At the moment we're still retracing our steps to some degree (to be exact to the 0˚!) and have landed up in Quito again. This time we are staying very close to the Zona Rosa of Mariscal Sucre and have very few cultural objectives as we have already spent a few days here and done lots. The area was once called the New Town as it spread out from the historical centre in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of it has now been developed, altered and just plain ruined by the proliferation of bars, restaurants and hostels.

However, if you wander around you can find lots of reminders of what the place once looked like; substantial detatched villas with eclectic reminders of architecture from all over the place.








There are even some streets where the trees still line the road and you could,if you shut out the noise, just for a moment, imagine yourslf in 1910. As another interesting variation from the constant clubbing, the CiclóPolis (Cycle police) block several roads on Sundays so the whole are becomes a relatively quiet cycle playground.








We did a bit of calculating and worked out that it must have been a year since we got married! So we celebrated by going back to La Boca del Lobo, the very trendy bar/restaurant that we visited and enjoyed so much last time we were here but this time we remembered the camera. The core of the building is another of the old villas. However, the owners have incorporated the garden into the bar by using glass walls. The outside of the house has decorated as if it were an interior and all the decoration throughout has been done in a very eclectic way. Their excellent food and an extensive cocktail menu make it a good place for celebrations...

One thing we had to do though was to visit to El Mitad del Mundo (The Middle of the World). We have now crossed the equator twice but have not yet made it to the place just outside of Quito where a whole theme park has developed around the monument that marks the imaginary line. In this case the line is actually very imaginary because modern technology shows that the monument has been placed about 300 metres away from the correct place.

However this hasn't proved much of an inconvenience and the park continues to attract groups of vistors, particularly at weekends. Souvenir shops and cafes are set out in the form of a small village around a central square. The "equator line'' runs right through the middle of this square, then up the steps and into the little church, straight up the aisle to the altar. To entertain the people, bands play on a stage in the square, El Trencito (Little Train) runs around the site, llamas graze around the massive official monument and there are several children's playgrounds or varying levels of H&S scariness. All of which makes a jolly good day out for the average local family.

However, just along the road from the Mitad del Mundo site some enterprising landowners have identified, with the help of GPS, that the 'correct' line of the equator runs across their land. The Museo Inti Ñan has a whole heap of stuff for you to look at, only some of which really relates to its position. The first part of the tour takes you to a tribal house of peoples living a long away away in the Ecuadorian Amazonian rainforest. Here we were shown some of their artefacts, examples of deadly animals and given instructions for how to shrink someone’s head.

We then passed on to a replica of a house used by the people in the Ecuadorian coastal area, where we looked at some costumes, tools and cooking pots. A short walk further on took us into a home as used by those people living in the Ecuadorian Andes. This was significant for its lowered floor acting as a pen to stop the guinea-pigs from escaping. Finally we were taken to a model of a tomb and shown the funerary urns and some grave goods. Makes you wonder why we’ve bothered travelling all round South America – we could have seen everything here!

We finally got to the equator bit where there were several sun totems from different cultures and we were given an explanation why people in the north and south get 4 seasons but in Ecuador there’s just dry and rainy seasons. We looked at a sun dial that will only work on the equator (but actually wasn’t working anyway because there was no sun).

We posed for silly photographs on each side of the equator and were then given a demonstration of the way that the Coriolis effect makes water go down the plughole in different direction on the northern and southern sides. This is actually not true as the Coriolis effect is too weak to influence small bodies of water and the direction of the vortex is more to do with residual movement in the water. Anyone interested in this should take a look at this website:
http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html
which gives gives some good explanations.

Still it makes as much enjoyable nonsense as the next demonstration of how an egg can be balanced on a nailhead, 'only possible at the equator'. TP often has trouble just balancing himself when he walks down the street so he declined, but Jen bravely stepped up to the plate but, despite her brimming confidence, miserably failed to balance the egg. However, Tomas, a small but effervescent Colombian boy in our group did manage it and therefore got a certificate, although what it proves is beyond us. We were content to simply get stamps in our passports to say that we had been there.