The Middle of the World
Ecuador sits on the middle of the world. While I was in Quito, the capital, I visited a museum where you can stand with one foot in each hemisphere.
Our guide showed us a sundial with two faces, one in each hemisphere. For six months of the year, you can tell time on one face, but for the other half you have to look at the opposite face. Most amazing were the physical “tricks” the equator can play on the body.
For example, our guide encouraged me to hold my hands together in front of me. He told me to keep them still while he pushed them down. Of course, it took some effort on his part. Then as I stood on the equator, arms raised parallel to the line painted on the pavement. With no effort at all, he pushed my arms down. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t experienced it myself.
And, of course, our guide showed us how draining water will swirl in opposite directions on each side of the equator. It’s a fact we all learn in grade school, but I felt like a kid again seeing it happen in person.
It’s all meant to give tourist a wide-eyed experience, but it’s only one aspect of a country that is literally spread across the middle of the world in four dimensions.
Hillside in Quito, Ecuador
Quito itself, cupped in the magnificent hands of the Andes Mountains, is 9,000 feet high. Traveling any distance away from the city is a trek down as much as it is away. On our first travel day inside the country, we took a bus from Quito to Santo Domingo on the coastal Plains. First we traveled higher through a mountain pass. The landscape thinned to dry rocky crags where short grasses and scrubby bush struggled to survive.
Traveling down out of the mountain pass was like being on a slow motion elevator in an aberretum. Desert landscapes gave way to forest, then lush jungle. Each few kilometers of our decent brought a whole new landscape into view. At last, the bus stretched out into the coastal plains where giant palms, flowering trees, lush grasses and towering bamboo crowded every foot of the view.
Ecuador is home to nearly any climate you can imagine save the winter’s we have here in the midwest, which makes it one of the most biodiverse countries in the world.
More on my Ecuadoran adventures soon!
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