Tsunami Alert!

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On Thursday 9th August I left Antigua in Guatemala and made my 2 day journey down to Costa Rica. The journey was fine and over pretty quickly considering the distance.
After spending a day in the capital San Jose and looking for my friends lost luggage we set off the next day to the little village of Montezuma on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. We got the bus to a place called Puntareanas where we then got a ferry then back on the bus the other side for the 2 hour drive to Montezuma.
Montezuma is a tiny village consisting of two roads. It is the original hippy town and there is a very laid back feel about it. We spent the next three days sunbathing, swimming in waterfalls and generally lazing around in hammocks reading, it´s a hard life!
The night before we were due to leave (wednesday) there was a yellow alert for a tsunami along the pacific coast of South and Central America and Mexico We got the alert at about 7.30 in the evening and so rushed back to our hotel and grabbed our bags and left the hotel. We were advised to try and get at least 500m above sea level, sounds easy, not really when you haven´t got a car!! Anyway we started walking up the hill towards a town called Cobano and after about 15 mins managed to get a lift in a 4x4 with some spanish people who drove us to Cobano. When we arrived there we got to a bar that had the tv on, the news was reporting that if the tsunami hit it would be about 9.40pm that night and that after that people were advised not to go back to sea level for a few hours. So it was pretty surreal being up there. Anyway after about 20 minutes at about 9.15pm the news then reported that the alert was off as the centre for tsunamis had reported that the threat had gone, so we made our way back to Montezuma with the friendly spanish people and stayed the night in our hotel, it was pretty scary for everyone. I think everyone just had the images of the boxing day tsunami in Sri Lanka and how quickly it came and wiped out everything.

Costa Rica is so completely different to Guatemala, took me a while to get my head round it at first, it´s very americanised in places and everything is quoted in $ and colones (local currency), also it´s quite hard to practice the spanish as nearly everyone speaks english, still the country´s beautiful and once you get your head round the fact that you´re not
going to get a cutural explosion like Guatemala it´s a great country to be in for a holiday.

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