We met our group at 8:30 and, after a nice walk through the city, we picked up a bus at Avenida América that would take us to our destination. It had been cold and rainy in Quito, but as we got closer to the equator, the climate became hot and dry.
Before visiting the equator itself, we wanted to see the Pululahua crater, a volcanic circus about five kilometers from the town. In contrast to the surrounding desert, the inside of the crater is relatively wet, the result of a local micro-climate. Pululahua used to contain a crater lake. Today, the lake is long gone, but the flat and fertile soil of the former lake bottom, coupled with the warm, wet weather typical inside the crater, left an area perfect for agriculture. As a consequence, the entire bottom of the crater is blanketed in small farms, which we were told, grow some of the best grapes and potatoes in Ecuador. We were also told that Pululahua possessed a special “cleansing energy” carried by the wind blowing up from out of the crater.From here we traveled to the equator itself, or rather to the Museo Inti-Ñan. The museum, so they claim, lies squarely on the equator (GPS calculations have shown that the Mitad del Mundo Equatorial Line Monument does not) and has exhibits about Ecuadorian ethnography as well as experiments relating to the sun and the equator itself. The later, especially those demonstrating the Coriolis effect, were little more than slight of hand. To me this was disappointing and made me question the veracity of everything I had seen and heard at the museum that day. Still, the stories told were interesting: the Ecuadorians we spoke too all viewed the equator, much like Pululahua, as imbued with an “energy” all its own. And it was fun straddling the equator and taking photos with Eve, each of us standing in our respective hemispheres.
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