Will the real Equator please stand up?
14 05 2007Today we visited Mitad del Mundo (middle of the world), a monument built to recognize the location of the Equator in the country that bears its name (Ecuador). The bus ride out to the monument took a while to find (Lonely Planet says to look for pink buses - these do not exist) but we prevailed. The bus was also silly crowded (as usual).
At the Mitad del Mundo, they built an enormous obelisk made of some exotic rock topped with a metal globe that weighs some ungodly amount of weight, the whole monument must have been very expensive. The irony is that they built it in the wrong place!
As the story goes, since the advent of GPS, someone brought in a military GPS (i.e. one without the crippling selective availability of consumer units) and determined precisely where the real equator passes through the area - several hundred feet north of the obelisk. Oops! At the real location, they built a museum, called Museo Inti Ņan, where we (for twice the entrance fee than the obelisk) had a guided tour of indigenous dwellings and got to try our skill with a blowgun dart at a cactus. Of course, we also got to do some tricks that supposedly you could only do at the equator (year round that is), including balancing an egg on its end on the head of a nail. The guide also showed us an example of water draining from a sink with the absence of the Coriolis effect. Pretty cool excursion - definitely recommended.
