Equator Line and New Town

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My last day in the hotel. I need to move to a hostel as I'm staying till Friday then I'm off to Costa Rica 😊. I have a buffet breakfast (part of my GAP adventure) in the hotel. After breakfast, I repack all my clothes, check out of the hotel and move back to the Blue House (hostel). I head back to the hotel to meet up with the girls (Michelle, Helena and Tania). We are going to the Equator line.

We catch a cab out to the Equator line. Michelle made a deal with the cab driver and he is going to wait for us to take us back to town. At the Equator line, we pay $2 USD to get into the site. We have lunch at a little restaurant and explore the site. There is a monument dedicated to the Equator line and a line draw in the ground to mark it with a big N and S on either side of the line. There are many museums and stores on the site. A few of the museums you need to pay for, but a few are free. The demarcation for the Equator line was calculated by French scientist. We leave the site about 2.5 hours later and head to old town.

As a side note: I found out that the French made a mistake and missed the real Equator by 240 meters. Shit! There is another site 240 meters over that marks the real Equator line. I was told that it's off by a few centimeters. There is a monument on one of the mountains that marks the Equator line perfectly. The monument predates the Incas. And we thought we were advanced...

At old town, we wander the streets a bit and end up in a church. All of us are religious, so, we each light a candle and say a little pray. We go shoe shopping for Helena. After walking around for a bit, we finally find something for her. She buys her shoes and it starts to rain. The rain turns into a down pour in seconds. It's raining so hard that the streets of Old town are empty, expect for cars. There is no one walking down the streets, everyone is hiding in stores trying to wait out the rain.

We wait for 15 minutes before we decide to run out into the rain and catch a taxi. We buy 2 large umbrellas from a woman walking around selling umbrellas. As we head down the street with our umbrellas, we still get our shoes and pants soaked. I notice there is more than one lady selling umbrellas as we go. We try hailing down taxis, but they are all full of people. The fifth taxi, we hail, has people in it, but the people get out right were we are standing and we jump in. It's back to New Town for us. As we are leaving Old Town, we notice that there is a power failure. I hope it doesn't affect all of Quito.

When we get back to new town, we head to papayanet internet cafe for snacks and drinks. The girls check their emails and then we head to dinner at The Coffee Tree. This restaurant is open 24 hours a day and is always busy. Wish we had something like this in Vancouver. We have burgers and desert before calling it the night.

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