The Whole Nine Yards

Ecuador takes its name from the equator. Yes, no duh. The Latin root of the imaginary line partitioning the Northern and Southern hemispheres is "equal." Yes, no duh. But Ecuador is amazing in that it contains three distinct climates and geographical regions (which the US does, but it has much more room to do so; Ecuador is the second smallest country in South America). Have you ever stood on both hemispheres at once? I did:

Hate to brag, but I think it was awesome. However, the actual line is on top of a small mountain to the Northeast, the French were off by a few kilometers. When the GPS system was configured and the system analysts came to the very point at which I took this picture, they found out they were off. A large search for the mathematical equator was conducted and when discovered, ruins below a farm field at the top of the mountain revealed ancient ruins. The French geographers believed the distance to the North pole from the equator was 1,000,000 kilometers. Well guess what, with modern science we found out it was about 1,000,230 kilometers (by the way, this is how the metric system was invented, dividing the distance from the equator to the pole by 10,000,000 to create meters).

Here's the best part, though, the ruins showed us that the indigenous people had it figured out a thousand years before we did. It is surmised that because of the mountains in the area, the movement of the sun along solstice and equinoxes [sic] allowed the indigenous people to discover a single area at which the Sun met, and thus, found the equator.

Back to my point, the three distinct regions from East to West (coast) are the Amazon (jungle), Andes (Mountains), and coastal. Thus far, I have been to the first two. The entries will follow accordingly. Unfortunately, I must call it a night. To give you a taste of what's to come, however, here's a picture of what I was looking at throughout the bus ride: