Woman tells of China quake ordeal

Ms Cullen was on a tour in the Sichuan province when the quake struck

A Wirral woman who went missing in China after the earthquake has said she thought she was going to die.

Liz Cullen, from Eastham, and Emily Hale, 66, of Bromborough, were touring the Sichuan province when the quake struck, flattening entire villages.

Ms Cullen, 46, was walking up a hill when the quake started. She said there was a "noise like a volcano and the ground started to shake".

She described how trees and boulders began to roll down the hill.

"It was very frightening," Ms Cullen said.

"There was a severe side-to-side shaking underneath us then we looked up and we were surrounded by mountains and one very close to us seemed to explode from the top."

She said she was overwhelmed by kindness from the locals.

"I would love to think that if the same sort of thing happened here that we would treat a bunch of foreign tourists in the same kind, generous supportive way that they treated us," she said.

Ms Cullen said when she was airlifted to a military base the first thing she did was call home.

My abiding memory is... seeing absolute devastation and whole villages flattened Liz Cullen

When her brother-in-law Simon answered she said. "It's me I'm OK. We're all OK."

"There was a kind of silence in the background and I could hear my sister saying 'it's her it's her isn't it?'.

"I said get my mum because until I heard her I wasn't convinced she would be OK, I was so worried about her.

"He said, 'she's in bed,' and 'I said I don't care, get her up, get her up quick!!' And the first thing she said was' you sound remarkably well!' That was a wonderful moment."

After she had called home Ms Cullen passed her mobile phone round to others who had not been able to speak to their families.

She added although she had been lucky she had not forgotten the plight of others: "My abiding memory of it is looking out of the windows when we were airlifted out and seeing absolute devastation and whole villages flattened.

"I've been watching some trailers for the Harrison Ford movie and thinking yeah that's what it's like - but it's not it's real people's lives and they are still there."