Earthquakes and Freefalling with a church group from Alabama - Separate Incidents.

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Last Friday night, about half 7, while I was sitting on my bed minding my own business the earth started to move. As I understand it there are several things that can bring this about, being in love, being drunk, standing up too quickly and beating Manchester United on penalties at Wembley, to name just a few. This was none of those, however. This was an earthquake, and quite a big one at that. I will assume that most people reading this have never been in one so I'll do my best to explain how it feels. Initially, being the quick witted cat that I am, I had no idea what was going on. I heard a loud noise that I assumed was thunder and then became aware that I was rocking slightly from side to side. It took a good five seconds for my brain to click that this wasn't normal at which point I looked up and saw that the door, the lampshade, my bag and the chairs in the next room were all moving around. It was here that I realised something was up. I have since been told that the safest place to be in a house during an earthquake is in a doorway. I ran straight through my doorway, into the kitchen, and then outside onto the front step to see all the neighbours running into the street panicking and crying. It probably lasted the best part of a minute and after the initial novelty of the realisation that it was an earthquake had worn off, I was a little shaken up (not an earthquake joke) but still openly quite happy about having been in one. I don't think my grinning face helped a lot of the tearful neighbours as they were running outside screaming though.

The best way I can think to describe it is like the feeling you get for a few seconds immediately after getting off a bouncy castle, when your legs and body still feel like they're moving around, except that this was for almost a minute.

There was an emergency news report about half an hour afterwards showing pictures from various stationary cctv and television cameras, and also pictures from traffic cameras showing cars veering off the roads due to the shaking. The reports have said it was 5.9 on the Richter Scale, I was told yesterday that anything in the "6's" is considered to be big and is when serious damage is expected, so if it is just a few car crashes then I suppose we can consider ourselves lucky.

The day after this we decided to celebrate our brush with death by going to the rainforest to jump out of trees. We were joined, as unlikely as it sounds, by a church group from Alabama who told us they were on their annual trip down to San Jose where they make orphanages 'Earthquake proof'. Hands up who believes in Divine Intervention then? I have never met anyone from Alabama before, much less a church group from there and they didn't disappoint. Most had t-shirts with bible quotes on them and those incredible 'southern drawl' type accents - the type that could make King Lear sound like the confused ramblings of a drunk halfwit. They were called things like 'Marv' and 'JT', and basically were a couple of mullets away from being a stereotypers dream.

That said (he says trying to gloss over how rude he's just been) they were all lovely and good fun to spend an afternoon with. A couple of them were also of an age (in their 70s) where you would not have expected them to be spending an afternoon careering round a rainforest on fourteen zip lines and then freefalling ninety foot out of a tree. So fair play to them for that.

The zip lining was like nothing I have ever done before. There was a hike through the forest up to somewhere near the top of the mountain and then after a two minute safety talk, that pretty much said 'put one hand by your chest, the other on the rope and try not to fall off', we were ready to go. The longest line was about 450 foot (about one and a half football pitches) and at times you actually came out of the canopy and saw the rainforest below you and San Jose in the distance while travelling at quite a speed above the trees. It felt amazing. I didn't stop smiling the entire time we were there. I think I looked a bit like Lenny from the Simpsons when he gets plastic surgery and ends up with a permanent grin on his face.

If the zip lining wasn't enough, there was more to come. On about the twelfth line, we were told that if we went across we would have to do a ninety foot freefall out of a tree to get to the next one. The bar was then raised slightly by the 75 year old elder statesman of the church group who immediately said he was doing it, meaning that there was no way any of us could say we weren't. When I say freefalling, I don't mean abseiling or rappelling, I mean actual freefalling. You were suspended in mid-air by a rope that was controlled by the instructor on the ground and when you were ready (or in most cases, a long way before you were ready) he slackened the line and you fell to the ground, only to be stopped about five yards from the floor when he tightened it again. Terrifying but brilliant in equal measure. Particularly terrifying for one of our friends who asked to be dropped slowly and when the man on the ground responded by making hers "muy rapido", she made the mistake of shouting "you bastard" at him on her way down. So, as you would, he stopped her halfway down to leave her swinging fifty feet in the air, before dropping her again. She was a little flustered when she made it round to the next line.

There was one more freefall after that but it was only a forty footer and as such is barely worth a mention as by that point I was so cocky that I felt could do one that size with my eyes shut - which might be my tactic for the next earthquake too, assuming I realise what's going on this time.

Pura Vida.

Dave

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