Crossing the line

Crossing the equator always cast a curious spell on sea-goers. No other imaginary line on the map provokes such ceremony, and so much talk of shellbacks and pollywogs, as does the passing at sea from one hemisphere to the other. It's a travel ritual older even than the Endeavour, on which Joseph Banks paid a brandy allowance to exempt himself, James Cook, his servants and dogs from being dunked thrice in seawater, as remains a custom for those yet to "cross the line".

All of which makes my landlubber's plod over an unbroken red line on concrete in Ecuador, the only country named for its geographical whereabouts, seem, well, rather pedestrian. But some steps are more memorable than others, and few make a travel photo of such pleasing symmetry. It's not every day you straddle a planet's halfway point.

A traveller's mind always does wander, and tourism, a word derived from the Latin tornus, "tool for making a circle", has always found places such as this: furthest points, geographic oddities, a cartographer's rule.

Inquisitiveness is reason enough to go, and why those who first left the village sought the horizon, looking for land's end (as a toponym, it's on a tip of Cornwall), the antipodes, the New World, the Far East, the poles, Shangri-La, Utopia, the highest points, the emptiest spaces. On seeing what's beyond, it's only logical to find out where it stops.

"Now, when I was a little chap, I had a passion for maps," wrote Joseph Conrad, of this yearning for the far off, in Heart of Darkness.

"I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration."

For most travellers, wanderlust takes hold when a map is unfolded. Its graphic representation tells us where we are in the world, but also where we might like to go.

Mostly, maps are a journey's starting point, but sometimes the reason itself for travel. Many years ago, I spent four days with three friends driving an unreliable Peugeot to a place on the map called Cameron Corner.

It's in the middle of nowhere. I had gone to see a brass plate on a survey monument, and to visit the only spot in Australia where one can bend a boomerang around three states. The novelty is in being everywhere at once, but also nowhere in particular.

For people like me, places such as this arouse curiosity. It was put on the map by royal decree, when Queen Victoria in June 1859 declared the district of Moreton Bay ruled off to become the colony of Queensland.

Limits were set. Like other right angles in the barren interior - Haddon Corner, Poeppel Corner and Surveyor-General's Corner - it would come to peg a far boundary in silent witness.

Not that it was particularly peaceful. "Everyone who comes here is on holiday," said the woman behind the counter at the nearby Cameron Corner Store - a Queensland business with a NSW postcode and South Australian telephone number - built in 1989 by a former surveyor to cash in on the passing tourist trade.

"You think you're going to be lonely, but you're always busy."

The store's diesel generator hummed. Convoys of four-wheel-drives pulled up in clouds of dust, with passengers disgorging and looking for distraction, found partly in the tea towels, fridge magnets, stickers, postcards, coffee mugs and cloth badges sold as keepsakes.

A fencer dropped in for a coffee.

"We sort of don't have days of the week here, but you know [when] it's Wednesday. That's mail day," he said.

It's that old travel chestnut: where would you go if you could go anywhere in the world? In shopping centres, at travel agencies, I lose myself in window displays, looking at all those destinations and intrigued by their wall maps with pins pricked into places where staff have been. Am I the only one not to have been to Phuket? How to explain the popularity of Los Angeles?

Open an atlas and I'm caught usually by the geography of the Pacific, thinking one day I might island hop all through it, and by the coastline of Norway (the designer of which, in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, won a gong for his baroque creation). I like the idea of Africa, having visited three of its corners, and the topography of the world's two greatest mountain chains - the Himalayas, the Andes - always excites. But ever since I've known about a place called Tierra del Fuego, nothing quite has fired the imagination as much as the thought of plumbing Patagonia.

It looks on the map how an end of the world should.

Previously, I've gone out of my way to reach the southernmost point of mainland Australia, for the purpose mainly of urinating off the country's end. The spot, prosaically called South Point, dips into Bass Strait from Wilsons Promontory and if one is keen on such a pursuit, then be wary of sharp barnacles and a blunt southerly.

On other travels, I've gone out of my way to visit man-made lines that criss-cross the planet, if only for something to jump over. In London, at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, I've joined crowds who come to see the arbitrary division of the world based on the prime meridian.

It's a wonderful place, a monument to measurements, where sightseers have their portraits taken with family members astride longitude 0'00"00"; where a young girl skips from side to side (east, west, east, west), where all who visit find their place in the world.

Another time, I've holidayed at a polar opposite, on the far-flung Fijian island of Taveuni, mostly because in colonial days it was once split by an international date line, running rigidly along the 180 meridian. Locals could never be too sure what day it was.

In another climatic zone, I've parked a hire car alongside tour buses and gift shops at Santa Claus Village on the Arctic Circle, which maps the southern extremity of the polar day and night.

When I look at a map of the United States, there is a place I wonder about more than any other. It's called Four Corners and is where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico meet. Two lines cross and I want to go there, because there's nothing like it, because you can be in four places at once, because in an ethereal scene in Breaking Bad it's used as a metaphor for disorientation, and because there's sure to be a hot-dog stand nearby and tourist T-shirts to be had.

The attraction is in finding the limit, and the spectacle is in the demarcation between here and there. As it is with Checkpoint Charlie, a flashpoint of the Cold War that brings about 4 million visitors yearly, creating its own tourist industry - and the red stripe painted through Berlin to mark the site of its demolished wall. And for travellers such as me, there is a pleasing tension that comes still with border crossings - the mild anxiety of entering a no-man's land, a lingering doubt, stamped passport, the brush with officialdom, relief when allowed to pass from here to there.

"It is not down in any map," wrote Herman Melville in Moby Dick. "True places never are." But after arriving in Quito, woozy with jetlag and lightheaded after setting down in the world's second-highest capital (after Bolivia's de-facto capital La Paz), our guidebook confirms la Mitad del Mundo (the Middle of the World) is, in fact, a place, about 24 kilometres north of the city and reachable by two local buses - a short trip to the longest latitude.

I travel with a friend whom I've known since school days, when in geography classes the two of us lost ourselves in maps, usually plotting truancy. What we find beyond the outskirts of Quito is a walled garden to sightseeing, built to accommodate and commercialise a shared curiosity for a geometric limit and a cartographer's rule.

It's not every day you stand on a parallel of such pure simplicity. For this moment, we are consumed by the idea of the equator, this great circle equidistant from the Earth's poles, a fantastic line crossing 11 countries, dividing two hemispheres, creating a place that for many is imagined as an allegory of adventure, lassitude, steamy romance, exoticism and danger.

As with all geographical extremes, it's a place that's elsewhere; it's beyond the everyday. It's also a place that demands to be crossed. The attraction at la Mitad del Mundo is the solid line of red paint tourists such as us straddle, step across and photograph, as if it has magical powers. It feels like Ground Zero - both a beginning and an end - that's easily understood and readily agreeable.

We share our time with other sightseers, mostly from the First World in the north - the US, France, Germany, Spain, Denmark and Canada - but there are also two others from the south, from Christchurch, New Zealand, on a two-year round-the-world odyssey that started in Argentina.

"We're making our way north," says one. "We've got halfway. We've got the other half to go."

Dugald Jellie is a Melbourne-based writer for now grounded with two young boys. He escapes otherwise in his head, getting lost for days in maps.