Eleven Kinds of Delight: , 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

Janelle married Edwin, moved to , had a baby, F, and invited me for a visit—not necessarily in that order. I arrived shortly before midnight on December 31, 2017, and Janelle, Edwin, and F met me at the airport. They gave me eleven grapes to eat; that’s the traditional number for New Year’s Eve. I ate more. They showed me a record-breakingly huge pumpkin (it’s traditional to cook an enormous pumpkin for New Year’s Day). And they gave me a New-Year’s wall-hanging. The idea is that what one has when the new year arrives is what one will have all year long—since I was traveling for the New Year, I will travel throughout this year—doing well so far. The wall-hanging includes a variety of foods and a little wad of money, for prosperity throughout the new year—doing well on that, too, if prosperity is having enough to eat.

The delight of having enough = 1

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

Janelle is one of my favorite people. I haven’t been able to figure out as much as I would like, but she’s fun to watch, and I try to figure her out in order to enhance my own life experience: she walks around in a swarm of people who want to be her lovers; I walk around in a swarm of mosquitoes. She’s incredible. She likes cities, including huge cities like Bogotá. That makes sense in her case; people love her. Why I like forests, where the mosquitoes love me, is more of a question.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

We walked around the neighborhood, and out to the edge of Bogotá. F loves to go out for walks. She was more conflicted about busses while I was there, but they were also a less common and less fun experience. Colombia is the best place in the world to be a baby because, as Janelle says, every baby is the Baby Jesus. Babies taken for walks are adored by everyone who sees them; everyone stops to worship. This is the Baby F being adored just by the three of us, on the way to the botanical garden.

The delight of good friends = 2

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

The paving stones for the walkway into the main part of the botanical garden in Bogotá are concrete, with leaf impressions. There are dozens of them. The Spanish names of the are also on the stones, in this case, bear paw (hand of the bear) (in Latin, Dendropanax colombianus). It is a native Colombian and grows in higher-lower altitudes (3000-3500 m). It is important for timber and for bird habitat.

The delight of languages = 3

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

The Botanical Garden of Bogotá is one of the best botanical gardens I’ve visited. It has five main areas that display plants from five main ecological zones of Colombia, encompassing the hottest deserts, the soggiest rain forests (this picture), and the highest mountains. Some of the garden is dedicated to conserving and breeding rare and endangered Andean plants. The largest collection is of plants from the páramo, high-altitude areas that are above line but below permanent snow line.

The delight of new information = 4

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

The garden is landscaped in part with coprolite, fossilized dinosaur feces (that’s becoming a theme: coprolite in Arizona in late 2017, coprolite in Colombia in early 2018, coprolite gift for a friend who recently acquired a doctorate from a program run by abusive people and people who accommodate those abusive people—fossilized crap seems an appropriate and entertaining recognition for her achievement, given what she was given for a decade), some of which includes fossilized mollusks. Was the dinosaur eating the mollusks, or just pooping in the water, like my pet birds seem to enjoy doing, or were these land gastropods?

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

The great thrush (Turdus fuscater) is fairly common in Colombia and throughout northern South America, at altitudes above 2000 meters (6561.68 feet). Bogotá itself is a high-altitude city, the fourth highest in the world at 8612 feet (or 8661, or 2640+ m). Mating seasons vary depending on where the birds live, and January is the start of the mating season in Colombia, which is probably why the thrushes in the garden were active throughout the day and not primarily in the dawn and dusk hours.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

Edwin and I have a great deal in common, including a love of hiking and being outdoors for extended periods of time. We decided to rent a car and go to the Parque Nacional Natural Chingaza, the Chingaza National Park. But it’s a little weird to get into the national park, and we stopped by the office, which is located in Bogotá (the first time I’ve visited a national park office outside of the national park), for information and reservations. We could not go on the day we rented the car, so we decided to get used to the car and driving in Colombia and in Bogotá by going to a salt mine in Zipaquirá. Salt—my favorite. Edwin won all kinds of bonus points for suggesting this outing and making it happen. Zipaquirá is a less urban town with more hills and within walking distance. It also has the Catedral de Sal de Zipaquirá (the Cathedral of Salt). I liked Zipaquirá.

The delight of Zipaquirá = 5

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

The Cathedral of Salt is now a Roman Catholic Church built into an old salt mine. The mine is much older than the church, and was opened in 1954 and dedicated to Our Lady of Rosary, patron saint of miners. At least some of the mine was dug out by the (or Chibcha) people, a pre-Columbian civilization that used as an art supply rather than as a means of exchange and who are the source for the legend of . It is thought that there might have been a group working in the mines even before the Muisca arrived. I failed to join either the English or the Spanish tours, but both could have been interesting. The Spanish tours provide religious information; the English tours provide geological information. I ignored most of both: salt is delicious, and smells delicious and crunches deliciously underfoot.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

In transforming the mines into a cathedral, any remnants of the pre-Christian activities were destroyed (the idea to make the place a cathedral seems to have come from the Muisca, who had carved their own symbols into the walls of the mine), and a number of large chambers were carved out, and many (Christian) religious symbols were carved into the walls, including places to consider the twelve stations of the cross. This is a carving (note the spider) of the tree of life. I licked the walls. I sampled the purified salt. I bought a refrigerator magnet of a Muisca symbol made of salt, which I’m trying not to lick. The cathedral remains a place of pilgrimage for Catholics (for religious reasons) and for me (for salt).

The delight of salt = 6

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

Outside the Cathedral of Salt was a hillside covered in mostly native plants—having recently been to Kaua’i, seeing the plants where they started out seemed like an interesting opportunity.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

The next day, we left very early for the Chingaza National Park because there are limited times during which there is a guy being paid to open the gate, and if he’s not getting paid, he sure as heck is not opening the gate. The road into the park is not particularly well maintained (it’s a close competitor to the Baja 1000 portion of the route to Bahía de Los Angeles, and for a longer distance), which makes me wonder why a gate and a guy are needed at all. The people who make it to Chingaza are a dedicated few.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

Renting a car and driving in a place like Bogotá were not on my list of things to do, but it was the only way to do what was on my list, Chingaza. Janelle did the icky city driving, because I don’t like driving in or around large urban areas (I have some negative life goals, one of which is never to cook a traditional Thanksgiving dinner and another of which is never to live in or around Los Angeles and another of which is never to drive anything in Jakarta—I’ve been successful so far on all of these, but driving in Bogotá might be more similar to driving in Jakarta than I’d like to think), and I did the mountain driving, because Janelle is having some trouble with acrophobia. Some of the road into and in the park was so steep that it couldn’t be taken in even second gear, so I did a lot of driving in first. I see upon review that the road that we took into the national park still isn’t showing up on Google Maps; the road that is shown is passable by four-wheel-drive vehicles only, and given what we did with the sub-compact that we had, I’m going to say that the four-wheel-drive restriction is probably accurate. We were all relieved to reach the park and pass the guard house before the guard-of-the-day went off-duty. We went for a walk into the páramo.

The spiky plants are Puya goudotiana; ‘puya’ is from a Mapuche word for ‘point.’ The Mapuche are not from anywhere around here; they still live in southern Chile and Argentina. Their word became the name for the , so they have left a piece of information in botany and all over South America.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

Most of the park (99%) is part of the Orinoco River basin; the other 1% is in the Magdalena River basin. The Chuza Reservoir behind the Chingaza Dam on the Guatiquia River supplies water to Bogotá. The water in the Guatiquia River is there because the Sumapaz páramo, which the national park preserves a lot of, has a unique set of plants that grab water from the mists that float in the upper altitudes (see next page).

This picture is out of order—we visited the reservoir on the day we were leaving the park, but it fits here because of the water cycle and expected patterns for organization of information in English narrative discourse.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

Chingaza has eight-ish species of peat moss; these mosses can absorb up to forty times their weight in water. The silver-leafed plants with yellow flowers are frailejones, a genus of plants (Espeletia) that absorb moisture into their leaves via spiral-patterns of hairs that funnel condensed moisture toward the leaves. They release the water into the ground via their roots, mostly the opposite direction from how the plants I’m more familiar with work. They create wetlands, which the mosses help to maintain instead of letting the water run off as quickly as it can arrive, which drain into the creeks, which drain into the rivers, one of which is dammed to create the reservoir that supplies 80% of the water to Bogotá’s 8.2 million people.

The delight of water = 7

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

Macleania rupestris—for flora, the páramos are among the most diverse places on the planet, and if one limits the páramos only to South America (Colombia has most of them, either way), they are still places with an impossible variety of plant life; as I was reviewing for this page, I ran across a recently published article on the finding of yet another kind of plant in the páramo.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

The Siecha lakes are a group of three glacial lakes, and this is Lake Siecha. For the Muisca, the lakes were sacred; ‘siecha’ is Muisca for ‘house of the lord’. They would sacrifice a certain amount of gold to the gods of the lakes. I’ve been thinking extensively about the geographies of spiritual beings: where they live, how they are able to travel, what their navigational limitations are, etc. Muisca gods live in the high-altitude glacial lakes. ‘Chingaza’ is also a Muisca word, sort of: chim-wa-za, god’s night mountains.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

The lake district of Chingaza National Park

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

Weather started rolling in while we were returning from the lakes.

The delight of hiking = 8

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

We continued our drive to where we were staying, at a hostel in the park. Because we were there in the off season, we had an entire eight-bed room to ourselves. We still had to share a bathroom, but there weren’t that many people around. We stopped here for a look off the edge, although there was no view because of the fog. It’s not every day or everywhere that one can see a cow, a shrine, and the abyss all at once. This picture could be the start of many stories.

The delight of stories = 9

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

While we were in the park, we were told this was a black-tailed deer, which was confusing because he didn’t look like a black-tailed deer of Arizona but does look like a white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), which range as far south as Peru, plenty south enough to be in the park.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

On the last day in the park, I went for a guided walk along with a Colombian family while Janelle, Edwin, and F took their time over breakfast, brunch, and lunch. The walk was below tree line, in the rainforest.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

Some kind of bromeliad, in bloom. Many bromeliads, including this one, trap water in the lower points of the leaves (they function as phytotelmata), saving it for later if they need it and contributing to the water-cycle in the park. Bromeliads are part of one of the two major categories of flowering plants (angiosperms), the monocotyledons, as opposed to the eudicotyledons or dicotyledons. This is where even the botanists give up on the huge technical terms and go with monocots and dicots. The difference is in how many seed leaves are in the embryo, one or two—one for the monocots.

The delight of technical terms = 10

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

That swarm of mosquitoes I mentioned: here’s part of my swarm for the day, not mosquitoes in this case, which was helpful. I was bitten up by something, but not these insects, and I think the biters were smaller and indoors.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

A rainforest doing its thing: plants growing on plants growing on plants growing on plants, with all of the insects and spiders and larger animals who can eat the plants and the animals who can eat the animals, and the animals who can eat the animals.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

While I was waiting in the national park office in Bogotá (Edwin did an outstanding job of collecting information and negotiating past the usual bureaucratic inefficiency, god bless him—even if I had his language skills, I don’t think I would ever develop his patience), I spent time looking at the map of the park and the pictures of the wildlife, and I decided that I would try to see one of the Andean bears (spectacled bear, jukumari, ukumari, ukuku, Tremarctos ornatus). Something I learned on this trip: be specific with my decisions. I saw one, but far, far away, and I would have preferred to see one much closer. The bear is the white spot out in the tree in the upper right quadrant of the picture.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

A waxy orchid, and I’m not even going to try beyond suggesting the possibility of Fernandezia in order to keep this information available in case I ever learn enough to figure this sort of plant out. Colombia has many orchids, and the national flower is a kind of cattleya. In addition, orchids freely hybridize themselves, so categorizing them is an ongoing challenge for taxonomists. I don’t stand a chance.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

When I have the resources to be a professional artist, I’m going to be the Georgia O’Keefe of fungi, as well as for fungi that are blended into lichens. This is a Dictyonema glabratum, and probably a good place to start. The Dictyonemas are a small group of lichens that are symbiotic organisms between a basidiomycete fungus and a scytonematoid cyanobacterium, a cyanobacterium that does photosynthesis for the lichen and gives it a bluish tint. About 10% of lichens have cyanobacteria as part of the mix, and about 1% have a basidiomycete as part of the mix, so this combination is especially rare.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

The hike was proceeding slowly; the family I was with was comprised entirely of charming and wonderful people who were very concerned that I have a good time and be taken care of. But they were slow. Not one of them was a regular hiker or even a person who did much outdoors beyond moving between buildings. The trail was sloppy, with knee-deep mud in places, and they were trying to stay clean. Fat chance, but they kept trying, even after we’d all been covered in mud for some while. The rest of us had a schedule to make to return the car before I was dinged a $500 late fee, and I was becoming concerned about leaving on time. I asked the guide to point the way, and I zipped back to the hostel. This was the last plant pointed out on the tour before I left, but I don’t remember what it was called, and I haven’t been able to find what it is.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

I probably should have ditched the tour sooner. When there was only one of me, and we weren’t all chatting and checking on whether we were all okay after we’d fallen in the mud, I saw much more of the smaller wildlife, such as this Pedaliodes ochrotaenia.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

I even saw some birds, once I’d given up on the tour, including a masked trogon (Trogon personatus).

The delight of having ditched someone else’s program = 11

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

Janelle took over driving in the city for rush hour.

Eleven Kinds of Delight: Colombia, 2017-2018: Marla Perkins, Ph.D.

F, the adventure baby—she was always excited to go out and see whatever part of the world we could show her. Walking behind Edwin let Janelle and I watch the eleven kinds of delight, as Janelle put it, that F was showing with her smiles. I believe we had all eleven kinds ourselves, watching her.