Travel : Ecuador

Obligatory foot in two hemispheres photo-opportunity.

If you're going to go around the world I reckon the middle is as good a place as any to begin. For a start there's so much choice, so many middles to choose from. For the wealthier traveller there's Borneo and Kiribati, for the adventurous there's the DRCongo. And retired quantity surveyors might want to check out Somalia, I don't know. I just figured if you are going to start at the equator then you may as well be literal as well as anal and start at the one that sounds like e-qua-tor. Ecuador it is then.
         Quito. Every city is an ugly city. The sprawling tenements of Quito offer no exception to the rule. However, it does have its advantages. Nestling at an altitude of some 9000 ft and being flanked on either side by even higher lush green mountains, its hard to feel claustrophobic here.
Did I say lush? That´ll be the rain then. We (let me introduce my girlfriend and fellow traveller Liza) arrived in typical spring-like Ecuadorean weather in late September. Not too hot, not too.. within 30 minutes of arriving at the Secret Garden the clouds rolled over the hills and an immense thunderstorm crashed its way across the city, sheet lightning illuminating the urban sprawl. Welcome to Quito, the man said. This only happens about 30 times a year.

Claustrophobic? No. Just put that fire out please.

It took us 24 hrs to find our feet and 48 for me, as a smoker, to find my lungs. Our first excursion took us, where else, to the equator, Mitad del Mundo, where controversy abounds, as controversy seems to, as to the exact location of the centre of the Earth. The French had marked a line and even built a monument but that was (literally) miles out. Sept kilometre. Should have asked Jules Verne...or the Incas. Or, there being none around anymore, the locals. Hundreds of years earlier, while the West was still under the misapprehension that the world was flat, and with no fancy technology other than a study of the path of the sun and the moon, the Incas knew. And today, with GPS technology, the Incas have been proved correct. A new line was drawn (see above) in 1980. And even this, by modern mapping standards (hello google) is 240m off-centre.
  I wonder if they told the (Ex-)President? Bill Clinton has his own plaque, Hollywood stylee, completely incongruously, at the official (ie wrong) Mitad del Mundo. "Bill Clinton stood here". Like. Wow.
 We moved on, a few km North to Pululahua, a Geo-Botanical reserve inhabited by ethnic Ecuadoreans, the San Idriso community. They live, essentially, in the crater of an inactive volcano.

Afternoon cloud, a regular event, begins to envelop the San Idriso community.

Unusually for us we did the tourist thing and took an English speaking guide. This was a great thing to do. Not only did he fully inform us of the superior Incan knowledge regarding the correct line of the equator, he also led us up a crazy mountain path (Liza in sandals) to the Ventanillas look-out point to view the spectacular volcanic crater and its inhabitants. Further, he sat us down and played beautifully on his Ocarina, music entirely in harmony with the surroundings, a call to Mother Nature. And finally he gave us his (non-western) take on 2012 and the Mayan prophecies of the end of the world. There is no apocalypse. Simply a change away from materialist thought to a more spiritual plane.
To our shame, perhaps because our senses were overloaded with S.American culture, history and scenery, we cannot remember his name. Fernando? Possibly. Fernando. Vice-President of the Volcanoes. No plaque required.

Mitad del Mundo can be reached by local metrobus from Cotocallao station. Pululahua is a further 10 mins by taxi. Public transport in Ecuador is excellent, cheap and whatever the opposite of green is.