Middle of the world

  Mitade del Mundo, Ecuador
Friday, June 1, 2007

Hola otra vez (Iīm learning)

In answers to queries from regular visitors, nope never made it up the volcano - sent four hours one day trying to push a 2tonne truck up a hill, followed by a 4 hour hike down the mountain to find civilization, luckily finding some people who gave us a lift bak to Quito in their pickup. Then the next day spent about three hours trying to get the truck up the hill with the aid of another truck - more succesful this time. We did get to ride down the rest of the way on the bikes whichwas fun, uti we got the the really long cobbled road - really not great for bikes.

This entry comes to you from the middle of the world (mitad del mundo), ok it actually is being written about a week later a good few miles south of the equator, but in spirit.

Strangely Ecuador means Equator and as luck would have it with one of those amazing coincidences, the equator runs right through the country - seriously, what are the odds? So last week a few of us went to visit the equator line, all three of them (it gets a bit confusing so try to keep up at the back there).

Theres the official park and monument here:

a. not laying acoss two hemispheres

Which is about as touristy as you can get, went in looked at monument, took couple of photos, and left.

Unfortunately a couple of hundred years (maybe - I forget) after some French blokes had come along and stuck a pole in saying this is the equator somebody invented GPS and said, "no, its not its over there, bout 200 metres away". So rather than take down the gigantic monument

b. A line 200 metres from the Equator

somebody had built, they decided to put another, smaller one in the right place so they could charge the gringos and extra couple of dollars to see that one.

c. Found it!

It was quite good fun this one to be fair, tried (and suceeded) to balance an egg on the head of a nail (appaently only possible at the equator and at the equinox- gonna google that in a bit to see whether its total tosh or not). Saw the water going straight down the plug and then anti-clock and clockwise on different sides of the line (again a visit to wikipedia is needed) and then saw some indigenous houses and stuff including a shrunken head done by one of the communities I was considering volunteering at (good choice by the Hughes):

d. Whatcha mean - tourist?

I donīt think I look silly.
I know.


Now, even later some archaelogists came along and said - "see that big mound on top of that big hill over there? We reckon the Incas built that there to mark the Equator and the highest land point around it". They were right, take that Frenchies and GPS peeps! So they built a little monument up there aswell - didnīt actually go to that one coz its a really really big hill. But we did hav a multi-media pesentation from one of the archaeologists which was really interesting, all about all the monumnets that were built thousands of years ago - all perfectly on celestial and solar lines - clever peeps them. Then the Spaniards came along and stuck churches on top of most of them and again used the sun to make it appear that miracle were happening, like thesunlight coming through a window at the exact timeof the equinox which lights up a staue of Jesus - again clever peeps, though not so nice, but then again didnīt do much head shrinking so maybe its a tie...

Hasta luego