La Mitad del Mundo and lots and lots of mud in Mindo

On Friday, my teacher, Luis, took me to La Mitad del Mundo, the middle of the world, for class. The equator goes right past Quito, and there´s a huge monument in the small town north of here which marks the place where two French scientists measured the equator, sometime in the 19th century, I think. I don´t know all the details because they were actually wrong. The monument is not on the equator, and the monument is kind of stupid. But the museum just near the monument is really interesting.
It actually is on the equator, and they do all these interesting demonstrations. My favorite was when they took a sink of water, which they let out right on top of the equator, and the water fell directly underneath. Then they moved the contraption about 10 feet into the Southern hempisphere, and they did it again, and the water drained clockwise, and then they moved it 10 feet into the Northern hemisphere and it drained counter-clockwise. Great fun.

As we were walking from the museum to the monument, we passed this little house with a free demonstration of something to do with the equator. Luis had never seen it before, so we went in. It´s an anthropological organization called Quitsato that´s investigating the relationship between the indigenous groups in the Quito area and the equator. It ends up that these groups were able to identify the equator way before the Spanish got there, and they constructed all these monuments on the equator, and in a series of 26% angles from the equator. I can´t really explain it well, but their website is http://www.quitsato.org/. The website explains the project, but I don´t think it does a really good job of explaining some of the math and anthropology. Basically, what I learned is that most of the original pueblos in the area were constructed within a certain mathematical precision to the equator, including Quito, all of which constructed this 8-pointed star that you see all over Quito, which is a symbol of the sun and moon gods. The Spanish incorporated this symbol and its mythology when they came to Ecuador in order to convert people, so much so that they constructed most of their major churches on a line that has some sort of relationship to the equator. It was totally fascinating.

This weekend I went on a school excursion to Mindo, which is in the cloud rain forest northwest of Quito. It was a fun trip, but extremely wet and muddy. Mindo is a prime bird watching center, but we didn´t do much of that because it was raining.
We took a two hour hike into the forest, in tons of mud, to get to a waterfall, which was both beautiful, and fun since they had a slide going into it. The problem is that it was a 2 hour hike out. But we had a nice dinner, and then I hung out in a bar with my Australian friend Trent. Today, it wasn´t quite as wet, and some of the students explored a butterfly-orchid-hummingbird garden. It was actually very similar to Costa Rica, so not terribly exciting, but it was nice to get away. Mindo is a teeny-weeny town, and I definitely got more of sense of more traditional Ecuador, despite the obvious tourism.

I´m trying to decide now whether I´m going to go into the jungle in a week to finish my studies here before going to the Galapagos. The jungle sounds interesting, but I really like my teacher, and a 10-hour bus ride there and another back, doesn´t sound terribly exciting. But we´ll see.