An unexpected day in the life of a tourist

Trip Start May 26, 2007
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Trip End Ongoing


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Flag of Ecuador  ,
Thursday, November 1, 2007

In the couple of days we spent here we crammed in as many touristy things as we could find. One 'light shedding' experience was on our visit to the equator. We rock up to the famous monument, pay our money, take our cheesy photos and about 2 minutes later we find out it's all a sham. We stumbled accross this little research facility where we got a free lecture of how the modern attampt of placing the monument on the statue actually missed the mark by about 200metres, but they fail to tell tourists that part. Meanwhile, a pre-incan culture had a stab at it over 1000 years ago and managed to place a shrine smack-bang on the money. And not only that, they also placed the front gates at an angle of 23.5 degrees to the equator ie on the exact same axis as the tilt of the earth. Bloody Champions. We wanted to visit the site but it was inaccessible, so instead we went in search of the real equator on our own, marked only by a small metal disc stuck on some random road.
10 the fake equator
10 the fake equator
Many of the other places we visited also came with a few surprises. We went to check out the presidential palace, overlooking a nice little plaza, and while its not uncommon to get stared at or heckled by school girls, we weren't expecting a group of 30 of them to chase us down the street to 'get to know us better'. They seemed disappointed when linz told them he was 23. They were a lot happier when i said i was 18.

We went to visit a famous church, and it was nice to have the priest approach us and offer to show as around the place. He asked us about our faith and which saint we belonged to (i freaked and went with St george...?) and he was smiling and polite and then at the end his face dropped in all seriousness when he asked for his payment for the tour. We told him we had no money and he asked us how we expected to pay then. We told him we weren't going to pay and i swear i overheard him mutter under his breath "go to hell", which i can tell you has a lot more substance coming from a priest when standing in a 500 year old church.

We visited an old gothic church too cause we heard you can get some pretty good views of the city from the towers. However, getting to the top of these towers involved scampering over rickety wooden bridges, scaling steep laders on both the inside and outside of the building and clambering across a ledge or two. Ended up being a real highlight.

Then there was also the kids laughing at us on the flying fox in the park, the boa getting dumped on my shoulders at a reptile park and Linz makin the call to run across a six lane highway in the rain which put us both within a couple of metres of being sent back to Aus in a bodybag. Luckily our girlish squeels alerted the driver that he was about to hit a couple of clowns.

There was one event that occured during the day that came with no surprise what-so-ever and that was the $2.90 all you can eat fiesta. we'd been walkin all day, climbing towers, playing frogger with cars and even found time for a gym sess (i'm still weak as piss) and we THAT hungry we entered the restaurant with the full intention of putting them out of business. I'm sure how they are doing on the profit and loss sheet but i'd be surprised if we didn't make a little dent in it after polishing off 14 plates of food between us.
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