Today is THE day !!!

We will start with our first kilometers of our 11.000 kilometer journey... Finally, everybody was looking forward to this moment, and happy that we could start. The last days were really nessesary to get used to the altitude and the climate. It will probably take a week or so till the body is used to cycling on this altitude, so the next days will be tough anyway.

I got up this morning at 6, again pain in the lower back, beds are not that great I guess, so again the hot shower, and it helps pretty well. after the shower getting dressed in out Andres Trail shirt. It is white light-blue shirt, just like the flag of Argentina. Size is ok now, after swapping a Medium for a Large.

Breakfast was good, some bread, scrambled egg, strawberry-jam, and some Nesquick chocolade powder on bread is ok. Filling up the water bottles, and and 9 o´clock we went North to the Mittad del Mundo, or the Middle of the World, or just the equator. It is about 27 kilometer to get there, and a big part is down-hill ... nice but we have to get back uphill again, ... mmmm... we will see how we are going to do that later ...

... The ride over there went very smooth, traffic was soso, but the cars we helpfull and didn´t cause many problems.

The Monument of the Mittad del Mudo is a kind of piramid, without a top, and a big globe on it. Look at the map, and switch to satalite, then you will see this monument from the top. Inside there is a museum about the Ecology of Ecuador. First we took a lot of pictures at the base of the monument. I checked if the GPS was really showing 0 degrees, and it did, so we were really at the equator! After taking hunderds of pictures of the bike and me at the 0 degrees sign, we went inside and up to the top of the monument. Our bikes were still at the bottom and flat on the floor on top of the line of the equator, frontwheel on the nothern hamisphere, and the backwheel on the southern hemisphere. Of cause we took a group picture, and after all this was done, we had a long tour in the monument and explanations about the ecology of Ecuador... Nice, but it took a bit long...

finally we were outside again, and got 3 speeches of the director of Tourism in Quito, a director of a cyclo-promotion organisation, who wants to get people out their car and on a bike. If you can smell the air here in Quito, you don´t want to be on a bike, but in your HEPA filter equiped car... anyway, after that we got a speech of the director of the monument, so the owner of the equator itself... Nice, Nice Nice, but now time for some bananas and water, and start our 27 kilometer uphill journey back to the hotel, this time in the southern direction, where we will go for the next 4 months.

Climb uphill was tough, it was getting better then before, but still I got problems with breathing, it was just like you got a strap around your chest that prevents you from breating... overall it went ok I guess. Back at the hotel we had bread with cheese and vegetables, and that tasted very good.

Now I am downtown, and getting the last thingts before we hit the road south tomorrow.

So, a very good first day, and start of the journey !!

Michiel