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Published: January 8th 2007
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The fake equator!
The government sanctioned equator monument is certainly impressive.... shame its about 300m off the true equator line!! After the manic period over Christmas and New years we had a week off work at BSI so we decided to cram in as much as we could in the northern / central area of the country. We based ourselves in Quito to start off with and the first thing on the agenda after having a largely vegetarian diet for the past month and a bit was to get some meat!! We found a really nice Argentine restaurant in the Mariscal area of Quito and had some excellent steak and treated ourselves to a really tasty bottle of wine too. Andy and Michelle had very kindly given us some money to treat ourselves on our week off so we put it to good use!!
From Quito it is possible to visit lots of places on day trips, the first one we took was out to the equator, which passes through Ecuador a couple of hours north of Quito. The ecuator is marked by a huge monument and has a complex of tourist shops and restaurants surrounding it. We discovered that the actual equator doesn´t pass through the monument at all, it is about 300m off the mark. Bit embarassing
Tash the hunter
At the little museum on the true equator there were other cool things you could do - like try your hand with a traditional Incan-style blow dart really but they still have a line painted there that you can stand either side of, which we did like the diligent tourists we are! Not being interested in the overpriced food or souvenirs we went to find the real equator! The real equator was just next door and passed through a tiny little museum where you could do experiments to prove you were on the equator such as watching water flow down a plughole in a sink in different directions and balancing an egg on a nail (Tash couldn´t do it!). Much more interesting than the "offical" (and boring) monument nextdoor. The museum also gave a guided tour with information about the local culture such as head shrinking and the significance of the equator in the Incan culture, which was fun and interesting and we got to try shooting a traditional blowpipe too!
Having taken in a bit of the local culture we thought we would pamper ourselves by taking a trip to lounge in some thermal hot springs up in the mountains not far from Quito. The springs at Papallacta are 100% natural hot water that bubbles up from underground heated by one of the many active
The proof!
Kev balancing an egg on a nail - something you can only do on the equator. Tash didn´t manage to do it though!! volcanos in the area. The springs have a whole network of pools of varying (hot) temperatures and different depths varying from ones deep enough to swim in to some that are shallow enough to lie in without going under the water. All very relaxing! We stayed there into the early eveing and as the sun went down and the air cooled the pools were shrowded in a steamy mist that created a cool atmosphere combined with the open air environment. Thoroughly relaxed and hungry we continued our meat diet by going out for some ribs back in Quito!
Having been living at just over 3000m for the past month we considered ourselves well aclimatised to the altitude to try climbing a little higher into the Andes, well nearly double actually! With more volcanos to climb than possibly anywhere else in the world we felt obliged to climb at least one; we chose Volcan Cotopaxi, whose summit is 5897m (19347 feet) above sea level. You can´t just take a bus to the bottom and wander up to the summit so we organised a guide and some mountineering kit (crampons, axes, ropes) with a company called Moggely in Quito.
From
Starting the climb
You can see where we were aiming for in the top left corner! Quito we were taken by jeep to the Cotopaxi national park and up to the carpark for the climbers refuge (4500m). From here we took off our soft trekking boots and put on our mountaineering boots to start the walk up to the refuge (4800m); our guide Marco advised us that we should take it slow as we would get tired quicker at our new higher altitude. It took us about 45 minutes to walk up from the carpark, which is only about 2km in distance but pretty steep.
Once at the refuge we went and found an empty bed in the huge dorm upstairs and left our stuff in a locker. We had a brief lesson in how to put on our crampons and walk using our ice axes at the bottom of the glaciar and slid down the glaciar on our backs! Marco made us some dinner and we went to bed by 8pm although for some reason it was quite difficult to sleep because of the altitude. Trouble sleeping was a pretty minor sign of the affect of the altitude - we saw some people suffering far more who obviously hadn´t taken any time to acclimatise
The end of the climb
We didn´t take any other pictures on the way up! This is us as the sun rises at the summit. before coming up.
We were woken up (sort of) by our alarm at just after midnight, got our gear on and had some breakfast in time to set off at about 1am. We were extremely lucky with the weather - a perfectly clear night with not one cloud and a full moon. Even at 1am you didn´t need a torch to see where you were going! Some people had obviously started a little earlier as you could see little torch lights dotted over the volcano.
The route started off relatively easy and then started to get very steep with the trail slowly zig-zagging its way up through the snow. Very slowly!! The climb took us about 5 hours in total, with at least two or three places where you thought you were going to get to the top only to be greeted by another huge expanse of ice! The route was pretty amazing, passing formations of ice that looked like they were from some kind of special effects studio along ridges with huge views across the national park and down the avenue of volcanos.
Arriving at the summit we were almost too tired (and cold) to appreciate
The Crater
note that we´re also above the clouds! the amazing 360 degree view we had as our fingers started to freeze through our gloves before we had even taken them off to get the camera out! Still had a real sense of achievement as Marco reminded us how high we were! We arrived just after sunrise so everything had a kind of soft edge to it, you could see all of Ecuadors other famous volcanos including one that was smoking! And then the reality hit that we had to go down again! I would have paid a small fortune for a parachute to jump off the top to save the walk down again (which took about 3 hours in the end)!
Thoroughly knackered we still had to walk back down to the carpark! needless to say we slept most of the way back to Quito!
Our last stop on our whirlwind week off was a visit to the huge Otavalo market. Its a big market anyway but if you go on a Saturday (which we did) the whole town turns into one huge market with vendors lining almost every street. We spent a loooong time looking round and came away having had quite a restrained days
The view to Chimborazo
Ecuadors highest volcano off in the distance - you could see a long way from where we were! shopping with only a blanket, two ponchos, some handmade scarves, an alpaca jumper and a felt hat! You could very easily spend the whole day wandering round just looking, theres an animal market too but we restrained ourselves from buying any livestock!
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Gem
non-member comment
Totally and utterly amazing...
That's all I have to say about that...