As the earthquake hit, it occurred to Mike Carson and his fellow Red Cross volunteers that there was nowhere to run.
The group were sitting with locals in a cafe at the bottom of a two-storey building in Chutara, Nepal. The "whole front" of the building was missing, destroyed in the earlier earthquakes which killed thousands and decimated parts of the country in April.
As the building shook, Mr Carson and the others realised if they were to run out into the street to avoid being caught in rubble should it crumble, the building was as high as the road was wide.
He said it was one of the "scariest" experiences he had while working as an IT and telecommunications team leader there.
Mr Carson was based in Kathmandu, but spent some time travelling for his volunteer work, including to Chutara, a village that had been hit hard.
"I would say 85 per cent of the buildings were gone," he said.
"It's a long way from anywhere ... really narrow roads . . . people are just getting on.
"In the whole place there was one tractor with a back-end loader. Everybody's doing everything by hand."
Having worked in Christchurch after the earthquakes, Mr Carson and the other New Zealand Red Cross workers were well prepared.
When they went to bed they would always have two water bottles within reach, and two bags on either side of the door stocked with clothes, radio, satellite phones, cellphones, and a whistle, among other things.
Whenever there was a "reasonable" quake, they "just went".
Mr Carson headed over to Nepal in late June, while Wanganui was still battling flood waters. He spent nearly four weeks there working on communications and technology.
The job also involved moving around the five satellite terminals that were set up in the country.
Work could be tricky at times, given there were about two hours out of each day that electricity was cut.
Mr Carson said Nepal did not have enough power for the whole country.
"They had rolling power outages. Typically, every two hours a day somewhere hasn't got power ... I think it's just how the country is."
Travel was another difficult aspect of the job. If the volunteers had to travel anywhere, they had to make sure they had three days' worth of food and water on them, because it was not uncommon for people to get trapped between landslides.
Mr Carson said the roads were severely damaged and landslides happened regularly, so occasionally teams would come across a landslide and head back the way they came - only to find another landslide had happened in the meantime and trapped them.
"It's really, really hilly country and suddenly you can't go forward but then head back and you can't get out either.
"Three teams got caught in between landslides," he said, adding it never happened to him.
Kiwi volunteers who never had to worry about predators back home also had to be aware of displaced snakes and big cats such as leopards in Nepal.
Because their food supplies might have been destroyed in the quakes, the animals would come close to villages to prey on goats.
"One team did see a cat close up. I'm not sure who got the biggest fright."
Mr Carson felt the New Zealand volunteers had an affinity with the Nepalese people.
"It was a bit of deja vu after having worked in Christchurch. I think New Zealand has a great affinity with the Nepalese after the earthquake.
"I found them a lot like us Kiwis. If something went wrong we would just get in there and fix it."
Red Cross sent 7970 volunteers to Nepal, provided 75,551 people with health services, and distributed 3.7 million litres of water.