trembloto

Guau, so I have gathered that many of you caught wind of the earthquake we recently had down here in Costa Rica. I was in fact in it, not far from the epicenter, but managed to escape unscathed. Coming from California makes earthquakes feel a bit common place, but this one was very strange feeling. Most people reported feeling like they had vertigo, which was exactly what I experienced. I was walking out of the rio toro after finishing a rafting trip with my group. I just thought I had lost balance, but as I set foot on the land itself I realized it too was moving. The quake registered a 6.4 but I think that they way it shook rather than its magnitude was what caused most of the damage.
Now for the kind of scary part...
20 minutes after we left the rio toro a head of water (what we would call a flash flood) surged down the river. The quake also caused a number of landslides with in the rio itself. On a nearby river, the Sarapiqui the whole river was filled with mud and trees, luckily no one was injured.
Additionally La Paz waterfall, or what was La Paz waterfall as well as the adjacent road were both totally wiped out by landslides. That was the very road we had used to leave San Jose the morning of the quake. In fact many of my pax probably took some of the last photos of the waterfall.
I've got a great couple on my trip, Tom and Mariam, I feel like they summed the whole thing up in a nice fashion in saying, "I guess it's just not our time." That's the thing about living next to, or on top of volcanoes, you can't do to much worrying about earthquakes or eruptions, you just have to live your life, and when it is finally your time you can look back on a life you are proud to have lived.