Mitad del Mundo, The Ecuadorian Equator, The Middle of the world!!… well almost. The French scientists who came here to calculate the exact equator line more than 100 years ago ignored the Indians calculations and determined that the Equator was in this spot. More recently their calculations have been proven false and the true Equator actually lies 240 meters to the North of here down a small dirt road and inside a small open air museum, which unfortunately is much less epic or photogenic.
This is the reason that you will not find any of the iconic equator physics experiments going on at this big monument, because they simply wont work here. But 240 meters to the north at the real Equator they will demonstrate how your muscles weaken when standing on the equator, walking straight is difficult on the equator and the Coriolis effect (water draining clockwise, anticlockwise or straight down depending on your position in relation to the equator line). There was also another experiment which required you to balance an egg on top of a nail which is supposed to be easier to do on the equator, but I wasn’t 100 percent convinced if this one was true or not, but the other 3, no doubt about it. The museum also had some displays of traditional Indian houses and even some shrunken heads!
We took 2 local busses with two Canadian girls we met in our hostel at breakfast to get here. It was easy and only cost 75 cents each. The trip back however was a little more stressful after we missed our bus stop back in Quito and had to disembark on the side of a freeway to catch a taxi back. We flagged down a taxi just as it was getting dark and although we had heard the storied about taxi kidnappings and robberies we didn’t have much of a choice but to take it.
We all started getting pretty worried when the driver took a turn in the opposite direction to our hostel, and when I asked he told me the traffic was bad on the main road. He took us through some very dodgy winding back streets all the meanwhile I was glued to my GPS making sure we didn’t turn down any dead end streets and memorising his taxi number. Eventually we ended up close to our hostel and it had become apparent that he either misheard the address or just had no idea where it was and took us to the main area in the old town. Phew.
