A Visit to Mitad del Mundo

Today, we visited Mitad del Mundo, or Middle of the World -- the equator! As you may have already guessed, Ecuador takes its name from the equator. 

To get to Mitad del Mundo, we hailed a taxi just outside our hotel. Eighteen miles and $12 later, we arrived. After buying our tickets into the Middle of the World City (kind of like a village/park), we grabbed lunch. Wonder what we ate? Yep, empanadas. Again. They're just SO good. But we'll deviate soon.

Inside the park, we walked around and explored a model village called Viviendas Ancestrales; it was an exhibition of traditional dwellings from three regions of Ecuador.

Sitting outside a traditional dwelling.

The kids found a playground and ran around a bit. 

Playground time!

These trees made us think of the book 'Extra Yarn,' by Mac Barnett and illustrated by Jon Klassen.

And after that, we walked to the trapezoid monument in the middle of the park. Now, here's your fun fact: This huge monument does not actually straddle the equator. Nope. Funny enough, the real, true equator is about 240 meters away.

The "first" equator at Mitad del Mundo was mapped in 1736 by the French geodesic equatorial expedition team, led by astronomer Charles Marie de La Condamine. It's super impressive that Charles and team mapped the equator so closely as they did, considering there was no GPS back then. The "real" equator wasn't discovered until recently, in the 90's, with the advent of GPS.

Straddling the (fake) equator. We've got one foot in the northern hemisphere and one foot in the southern hemisphere.

In front of the large Mitad del Mundo monument, constructed in 1979.

The view from the top of the monument. N stands for Northern Hemisphere; S stands for Southern.

Supposedly you can balance an egg on a nail at the equator. It didn't happen for us at the "fake" equator, but we saw it happen for others at the real one.

Another family selfie!

So, since we saw the original equator, and we were so close to the real equator, we decided to see the real equator, too. Here's what that looks like:

We walked out of Mitad del Mundo and up the street to a nondescript road.

There was just this one sign: To the Museo Intinan. And then we walked up and around a dirt trail to get to the museum.

Inside the museum was this -- the real equator.

Mitad del Mundo was pretty cool and worth the trip. We had to laugh that there's this huge park and huge monument for a mis-labeled line, but heck, for a couple hundred years, everyone believed.