Ecuador, or Equator doh!

Tracy has been preparing for this trip by learning Spanish on Duolingo. She’s better at it than she admits and a damn sight better than me. I can list the number of Spanish words I know on my fingers, although since arriving in Ecuador I will be engaging one more finger than previously. It’s only after I arrived in the country, and after having been on the planet for almost 59 years, that I realised Ecuador is the Spanish for Equator. It seems blindingly obvious now. If you pronounce the words using the same vowel sounds they are pretty much identical, try it. Because we don’t, it never occurred to me, and I suspect the same can be said for many other English speakers (go on, admit it).

Somewhat bizarrely, the country has named itself after a line. An imaginary one at that! I’d have thought if any country were going to name itself after a line it would be Colombia. It’s easily arranged, just swap the lombia for caine, job done! Eric Clapton’s already written them a new national anthem.

Of course, the equator is not just a line, it’s a circle. Ecuador can’t even lay claim to the whole line that it named itself after, it shares it with 12 other countries. Our guide, Fabricio, did inform us that Ecuador is the only country that takes the imaginary line into high altitude, all the other 12 countries are low lying. Ecuador is the place that tries hardest to distort the circle. Maybe that’s why it got so excited and adopted the imperfect circle as its name.

Quito is the capital of Ecuador although not the largest city. It is known as being the second highest capital city in the world after La Paz in neighbouring Bolivia. The historic quarter was the first to be listed as a UNESCO world heritage site for culture. Ecuador clearly caught onto this UNESCO listing business early as the first ever listing, and the first for nature, was The Galapagos. We really like Quito, it certainly feels more like an authentic South American city than Santiago. The historic quarter is beautiful and in the daytime bustling with people going about their business. Real normal people, not tourists like you find filling the streets in places like Florence and Venice. Curiously, at night it is totally deserted which we were told is a post-pandemic phenomenon. The economic impact of Covid appears to be longer lasting here than other places we have visited.

Quito is a sprawling city that extends some 80km along a valley between a series of mountains, many of which are live volcanos. In fact, there is a chain of 17 active volcanos in the area which is also tectonically unstable, meaning that any or all of them could be brought to life in the event of an earthquake.

Our first organised excursion was to visit Cotopaxi National Park. Cotopaxi at 5,943m is the highest active volcano in the world. Fabricio emphasised that Cotopaxi is very active and last erupted in 2016. I realised as he talked that I had not been as attentive to the details of this activity as I might have been! Any fears were only slightly allayed when he said that the lake we were going hiking around was the place of refuge in the event of an emergency, from where helicopter rescues would occur. With visibility at about 50m due to low cloud this seemed implausible. So, we stared the volcano down (or we would have done had we been able to see it through the clouds) took our chances and, after a pleasant walk around the lake, escaped with our lives.

Before heading to the airport, we visited the line itself. Latitude 0 – the Equator/Ecuador. It turned out to be a pretty engaging line. There is a museum which was a bit touristy but interesting, nevertheless. They laid to rest that much discussed matter of whether the water goes down the plug hole the opposite direction in the Southern hemisphere compared to the Northern hemisphere. It does. But what happens on the equator? It goes straight down. What was most remarkable was that you only need to move a few metres either side of the line to see the water circulating one way or the other, although some have suggested skullduggery is at play. I’m not sure all this makes the line so interesting as to be worthy of naming a nation but it was fascinating to see.

Tomorrow, we arrive at the very reason for this whole trip. Destination for Tracy’s birthday, home of the Blue-footed Booby and first ever UNESCO world heritage site. The hallowed islands that are The Galapagos.