South America Day 69 - Mitad del Mundo

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Today we are going to the equator. On the way there, it rains so heavily it’s difficult to tell if we’re driving down a road or a river. Rubbish floats past the windows when we stop at traffic lights. Luckily it eases off before we arrive.

First stop is the Intiñan Museum which claims to be on the GPS equator. Here we take a guided tour which includes such activities as balancing an egg on a nail and trying to walk along the equator in a straight line, plus demonstrations in chocolate making and head shrinking.

Then on to the Mitad del Mondo, a kind of equator based theme park which claims to be on the geographical equator. We only have 28 minutes here and in addition to a plethora of equator based photo ops, there are also more hummingbird sculptures. So we devise a strategic photography plan and split up, run round our allocated segments and get back to the bus a mere 2 minutes behind schedule.

We return to Quito and make a serious error; we go to a chicken shop and order pollo y papas and get chicken and boiled potato! Who even heard of serving chicken without chips?

In the evening, more torrential rain so we retire to the hotel and spend a glamorous evening sitting in the foyer by the WiFi router as it’s the only way to get a signal.

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