Road trip to....?

Yesterday Liz, Lisa and I took a little trip. I thought the plan was to go to the “real” equator in Mitad del Mundo (its supposedly past the two equators I’ve already been to in Mitad del Mundo) because I had e-mailed someone from the Quitsato project* and he gave me directions. But before I tell you where we ended up going, let me tell you how we got there. The plan was for me and Lisa (my new roommate) to pick up Liz in a taxi and then go to the bus station. Lisa and I successfully got a taxi and found Liz.
Then we told the driver we wanted to go to “estación Ofelia” (Ofelia station). He apparently did not here the “estación” part because he took us to the Ofelia neighborhood and tried to drop us off. We were like “hey dude, we want to go to the bus station.” At that point he thought he realized something and exclaimed “OOHHH” which was weird because that’s not and Ecuadorian thing to do, but ok maybe he has seen lots of English movies. I don’t know. Anyways he said “damos una vuelta” which is Ecua-Spanish for anything from taking a walk to taking a commercial break. But he meant it in the context of he’s going to drive around for 15 minutes and run up the meter until we say “hey, where the heck are you taking us.” After the little “vuelta” was finished he said “estamos aquí” (we’re here) and well we weren’t “aquí” We were actually anywhere but “aquí”. We were on some corner in the middle of a neighborhood where all of the inhabitants were just chatting on the street. We told him again that wanted to go to the bus station. His explained that this was the bus station (which is not true because I’ve been to Ofelia many times, it’s one of the biggest things in Quito). Once again I explained that I wanted to go to “Terrestre Ofelia” (bus station). And I get the “OOHHH” response again and then he tells me the bus station is closed on Saturday (also not true). Lisa and I were like “sure thing buddy” and we got out of the taxi. Since we didn’t exactly know where we were we asked all the locals who told us that we were at the bus station. Apparently we were at the only bus stop in Ofelia so according to them that is the bus station. Silly us, how did we not know that! They also kept telling us that the bus station is closed on Saturday, I’m not sure how a corner on a street can be closed but I’ll just take their word. Clearly we were not talking about the same place. But luckily we found a taxi driver who knew what we were talking about and finally took us there.
That was just getting to the bus station in Quito. We still hadn’t gotten to the real equator yet. Our directions to this place were kind of vague. The guy I e-mailed said to take a specific bus company that was going in the direction of Cayambe and get of a km 47. We talked to the bus driver and at first he didn’t know what we were talking about, but he said he would tell us when to get off. (another lie). As we were driving I noticed that we passed km 47 so we ran off the bus only to be left in the middle of no where. Seven months ago this would have freaked me out. But now that I’m skilled in Ecuadorian transportation (or at least experienced) I knew that if we really wanted to go back to Quito all we had to do was flag down a bus (and there were tons of them) and pay the $1 fair to Quito. I think Ecuador has this whole traveling by bus thing down pretty good. Back to the story, we were in the middle of nowhere walking down the road (like any good road trip movie) and we were trying to flag down taxis, but they were all full. Finally we found one. We tried to tell him where we wanted to go but apparently my pronunciation isn’t good enough and so he was really confused. After I showed him the directions I had written down, he promptly turns his car around and we’re off in the other direction.
Eventually we got to where our directions said. It was not at all where I thought it was, but it was pretty cool. We ended up at the Solar Clock in Cayambe. This is supposedly on the real equatorial line. Our guide said we could google earth it but I have yet to do that. He also explained the Quitsato project to us and told us that they want to educate the world on how the earth spins and stuff. They basically want to change the traditional orientation of N to E because that’s actually how the
W E N S earth spins and all that jazz. Plus
S W they hate the stuff that’s in Mitad del
Munda and they think it’s wrong to misinform tourists that it’s impossible to balance on the equator and that they are actually at the equator when the monument is like 200m away from the actual equator.

All said and done, it was quite an adventure and hopefully now I’ve fulfilled my dream of being in two hemispheres at once.



*Quitsato is a project that promotes education about the “real” equator and wants to get rid of the hokey museum that makes you think you can only balance an egg on the equator