Against All Odds: Giving Bogotá a Chance

Bogotá, if I’m being honest I never gave you a fair shot. Bogotá is kinda like the nice guy you go on a few dates with but find no connection with so you fall out of touch. He’s not adventurous or dangerous like Medellín and he’s not steamy and sexy like Cartagena. Bogotá is reliable. The kiss of death.

Similar to relationships that never get off the ground, my time in Bogotá came down to circumstances and timing. It wasn’t the right time for us to meet. It also didn’t make the best first impression. I rolled into Bogotá from Chicago during that fuzzy time of year between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in the wee small hours of the morning.

I woke up the next day not 100% certain what day of the week it was, but positive I had been secretly overserved while I was sleeping. I woke up with a headache of hangover proportions - yet I had no alcohol in my system. I had been served with soroche or altitude sickness. In my case it came in the form of a blinding headache that lasted several days.

I did not come prepared to deal with such great heights: for the next month I would be living in the fourth highest capital city in the world at 8,660 feet (2,640 meters). To put that in perspective, Americans refer to Denver, Colorado as the “mile high city” since it’s official elevation is a mile above sea level. Google tells me that Denver is at a mere 5,280 feet (1,690 meters). Nestled high up in the Andes, Bogotá even tops the elevation of Machu Picchu.  

I now know soroche is a very real thing after having dodged the bullet both in Cusco and at Machu Picchu. Luckily the headache went away after a few days but I never did quite shake the feeling of being constantly tired. Altitude can impact your sleep one of two ways, you can’t sleep or you can’t sleep enough. No surprise I fell into the latter category.

Bogotá is the coldest city we visited and it wasn’t even cold. It didn’t help that we came to Bogotá after visiting Medellín. We went from tropical warmth to consistently cool temps. Temps vary between the mid 40s and high 60s. Reasonable temps by Chicago standards, but ten months on the road basking in eternal spring/summer had turned this Midwestern girl into a big old baby.

After going home for Christmas, I left most of my sweaters in Chicago. They weren’t getting much use and with only two months left I didn’t see a need. Turns out there was a need for them in Bogotá. I stubbornly held out from buying any new clothes knowing that my last month in Mexico City would be warm.

Nights in Bogotá were the opposite of warm. At night temps would drop below 40 and most buildings (mine included) do not have heat. It made for an icebox of a bed and necessitated going to sleep in multiple layers of clothing. Not to mention, towards the end of the month we had increasingly inconsistent hot water in our apartment. So I would wake up cold and then step into a cold shower, not ideal, but it definitely woke my ass up. I have Daryl and Sam to thank for letting me use their hot shower and my roommate KG for lending me her sweaters.

But there was more to my time in Bogotá than a wool wardrobe. I can’t talk about it without mentioning the scope of the city. Although it wasn’t the biggest on the itinerary, it was a city where you felt its size. Even this self proclaimed city girl was overwhelmed by its big city status at times.

But perhaps the biggest factor impacting my connection to the Colombian capital comes down to exploration. The simple fact is this: it was the city where I did the least amount of exploring. This was in part due to the fact that I worked a lot that month. My weeknights were pretty lowkey by RY standards. They involved lots of coming home and getting back online or working late and coming home to Netflix and UberEats -  the single girl special.

Yet the workclock (being close to CST hours) is not specific to Bogotá, but to South America as a whole, which naturally cut into your available free time during the week to see things. In most cities I kept to my neighborhood, but in Bogotá I kept to a ridiculously small radius during the week. I had my gym, my grocery, and local coffee shop within a three block radius. My furthest point being the workspace, a 20 minute walk north up Carrera 15.

The truth is Bogotá was up against unbeatable odds. The stakes were higher than a close to home radius or a lack of exploration. I don’t know that any city would have stood a chance against month 11 and the feelings it brings.

Time catches up with you. Travel catches up with you. And I was tired. Scratch that I was exhausted. It wasn’t just the soroche, although it didn’t help. The months of travel were adding up. The late nights at work were piling up. But more than anything, the lifestyle had worn me down. By month 11 my body was in protest.

True story: I was tired. The RY lifestyle is much more active than my usual. During a typical work week back home, if I have two evenings worth of plans, that’s a busy week for me. On RY there is a Google calendar filled with social events every night of the week. No joke. Some nights even boast more than one option. You have to exercise your no muscle pretty hard to not schedule yourself eight days a week. Then there’s the weekend. Every weekend feels sacred and must be taken full advantage of as your guaranteed free time. 11 months of pushing past my social limits had me wiped out.

True story number two: I was sad. I have a tendency to get ahead of myself. I also feel deeply. Two things I am well aware of by now. I couldn’t help but feel the impending end looming. Or as my girl Sara Bareilles sings in “Breathe Again” - “But what kind of heart doesn’t look back?” Month 11 was a naturally bittersweet time for me. As tired as I was and as much as I was ready for a break from motion, I didn’t want my journey to end.

I came to Bogotá roughly 300 days in to my journey. I was in a serious relationship with this experience: the travel, the people, the places, the way it all made me feel. Our timing was off. It wasn’t you Bogotá, it’s me.

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