Driving into Quito I was surprised at how green the area was. The surrounding hills were a beautiful colour….that was what I could occasionally see through the driving rain…
The city itself is full of historic old buildings and has actually been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We did a walking tour throughout the old town to learn more about the history.
The main basilica…
(Inside the clock tower)
The rest of the city…
(Cultural theatre)
(Church)
(Central bank…which has much less of a function now that the country uses US dollars)
(Tom sampling the local sweets)
(Main alter of the San Fransico church)
(La Ronda street)
(No tour would be complete without a chocolate museum!)
After that we got visit the equator, jumping from Northern Hemisphere to Southern Hemisphere. The thing is…there are actually 2 equators, the one determined in 1736 after around 11 years of research and the one determined to be accurate by GPS coordinates not that long ago.
Obviously the original one has all the tourists and monuments…
…but we did find the new site, complete with touristy experiments (like balancing an egg the head of a nail – Tom is officially the ‘Egg Master’) and explaining why water does actually spin in two different ways in different hemispheres.
(The ‘Egg Master’ hard at work…)
I also took part in a street food tour sampling the local delicacies and avoiding the more exotic foods like tripe and cow’s womb soup.
(Watching a local band)
(Devouring….the giant empanada)
(Almost twice the size of an A4 piece of paper, stuffed with cheese, deep fried and covered with sugar)
