The Midnight Garden

Bronze shoulders flecked with light. The hotel ablaze with golden, square-paned windows. At midnight, the Musee Rodin was a land of waterless fountains, shadows feigning humans and darkness as crisp as clipped hedges. The sculptures looked as if they would be tempted to move if only the clock struck right.

Our feet ached from the seemingly endless night of museums, but when we walked into Rodin’s midnight garden, I felt suddenly awakened as if under a spell. This hotel, where Rodin worked in towards the end of his life, now had creaking bones and peeling paint but the sculptures inside writhed with life. There was the bronze of a man holding his hair back, so lifelike that envious artists took Rodin to court, accusing him of using a cast. There were the multiple renditions of Balzac and his great belly, its importance only rivaled by his ego. The many contorted female bodies, one flashing her innermost part. The beautiful cascade of marble hair from the sleeping woman was one I could relate to.

The true masterpieces were outside, framed by the impeccable garden and covered in artificial light. The Gates of Hell seemed far more sinister at this hour. From afar the twisting, tortured bodies looked almost like dead leaves, ruled over by the Three Shades and their joined fists. Their sinewy muscles looked tenser, more desperately strained as if they would burst into agonized movement any moment. On the other side of the garden, the Thinker was pondering more wisely as ever. The green metallic skin seemed to course with all his thoughts. We walked down the path behind the hotel where the dark trees were barely distinguishable from the dirt path. I imagined how brightly green the grass would be and how the fountains would laugh under the sun. Through a lit patch of leaves, we could see a golden dome of a monumental building, rebelling against all the surrounding black.

It had rained that day and unseen mud clung to my boots. We didn’t know it then but it would rain everyday in Paris. We laid down a museum map on a wet bench and I found his shoulder to rest on, warmer than weathered bronze.

Night of the Museums Geneva

It was a cool and fresh sort of night, and an inaugural one for Geneva's Night of the Museums. My friend and I went to buy our tickets at the Musee de la Reformation Internationale, devoted to Calvin and other Protestant reformers. It has a gilded courtyard complete with a pretty fountain. The Night of the Museum's ticket consisted of a white rubbery ring with “Nuit de Musees Geneve” engraved on it. What a lovely idea but the rubber turned out to be quite uncomfortable. Inside the museum an adorable, white-haired man was giving a printing press demonstration. His friend, a professional ink roller, assisted him by showing us a metal block of an assembled page. I had always thought that printing blocks were built letter by letter but I realize now that using assembled words would be much more efficient, assuming that the words one needs are all there! The presenter was so sweetly eager with his talk, spouting off the number of printing presses there were in Geneva throughout history. I admit that we were a little impatient and were just waiting for him to launch the presses. Finally, his assistant rolled the ink and folded the wooden slabs, cranked the handle and voila an engraved scene from olden Geneva was imprinted on the white paper.

We went on to the Cathedral Saint-Pierre’s archaeological site, a church basement like none other: a massive sprawling thing representing centuries of stone foundations. At least three cathedrals were built on top of each other before the currently standing one, evident in the markedly different layers of stone. Some layers were made of large blocks, others of little river rocks. When it was unearthed in the 1970’s, they had found tombstones as well but the bones were removed much to my disappointment. (My fascination with catacombs surely comes from Edgar Allen Poe's The Cask of Amontillado)

In the Parc des Bastions, the poppies and tulips were in full bloom, flaunting their bright orange, pink and yellow petals. Just as we arrived at the steps of the main library, a majestic building in the middle of the park, two women who worked there locked up the doors and told us it was closed. Even on a night of museums, the library was closing at 7pm. Looking at the hours posted on the door, we laughed. The library closes at 6pm every day, during lunch hours and on Sundays! Clearly no employed resident can be making use of the library. How I miss the New York and Palatine ones. Brimming full of books, CD’s, movies, and open at all hours of the day! The Parc des Bastions was truly beautiful though, and so was La Treille. The view looked like another city with the trees in thick foliage and dotted with spring blooms.

The Musee D’Histoire des Sciences turned out to be my favorite museum yet. But to get there we had to walk through a pitch-black path along the lake and park, where sketchy-looking men were hanging out with boomboxes and something to smoke. It was an alarming walk but we were relieved to hear the salsa music once we got closer to the museum. A full salsa party was in swing at the steps of the museum, with drinks, shaking hips and seducing shoulders. The museum itself seemed another world compared to the hot-blooded dancing just outside. There were fascinating trinkets from the early stages of Western science: old telescopes, a humidity measuring device that used hair as its main component, trompe l’oeil toys that demonstrated perspective, the frilly clothes and basic nail shoes that a famous Swiss scientist wore while scaling to the top of Mont-Blanc.

The Jardin Botanique was further up the park. The lights promised were faint dots along the path. A Rimbaud exhibit in the greenhouse was closed and from we could tell, mostly consisted of words like “soif” painted in red paint on the glass. The labyrinth was not made of actual plants as I had imagined. Instead, there were white linen walls hung up on wooden sticks. The “walls” were quite easy to see though and even more easily walked through with a parting of the hand. We soon ran into two drunk guys holding beers in the maze so we walked through many more walls for a quick exit. Sitting on the midnight bus home, I thought of the night fondly and of a small city that makes big cultural efforts.

First Snow in Geneva

December 2012

The flakes were thick and feathery, drifting beautiful disorder to the green, manicured garden beneath me. The carefully cut shapes of hedges blurred to the descent of snow. The sharp lines of stone buildings became a little less certain of their direction. The mountains behind the city surrendered their stern rocks to a hazy white.

Now the sun has ripped open the clouds to reveal a soft blue sky. From behind the iron curves of my balcony, I catch a glimpse of neighboring roofs sprinkled with snow as scratches of blue-gray tiles peek through. Even the biggest of snowflakes have melted now. The green garden is back to green. The darkened stone of the balcony back to stone. A crack in the distant clouds glows with the beginning hues of a sunset. An occasional raven slices through the stillness with its sharp black wings.

I could get used to this much beauty.

Pacaya Samiria The Real Amazon

The canoe looked like nothing more than half a tree trunk carved out. The slightest movement could capsize it. Yet three tourists and three days worth of camping supplies could fit, bracketed by two local guides who rowed through the Samiria river. All you could hear was the paddle parting brown water and the screeches of parakeets and parrots. The paucats, curious yellow-bellied birds, were the noisiest. The females industriously build nests from long strands of straw and guard their eggs inside these hive-like sacs. The male paucats cheerlead on the side by gossiping and singing. What else did we see? A sloth slowly chewing, reaching, picking a leaf, bringing it back to its mouth. A lot of blue martin kingfishers with their long fisherman beaks. Capuchin monkeys, a white-faced tamarind. An elegant black-spotted white heron who could have been at the center of a Japanese painting.

Our guides Marcial and Maria whipped up full meals, spaghetti and fried eggs, over nothing but a woodfire. Marcial especially was a hardcore Amazonian man. Soft-spoken and shy, he turned out to be deadly to river fish. After sunset, he took us out in the canoe: river and trees might as well have been one, so solid was the black sheet of night. The only light came from his headlamp, sweeping the waters for dormant fish. With one hand on the paddle, his other hand stabbed into the water with a three-spronged spear. A few seconds of bubbling and splashing later, his spear brought up a flapping fish. He must have caught at least eight them and hardly ever missed.

Suddenly, something heavy and wet jumped straight into my lap and started flapping up and down between my thighs. The city girl in me screamed, the wannabe adventurer in me tried not to flip the canoe mid-freakout. Apparently, the fish here often jump out of the water to escape predators. Too bad they're completely blind and land on people in boats. Only when my brave friend sitting at the front of the canoe punched the fish in the head with his fist did the flapping stop and my screams. The next morning, I had the same fish for breakfast.

Where we slept was an open-air wooden house of sorts, balanced over stilts. At first we were excited but having a room to ourselves with platforms and thin mattresses. But when darkness arrived, so did the cockroaches. The lack of electricity meant it took us awhile before noticing. A flashlight and candle were our only source of light.  It started with the one on the table, almost scampering into my journal. Then there were the ones on the walls, the floor, the doorframe, on our backpacks, inside our jackets. Giant Amazonian roaches the size of my palm that stood up on their legs. When my friend was about to hang up a bag of food on a nail, she suddenly realized that the nail was actually a cockroach. By the time we came back from fishing, that plastic bag was dripping in roaches. Marcial indulged us pansy foreigners by killing a dozen of them. Right after, another dozen arrived. Along with twin giant gray spiders half the size of my face. That first night, I did not sleep a single second. By the following night, I was so exhausted I told the roaches to all go to hell and slept like a rock.

We went piranha-fishing the next day with pieces of fish as bait but they were too smart for us. Marcial told us about a British tourist who once got half his forefinger bitten off by a piranha and I quickly withdrew my fingers that were streaming in the water. We left the water for a hike where the path was barely discernible through all the vines and shrubs. The tangles onshore are even more dramatic inside the forest. We came across a 500-year old tree, the oldest tree in the park. Its roots could have encompassed rooms. Several roots seemed to rise out of the ground as if standing on tiptoe. I wonder if it was the earth that sunk or the roots that yearned for light. The path started getting very muddy. My whole foot would get sucked into these puddles. Marcial used his machete to clear the path and to fashion us staffs as we climbed and balanced on slippery logs.The mosquitos were a super breed, piercing through repellent and cloth to get a taste of me.

The jungle or "selva" is a web with every leaf, wing and fish scale connected. Vines are the threads that build it. Even trees and roots mimick their shapes, curving and twisting amongst each other in a chaotic interdependence, so unlike the predictably straight trunks of pine forests, maples of the North. Each vine thread leads to a clumb of roots, like messy tassels, that dangle above the water or spread and disentangle within it. On our way out of the park, the last inhabitant we saw was a furry river otter bobbing up and down, calling out to a hidden friend on the shore. I wanted to think that it was talking to me. I wanted to think that within the last few days, I too had become a thread in the intricately woven and chaotically beautiful selva.

"El Romantico" Boat Ride to Lagunas

"El Romantico" could not have been a more ill-fitting name for the snail-paced wooden thing conquering the Huallaga river by inches. We were supposed to be on the express boat that morning but our seats got give away, so our only alternative to go from Yurimaguas to Lagunas was this 11-hour boat ride. I'm sure I could have swum faster. Instead of seats, the boat offers wooden beams and each passenger brings in their own colorful hammocks and sets up their own spot. One man had a sack full of fish, another barged in with chickens swinging off his back, their feet bound and their faces placid, accepting of their fates.
Vendors roamed onboard before departure, hocking everything from bread to scissors to condoms. “Don’t get pregnant on the boat!” the man yelled as everyone tittered. One old lady who was reclining in a hammock snapped something sassy in response.The hammocks were stacked so closely together there’s an inevitable amount of bumping into people as you try to carve a path through the sea of cloth and feet. In the bathroom, the wood was so moldy mushrooms had sprouted. Above a dead spider, furry and thick-legged, dangled like a Christmas ornament. Ants crisscrossed the planks. Around 1:30pm, they brought styrofoam boxes with lunch: dry rice, beans, tasteless plantain and a piece of chicken. 

The thought of doing nothing for an entire day terrified me but it turned out to be a rather pleasant, lazy adventure. The boat made several stops, part of the reason why it took so long, and at each stop, people unloaded and loaded cargo: moto-cars, sacks of beans, crates of chicken, blocks of ice for preserving fish... Dangling my feet over the front of the boat, I felt like there was so much more sky here. The water was of a lazy brown that captured every cloud, lining and beam of light, like a relentless mirror that has darkened with age but retained all the clarity of youth.
From the top of the boat, we chatted with the boat owners and the only other foreigner, a French architect who had been traveling around the world for the last 15 months. We watched as the sun gave in to darkness, though not before unleashing a slew of colors and light behind the shadows of the boat.

The Chocolate Factory

The wafts of chocolate coming out of the factory made me melt on the spot. Orquidea, the largest chocolate company in the San Martin region, was giving us a personal tour! I might as well have died and gone to heaven. The sacks of fermented cocoa beans, the series of machines to grind the beans, smooth them, remove the acidity, mix in sugar and milk: all leading up to bins of chocolate paste lining the factory floor. I wanted to dive in and swim in it. Instead of Willy Wonka's orange midgets, they have very professional and much more hygienic employees all in white who mix and fill the chocolate molds on a warm metal surface. In one corner, one woman was experimenting with different types of liqueur fillings.

            Our guide brought out a tray of samples, milk and dark chocolate. I kept brainstorming questions to ask him so that I could discreetly reach for the tray again and again, all the while nodding earnestly. Their super creamy dark chocolate has 65% cocoa. They mix crispy quinoa with milk chocolate to give it that crunch. The mocha one was better than any cup coffee. I wanted to stash myself in a corner just so I could run around at night after closing and make angels in the chocolate syrup or push over a machine and canoe down the chocolate river singing "oompa loompa doopa dee doo, I've got another puzzle for you..."

Chazuta Chazuta!

The motorboat provided no cover. It was a two-hour boat ride on the Huallaga to visit the cocoa farms in Nuevo Paraiso. I wondered if it's called that because it was a real mess before. Cold, cutting wind and occasional showers were the travel standard here. Tiny, sharp-winged birds with silver-white bellies flicked the river surface, diving for fish. 
On the way to the farm, we trekked along a muddy path where I was enchanted by a flower called the “Licorna,” resembling a braid of red and yellow bird beaks. After our meeting with the farmers, we were stuck in Chazuta for awhile. The odd thing about this tiny, dirt-covered town is that its one and only road is closed for construction from 6am to 6pm every single day. To kill time, we asked the municipal building to unlock the small houses in the plaza for us. These held archeological digs of ancient funerary urns. The clay jars looked too small for a human body, it’s possible that some of them were luggage to take into the underworld. We tried to visit the historical "museum" in the municipal building but they couldn't find the keys even as a young man tried a ring of about fifty of them. Circling around town, I discovered bite-sized children holding hands on the way home from school, playing inside a cardboard box better than any car, ones with vacant stares who hung onto doorframes. A pharmacy offered its menu in big red letters painted on the front wall: Cures! Injections! Instant pregrancy tests!

I was offered some fresh guaba, and unlike guava is about half my size. It's a curious fruit whose outside looks like a plump vine while the inside is similar to cocoa, white flesh over large stones. I snacked on it happily from the back of our truck until I discovered further up the fruit's long stem a brothel of maggots. They reassured me that these were "natural" maggots that very often live inside the fruits and that the rest of the guaba was fine. I still prefered not to eat any more after seeing all those flesh-colored things squirming inside. The road seemed to have opened again and we headed back to Tarapoto in the dark of evening.