Day 232 - The Equator

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Ed realised an almost lifelong ambition today - watching water drain down a plughole on both sides of the equator.

We began the day with a repeat of yesterday's fruit salad breakfast, which was even better now that she's added avocado to the mix. Surprising, but avocado goes extremely well with banana. Then we went to pick up the car we'd rented for the day - after a bit of a mix up we got a beast of a Landcruiser 4x4 which had recently returned from a muddy trip into the Masai Mara. The car rental guy told us how lucky we were to have a brand new car - kind of surprising when it looked old and knackered. But he said "Yeah it's brand new, only 3 years old" so these things are all relative. It also had 151,000km on the clock. We were taking 2 English girls from our truck on this exciting excursion, and soon we were heading out into the crazy Nairobi traffic, with people darting across the road apparently on suicide missions.

We saw about a million things on the journey ranging from people taking cows for a walk, signs saying things like "today is a good day for sausages", bicycles carrying more than a Transit van, Mount Kenya with its rather incongruous snow-capped peak. Oh and back to the car - it kept on cutting out. Probably 30 times during the day, which is just great. We made it to the equator in about 4 hours, over some of the worst roads in the world, for the day's real purpose. We found (or rather a crowd of tourist-dollar-hungry men found us and directed us) a man who could demonstrate the Coriolis effect - a force related to the world's spinning that makes draining water spiral clockwise as it goes down a plughole in the northern hemisphere but anti-clockwise in the southern hemisphere. It doesn't take a genius to work out that the best place to see this in action is at the equator itself. The demonstration is utterly conclusive, and we have movie footage to prove it. What's more, at the equator there is no spiralling at all. Some people say that all this is just a big trick, perpetuated by the famous Simpsons episode 'Bart vs Australia' where he needs a boy in Sydney to back up his story about the spiral's direction. Having seen it first hand it's hard to believe it's a hoax, but perhaps someone reading this can offer a more comprehensive explanation. Perhaps we can find someone with a keen interest in physics to give us a straight answer... Hmmm???!

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