Perth family’s desperate plea for 30-year-old missing in Nepal’s disaster zone

As Australian families travel to Nepal in a desperate search for loved ones, a Perth family has confirmed their son is one of the missing.

Family of 30-year-old Luke Costanzo say they’re hoping for a miracle - that he is found alive more than a week after the disaster.

Costanzo had been on a pilgrimage trek with the Isha Foundation and was last heard from as the group made its way back to Kathmandu.

"Luke is an extremely strong, compassionate, disciplined and spiritual person," his family said in a statement to 9News.

"We … ask everyone to keep Luke, and all those affected, in your thoughts and prayers."

It comes as the agonising wait continues for many more Australians, who are desperately searching for answers in the disaster zone for themselves.

Families of missing Australians arrived in Nepal on a mission to find their loved ones.

Sriram Parameswaran from The Ponds in Sydney’s north-west is in Nepal looking for his wife, Shruti Chandrasekaran.

"We have a two-year-old and 10-year-old kids who are waiting in Australia, hoping she is going to come back," he told 9News.

"I'm here in search of her and hoping as a Father's Day gift I'm gonna gift her to my son, that's my plan."

The mother is one of 34 Australians missing from a single Himalayan glacier trekking group.

They were travelling in Jeeps, leaving the town of Syafrubesi and heading to Tibet when the flood hit.

These families are frustrated because, they say, they've had little help from DFAT or the trekking company.

They're now so desperate, they're taking matters into their own hands.

“We’ve been hitting just rock walls everywhere, wherever we are going,” Santosh told 9News.

At the army evacuation camp at Nuwakot, 9News found other Australians who are similarly on a desperate search.

Ganesh and his brother are the uncles of two Sydney brothers who are missing along with their parents.

"We are on the ground, our family and friends are working remotely. They're working across the clock because it's all about data collection," Ganesh told 9News.

But seven days after the disaster, as the death toll reaches above 1000 and some 4000 people remain missing, Ganesh said he knows chances of finding family members alive are beginning to reduce.

"Absolutely … the number of unidentified bodies are also increasing," he said.

In the midst of the search, news emerged on Tuesday of a second missing Australian who had made contact with DFAT.

More help is on the way, with aid for search and rescue missions loaded onto an RAAF flight near Brisbane and bound for Nepal.

On the ground, a mission is under way to rescue nearly 1000 trapped workers across several hydropower tunnels, involving experts from India and beyond.

Tunnelling expert Arnold Dix assisted remotely from Melbourne.

"Well, I'm in the business of miracles," he told 9News.

"There's plenty of water, so they can drink.

"It will be pitch black, psychologically they will not be feeling so well but they'll be alive and they can be alive there for a long period of time."

Nepal holds a deep spiritual connection and it’s that belief that brought the vast majority of the 43 missing Australians to the country, many of them on spiritual pilgrimages in the north.

That included NSW man Michael Keats, who was returning from the Kailash peak in Tibet when the disaster struck. His partner had declared he had been killed by the floods.

The reality is that man victims’ bodies may never be discovered. But, in Hinduism, they believe in reincarnation, or life after death.

For some families that grieving process has already started.

Keats' partner herself declaring the worst, signalling a new and raw chapter of this catastrophe that's now playing out.