BUENOS AIRES -- An Irishman and his Australian girlfriend survived two weeks lost in the freezing Andes mountains of southern Argentina after he fell and broke his leg, they said Saturday.
Brendan Timmis, 28, and Su Yin Lee, 31, now plan to get married, they told Reuters. He asked for her hand if they survived a 14-day ordeal that began when he slipped off a high mountain path during a trek near the spectacular Andean ski resort of Bariloche in Patagonia."I thought if I get out of this alive, I'd marry him. But I wasn't expecting the question. I was thinking about getting out of there," Lee said by telephone from the San Carlos hospital in Bariloche, where Timmis was being treated.
Both are engineers living in Perth, Australia. Timmis is originally from Kildaire, Ireland.
Their South American vacation took a dangerous turn when Timmis fell 100 feet off a mountain path, smashing his knee and only avoiding death because his backpack absorbed the impact as he bounced three times against the rock.
The couple decided to wait on the path until they were found by other climbers, but after six days, no one had come. So Lee set off on her own to find help in the rugged mountains.
Thinking she was only an hour or so from a refuge and misreading a map, she left with with only a few cookies.
But she was away for three days, fighting through forest and over mountain and enduring freezing temperatures at night. She made it to pristine Lake Nahuel Huapi and returned without seeing anyone.
"It was so remote. I had visions of people finding us as skeletons in 10 years' time," she recalled.
While she was away, a condor circled over Timmis as he lay in pain with his shattered leg swelling. He managed to scare off the huge Andean relative of the vulture by turning on a radio.
"There was no light at the end of the tunnel. There was wildlife trying to eat me. I'd totally given up hope we'd get out of it," Timmis said.
Finally, having exhausted their meager rations of cookies and raisins, the two set off together. Lee would advance on her own before leaving her backpack and going back to help Timmis hobble down the mountain and around waterfalls.
After making agonizingly slow progress, they stumbled Monday into a mountain refuge for climbers that was manned by a warden. A horse patrol carried them down the mountain to a road, where they were picked up by an ambulance.
Timmis was operated on Thursday, when surgeons pinned his knee together but was still on painkillers two days later.
Officials of Nahuel Huapi national park said they would investigate why a search for Timmis and Lee was called off after only two days in the mistaken belief they had made it back to Bariloche.