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Published: June 29th 2010
We made it to the middle of the world ... as the sign says as you get off the plane. I suppose that the middle of the world is the burning hot magma core. That is not where we are ... we are however at the equator in the country of Ecuador. Actually when we arrived to Quito, Ecuador on Saturday we were a little south of the equator. However, our first day in Ecuador we made a day trip to the "mitad del mundo monumento" translated the middle of the world monument. It was awesome and it better that what we thought it would be. We had heard from reading and from our taxi driver that this is a place where many ecuadorians come on Sunday to hang out and listen to music, watch indigenous dances and be with family. To us it seemed like a place that would be filled with tourists but that was not the case at all. The majority of people that we saw were from Ecuador ... with their family enjoying a calm Sunday. The first thing we did was go to the middle of the world monument. This was a monument built in the
18th century by a French explorer group that came to find the worlds equator. Eventually a huge monument was built marking the equator pretty much through the whole mitad del mundo area. The monument was beautiful ... however the French geographic team did not get the line of where the equator was quite right which makes this huge monument loose a little of its importance. They were off by about 200 meters. We figured that they did a pretty good job with the tools that they had at that time though. Conveniently, they do have a museum Inti Nan which is located on the real equator oustide of this monument. This outdoor museum was really cool! First you do a quick walk through of the Amazonian culture including a replica of a Amazon hut. But the sweet part of Inti Nan was the part located right on the equator. We were skeptical of if any of these experiments would really work but after seeing them in person we can affirm that they are real. The first thing that we did was do was a test that shows that water drains straight down on the equator but just 10 m south
of the equator it drained clockwise and 10 m north it drained counter clockwise. Then we balanced an egg on a nail on the equator. Then we did probably the weirdest test ... walking the line on the equator. You had to close your eyes and walk heal to toe on the equator with your arms out. Literally no one could keep their balance ... but then 10 m away from the equator the same test was no problem. You could literally feel the pull of the equator. Needless to say it was a sweet site.
We also (we includes Steph, Andy and also our good friends Val and Sunia) saw many traditional indiginous dances done in the main plaza of Mitad del Mundo and also a live concert. This is done on Sundays and that is why Equadorians make the 20 min drive north from quito to Mitad del Mundo. It was an awesome celebration of ecuador culture through music and dance. I guess one of the biggest things that we got out of it was the relation that Ecuador has with her indiginous past ... something that you really don't see in the US. It was an
awesome way to spend our first day in Quito acclimating to the 9,500 ft altitud.
So far we have been enjoying Quito - it is a city full of life and nice people. We are loving traveling with Val and Sunia and getting to take in the experiences together. Ciao de Quito!
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Ruth
non-member comment
Por Favor!
Thanks for sharing your experiences with those of us not so well-traveled as you! The equator experiments sound awesome . . . I'm sure your students will enjoy hearing/seeing those as well :) Have a safe and fun-filled rest of your journey.