Celebrate Mitad del Mundo and the Equator in Ecuador
At Mitad del Mundo in Ecuador, dancers - traditional, of course - let loose and celebrate the equator every weekend. Didn't I tell you Quitenos love festivities? It's not everywhere that you can tap your foot to the dance of the middle of the world.
Between 1979 and 1982 a Mitad del Mundo 30-meter monument tower with a globe at the top emerged 25 km. north of Quito to mark the location of the equator according to technology of the day. Quitenos celebrate it as symbolic. Today's technology, the GPS, agrees with the original location, 200 yards away.
A double reason to celebrate. A double reason to ribbon dance on the ribbon line that equates itself with the equator.
Mitad-del-Mundo Dancing on Symbolic Equator Line

The ethnographic museum in the monument behind the dancing area displays history as you ascend the stairs to the top. The spectacular view offers a bonus. You can also go up by elevator and descend through history with much more explained on the floor... great way to understand Ecuador from the local point of view.
As the indigenous swirl dance at Mitad del Mundo, centuries old culture comes alive. Around the area, quaint little shops offer crafts, and the aroma invites you to eat and spend the day here. I haven't tried out the food yet... another to-do.
Photos with one foot "symbolically" on one side of the line and one "symbolically" on the other claim the rage here every day.
Angel Rea of Quinde Adventures del Ecuador delivers the tour to Mitad del Mundo AND the equator,.
How would you explain not going to both when you got back home? How would you explain not meeting Angel, the culture angel of Quito?

The Equator -- Inti - Nan
Inti means sun and nan means path in Quichua. In English - it's the equator.
After the symbolic middle of the world tour, Angel drove me to Inti Nan, the Solar Museum. We passed the corralled llamas through the graveled ground with an open theater to the right of the corral, and a couple of grass-roofed huts as he led me to the museum guide where I paid my small fee, and continued to really get photographed on line - the equator line, that is.
She demonstrated how water drains straight down over the equator line, and swirls to opposite sides on each side of the line, but scientists cried fake. They claim it can do the same in other places. Does an egg also stand on end elsewhere?
A solar clock marks the time,
and a solar calendar marks the date...not fake! Cayambe Volcano with its cap of snow, the only volcano in the world that straddles the equator cannot be fake.
You weigh less here than at home because gravity has less pull! Do they call this fake? I don't know, but that definitely means a lot to some of us.
One hut displays a shrunken head with hair still growing on it. For any questions on this, get yourself to Quito, get toured over there, and ask! I really didn't want to know.
Unusual displays dot the ground here. One being the invention of the wheel, which the indigenous here claim as their own. Another shows how the indigenous buried their dead and why they buried them in the manner they did, and much more.
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