Bad tsunami times.

In 2004 me and my family were on holiday in Sri Lanka. It wasn't the greatest start to a holiday in the first place, our car journey to the hotel turned out to be one of the most terrifying trips of my life, with the absolutely enormous spider that lived above my head for the entire journey being a minor side note compared to the mental driver who figured it would be a great idea to fall asleep at the wheel and overtake on blind corners. But eventually we managed to arrive at the hotel alive and things were looking much better.

Christmas day was lovely; just chilling on the beach and in the pool. Boxing day, we woke up at about ten, it was the first morning the whole time we'd been there that we didn't go down for the breakfast buffet. A few minutes later we heard screaming and banging outside, and I opened the room door to see the hotel staff running around banging on peoples doors shouting to go to the top floor. It was absolute chaos. My dad pulled back the curtains, and there was water spilling over our second floor balcony. It didn't look real, the sea had risen so you could only see the tops of the trees. We ran to the top floor and people were screaming that we should spread out, or the pillars the building was being held up by were going to collapse.

We stayed on that floor for over 20 hours, everyone was panicking that there would be another wave, but the water was slowly going down.

In the early hours of the next morning we literally had to push and fight to get on the coach to Colombo which after a ridiculously long wait and journey took us to a massive golf resort where we had a buffet that had been prepared for the president of Sri Lanka (who had to deal with bigger things like the tsunami that had just wrecked his country), so the tsunami wasn't all doom and gloom, we got a presidential buffet out of it. The people from our hotel all slept in one enormous room on the floor with blankets and duvets waiting for a flight home.

230,000 people died, so my experience was hardly one to have a moan about, but its still a pretty major memory... and a pretty crap end to the holiday.