Quito again

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Geo: -0.224687, -78.5139

Travelling day on Sunday. A barge had run aground in a narrow channel and the Anakonda could not pass. So we spent 2.5hr in the canoe driving upstream to Coca. While there we had a brief visit to a local market. Then we boarded a TAME Embraer-190 (26 rows, 2x2 seating) for Quito, landing at 1530.

Our American fellow passengers are also staying at the same Quito hotel, but they leave tomorrow for the Galapagos. We have another day in Quito and fly to the Galapagos on Tuesday. We've arranged for our driver to take us to an Equator tourist venue. See pics...

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Photos

Mitad del Mundo
Middle of the World - tourist venues associated with the line of the equator. This pic was taken at the Intinan Museum which contains a number of "scientific" experiments. Does water go down a drain clockwise and anti-clockwise depending on which side of the equator the basin is located? The museum also had interesting indigenous exhibits such as a genuine shrunken human head 160 years old, a 6m stuffed anaconda, the oldest surviving native hut, etc.

Latitude "0" Monument
The distant 1982 monument replaced a smaller one built in 1936 to commemorate a 1736 French Geodesic Survey that took detailed measurements of the Earth. It houses a number of exhibits on several internal levels. We went into the planetarium but the narrative was in Spanish, so we groped our way to the exit and left. That's our driver, Jorge, who doubled as a tour guide today.

The line of the Equator
Seen from the top of the monument. Zooming in will reveal a guy doing a one-arm handstand on the line. One of the Intinan "experiments" was meant to demonstrate that it is harder to balance on the Equator. Because of the Earth's equatorial bulge, we were told that a local mountain is higher than Everest, if measured from the centre of the Earth.

Comments

[Kerrie Lonn]

All looking very interesting. Thanks for persisting with stories and pics with the slow internet. From Mexico with love.