Day 2: The “real” Equator and Quito’s old town

Because of the late arrival we start at 10:00 with our program today. The jet lag helps tough to get in the morning still, so enough time to take it easy and get prepared. The hotel is clean and boutique like, the rooms though only fit little more then the bed.

We start with a standard breakfast with some fruits, a good juice and scrambles egg – this actually will not change tomorrow, before heading straight to the equator museum which is located about an hours drive outside of town. Funnily there is also an equator memorial close to the museum which unfortunately was misplaced at the time it was build, as calculations at the time of construction were a little imprecise. The museum is a nice and quite place with some not very serious coriolis force experiments like egg balancing and the popular toilet flush experiment (right and left spin of the flush depending on what hemisphere you’re located on), which works, but is a bit hard to believe though (will have to do some reading on this…). The museum also hosted a Chicheria – a rural brewery of the traditional corn beer brewed in Ecuador, “protected” buy some guinea pigs as we learned. The little animals not only serve as a local dish (I am quite curious to try) as well as the “mood sensor” for guests – if they get nervous locals rather keep their guests outside. We took the obligatory equator shoot and also had chance to see the first hummingbirds.

Afterwards we took the tour back and experienced a true South American traffic jam. The weather from being super hot changed together with the return in seconds into heavy showers and roads were immediately verbally flooded! We used the timing to eat some local food and had Empanadas together with a Mokkachino, before mooving on the city.

Before seeing the unesco world heritage protected old town (mainly because of the high density of cathedrals and monasteries) we went up the city’s central mountain (the locals call it due to its special shape call “Brötchen”) which hosted a huge Maria statue. The rain meanwhile had stopped but a lot of fog was at that time sticking to the mountains and volcano Pichincha surrounding Quito valley. After that we went straight to the old town where we we started from the Placa Grande and exported the presidents house (who at the time of our visit actually had talks in Germany with Angie) and the gold flooded churches around.

After some further strolling through the city we took dinner at a restaurant that offered a perfect night view over the city before heading back to take a relaxing sleep after an exciting first day…