Journey to the Center of the Earth

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To get to the middle of the Earth from Quito takes three buses and (at least for me) a lot of asking the way. It lies beside “Mitad del Mundo” park, about an hour north of the city at the end of a dusty road of barbeque shacks. It looks a little like Disneyland, with manicured grounds and a little “village” of pink souvenir shops and restaurants. When my friend and I arrived there was a dance performance happening in the middle of the village, even though hardly anyone was there. A wide cobblestone road led to the “Mitad del Mundo” monument, which has a three- or four-story museum inside. The monument marks a site that a French expedition determined to be on the equator in the eighteenth century, although GPS measurements show the equator to really be about 600 feet north. To get to the real site, you have to leave the park and walk up a dirt road. That takes you to a little museum with displays on indigenous tribes and experiments to prove you’re at the middle of the world. You can balance an egg on a nail on the equatorial line, for example (I couldn’t do it, but other people could.) Our guide then moved a portable sink from one side of the line to the other. On the south side, water ran down the drain clockwise; in the north, counterclockwise. (I took video of this with my camera, but can't seem to post it.) My friend was skeptical, since the positions of the sink were only about 30 or 40 feet apart. Other people suspect it’s rigged, too, but the principle is interesting...

Some of the photos here are of the colonial center of Quito, where I’d gone with my Spanish teacher a couple of days before. It was the first UNESCO heritage site in South America and is prettier and less polluted than the rest of the city…

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Photos

human shrunken head
After beheading their enemies, some tribes would shrink the heads as trophies from their conquests. Our guide said this was done up until around 60 years ago by some Amazon tribes.

Gael Garcia Bernal?
(photo in the park museum)

Panama hats...
...supposedly originated in Ecuador, not Panama. My Spanish teacher Nubia and the hat display.

a night out in the old city
Most of the people are from the Spanish school (almost all are German or Swiss).

Comments

[Marcusito]

Bad Coriolis
Clockwise. Counterclockwise. Bah humbug! Your friend is wise Amisita. The observable difference in force exerted in the northern vs southern hemisphere is too small to impact the direction of swirling water. Air masses, yes. Toilet flushes, not so much. Or at least so says the library of congress, discovery online, snopes and me. (I'm not a scientist, but I play one on TV). Because our real fact checker has gone home, I will simply paste the relevant stuff below. (in a related matter, seems that maybe the egg balancing thing has nothing to do with the equator and everything to do with being patient. which reminds me: why do the french make such small omlettes? because .... one egg is 'enough/an oeuf') sorry. More importantly, keep the entries coming. it's self-serving and greedy, but we're depending on you for the travel fix, and are quite appreciative in spite of the selfishness. safe travels!!!!!! /snip/ Because the Earth is a globe spinning on an invisible axis, a point at its equator will make a circuit of 25,000 miles in the space of a day, but any point not on the equator will make a shorter round trip; the closer that point is to either of the poles, the shorter its trip will be. Put another way, a pencil at the equator travels 1,030 miles an hour, whereas another at Sarasota, Florida, moves at 930 miles per hour, and one at the North pole doesn't move at all. This apparent difference in speed results in the Coriolis force, an effect that imparts a twist to largish events happening away from the equator. Best known is its effect on air masses: as they move away from the equator, their speed (which matches that of where they started from) appears to be faster than that of the surface over which they are traveling. This sets them turning in a clockwise twist in the northern hemisphere and a counterclockwise twist in the southern. (Before you complain we have that backwards, please click here.) Likewise, a cannonball fired due north will veer a teeny bit to the east, and one fired to the south will deflect ever so slightly to the west, something a skilled gunner would make an adjustment for. The twisting effect of the Coriolis force is real and does influence certain large things like the movement of air masses, but the effect is so small that it plays no role in determining the direction in which water rotates as it exits from a draining sink or toilet. The Coriolis effect produces a measurable effect over huge distances and long periods of time, neither of which applies to your bathroom. Toilets and sinks drain in the directions they do because of the way water is directed into them or pulled from them. If water enters in a swirling motion (as it does when a toilet is flushed, for example), the water will exit in that same swirling pattern; as well, most basins have irregular surfaces and are not perfectly level, factors which influence the direction in which water spirals down their drains. The configuration of taps and drains is responsible for the direction of spin given to water draining from sinks and bathtubs to a degree that overwhelms the slight influence of the Coriolis force. The belief that the Coriolis force influences the direction in which water drains from plumbing fixtures is widespread and has been repeated as fact in a number of venues, including popular television shows (such as world traveler Michael Palin's Pole to Pole) and even in textbooks. We can only speculate on why people are so enamored of this snippet of misinformation, guessing that it has something to do with the desire to find some of the mysteries of science in the realm of the everyday.

[gael garcia bernal]

'is not me!
that's my twin brother! not me! (-ggb, aka ivahhc)

[Niklas]

Refreshingly low budget
I love how the sign indicating the Equator is secured to a discarded car wheel.