Journey to the centre of the earth

  Quito, Ecuador
Sunday, October 8, 2006

Our two fellow travelers on this trip were a Northern Irish couple who seemed to have very similar interests to us and had also started to travel widely. There being only four of us for the two weeks was a little worrying but we were quite optimistic once we had met them. Our guide was a tiny Quito girl who seemed pretty cheerful given that she was going to spend a couple of weeks with four old fogies. She would not be to much help warding off the Ecuadorian bandits but she certainly knew her stuff.

We realised quickly how little we knew about Ecuador. The BBC doesn´t seem to offer much help so I am now your on the spot reporter. Basically Ecuador is an explosion waiting to happen. It has 22 active volcanoes with at least one erupting at any one time. Quito lies in a valley overlooked by Pichincha which regularly blows it´s top and it seems that they will get 20 minutes warning before the next eruption - problem is there are some 1.8 million people with only one road in and one road out.

After an interesting tour of the old city

Daytime Quito

  we were off to the centre of the earth monument. Unfortunately it is in the wrong place. Eight French scientific experts arrived in Quito in the seventeen hundreds on the first recorded business trip jolly. They had come to find the equator and study the its physical effects. After eight years "work", a monument was duly erected some 200 metres away from where the native indians had calculated it and worshiped for centuries. Guess who was proved right with modern GPS technology. - Indians 1 : France nil point.

So having photographed the nice but wrong monument

The official equator monument

  we went to see what the modern day Indians had to offer at their museum.

Centre of the earth

 
Firstly they had a truly beautiful guide - lets call her perfect 10. She rattled off a machine gun like commentary which was full of interesting points about the native Indians and the effects of the equator. She demonstrated that water really does spiral anticlockwise in the southern hemisphere and clockwise just a couple of yards away in the northern one. I listened intently to this gorgeous guide and got my chance to impress when she asked for a volunteer to hit a cactus with a blowpipe dart. Relying on my Borneo (you may call me Joe) training, I took the blowpipe with the correct headhunters´ grip and blew as hard as i could. In my enthusiasm some puff leaked out of my mouth and although the dart hit the target I scored no points with her. Gill, realising that I had been drooling over this girl for almost an hour commented that it was just as well I hadn´t followed through with the puff leaking out somewhere else!

We visited the market town of Otovalo where the local indians still where their traditional clothes,

Otovalo Indians

even in the internet cafe we noticed!

Old world dress and new world communication