown was definitely a low point in our journey.
“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.” Once the tyre was changed, they drove on to Cochin and arrived just in time to help the 260 people on to the emergency Foreign Office flight.
Meanwhile, a group of 42 students and teachers from an international school made an eight-hour journey to meet Foreign Office staff member
Rajesh Bhaskaran, who had driven 36 hours to rendezvous with them and hand deliver an emergency travel document so they could fly.
Rajesh 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.” Foreign Office workers helped 400 British travellers get home at Bangalore on a further three charter flights.
One of the passengers, eight-yearold Mayzia Richardson, from Derby, even entertained fellow passengers with a song at the check-in desk.