Chile Earthquake
Trip Start
Sep 23, 2009
1
69
85
Trip End
Apr 23, 2010
Santiago, Chile
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Both of us slept through it, and we only woken when the Chilean guy next to us couldn't contact his family on his mobile, we are putting the fact that we slept through a tremendous earthquake down to the fact that we were traveling on a double decker coach, which often sway due to their height.
It was 8 hours before the roads were opened and for us it really wasn't a problem as the coach was comfy and we couldn't see any damage from the part of the road we were on, only when the coach traveled further did we pass several collapsed bridges that had fallen on cars and trucks and we thought this could be bad. The one picture I took shows a broken bridge by a trailer, luckily for the driver the cab just missed the fallen bridge.
We arrived at Puerto Varas around 4pm, we trawled around to find somewhere to stay and on whilst checking in and chatting to the receptionist did we find out the severity of the quake at 8.8, 500 times stronger than the recent quake in Hiati. After contacting our families we wandered around the happy lakeside town worlds apart from the images of Santiago, the city we had just left behind, feeling kind of surreal and extremely fortunate that an earthquake of that magnitude had somehow passed us by.
We are sorry for all the panic we caused to our friends and families.
Comments
wow, you guys were lucky. Amazing photo of that truck and the collapsed bridge!