Yellowknife (Oct 29/04) - What's it like being stuck in a Tokyo hotel when the city around you is groaning under the force of a 6.8-magnitude earthquake?

Ragnar Wesstrom knows.

"I'm still shaking," said the owner of Enodah Wilderness Travel. "Someone's out to get me."

And Wesstrom wasn't just there for Saturday's quake -- an event that killed 25 people and left 100,000 displaced from their homes. He was also there for the typhoon the Wednesday before.

"You've never seen rain like that in your life," he said.

The typhoon, the deadliest storm in over a decade, killed at least 63 people and washed away entire hillsides. Wesstrom was due to attend a reception at the Canadian Embassy as part of a tour to promote Canadian tourism. The reception, obviously, was cancelled.

So what do you do when you're stuck in Tokyo and Mother Nature's out to get you?

"Everyone was drunk," said Wesstrom. "Everyone was having a typhoon party, just waiting for it. We knew it was coming and we couldn't do anything about it, so we partied."

Wesstrom travelled down to Osaka after the typhoon. As he was returning to Tokyo on one of Japan's famous Shinkansen "bullet trains," he thought "what if an earthquake hits? This thing goes 250 clicks."

And then, that Saturday, an earthquake did hit. And a bullet train was derailed by the quake, the first time in the 40-year history of the trains.

Fortunately, Wesstrom was checking into his hotel as the lobby started to buckle and shake.

"I went 'holy smokes it's an earthquake,' and I looked at the staff and they were saying 'it's OK, it's OK,'" he said with a laugh. "

"It's good to be back safe in Yellowknife," said Wesstrom. "At least the earth doesn't move here."