From the minute I read about Remote Year, I knew I needed to do it. In typical me fashion, I pretended to debate for a while, batted around pros and cons with my friends and family. I am secretly a very decisive person about huge life changes, but I like to disguise that by venting my fears at every given opportunity, almost like a superstition, an anti-jinx. As long as I name the fear, I might be able to avoid it coming to pass. And since I am blessed with a creative (and overly active) mind, I could imagine a lot of fears. A million ways this trip could go wrong.

But I never voiced the real one.

I told my coworkers I was worried about going freelance, possibly running out of money halfway through this trip. (I wasn’t.) I told my family I worried that I wouldn’t get along with anyone in my randomly-assigned travel group. (I was actually pretty sure that out of 80 people, I’d at least like a couple.) I told my friends that I worried I’d hate some of the cities or countries we visited. (But really, most were on my to-see list anyway.)

I made up all these fears to try and exorcise the one that was really eating at me.

I was afraid this trip would go right.

Fortunately (unfortunately?), it has.

We’re approaching the 6-month mark of this trip. That has made me look deep in the mirror and face what comes next. Because I already know in my bones that this will not be enough for me. One year is not enough.

People talk about getting the travel bug out of your system. People talk about “the trip of a lifetime” and “the last hurrah,” like a honeymoon or a babymoon, those trips people take before they settle into “real life” (as if any other iteration of life is not real, as if anything but the house and the spouse and the 2.5 kids is pure fantasy).

That’s not what this trip is for me. I knew that going into it, and it scared (it still scares) the shit out of me.

This is the start. This is tearing up my roots and growing the wings that have been itching to sprout since I was a kid. This is what I have always wanted to do, where I have always wanted to be. I cannot imagine ever being ready to give this up.

Sure, I can picture a future where I want to stay in one spot for longer than a month at a time. I can envision a few months here, even a year or two there. But I cannot see myself settling down in the traditional sense. I cannot imagine one house in one location ever being enough. I understand how it could be for some people, I understand why that’s what most people want.

But that just isn’t me.

Part of me has known that all along, but it took this trip being what it is to really force me to see it. I would never be happy with normal. I cannot settle for it anymore.

Which leaves me with a lot of questions to work out. What does an unsettled life mean? What the hell does a future without an anchor look like?

It’s not a life most people would sign up for. It’s not a life you can share with someone, except maybe for brief periods at a time. It looks lonely as hell, to be frank.

Is that okay? Is that doable?

I’ve always made my home more in experiences and people than in places or possessions. But if I’m chasing new experiences, how do I make a home with people? Am I doomed to a constantly rotating stream of surface acquaintances, a lifetime of goodbyes?

I’ve always considered myself lucky because I grew up with friends scattered around the globe (the magic of the internet). But any blessing turned on its head can become a curse. My heart has never really been whole because there are pieces of it scattered around the planet, and they’ll never all be in one place at one time. Some days that’s fine and some days it hurts like hell, when someone I care about is in pain and I can’t be there because they’re literally a thousand miles away.

I’m only setting myself up for more of that now.

Remote Year looked perfect because it was a stepping-stone. A way to dip my toe into the deeper waters of solo travel without getting immediately drenched in loneliness on the way down. It has been all of that and more.

But eventually it’s going to end. My new friends are going to go home, or move on to new lives, or keep traveling to other places, but probably not the same ones as me, and definitely never again as a group this big, an actual community that feels like a mobile home, the perfect balance between change and constant, the chance to chase new experiences with the same people, people you can actually get to know on a deeper level, people who have become friends faster than I imagined possible. And once we all go our separate ways, I’m going to have to figure out how to keep moving without them—how to swim in the deep end without a life vest.

I’m going to have to figure out what a future on the drift looks like. How to strike a balance between wings and roots, between constant flights and enough of a layover to keep me grounded.

I have to learn to be lonely.

In a way, I knew that’s what I was signing up for when I dove headfirst into this trip. I jumped anyway. This is just me naming the fear—and perhaps still superstitiously hoping that will allay it somehow.

I realize it’s starting to sound like all I do is adventure. That’s about 50% true (okay, maybe 60%). But I’m still working on this trip, and week 4 in Bogotá I really had to buckle down and get some things accomplished (exciting news there, actually—but I will post more about that when I can talk about it publicly!).

Luckily, we had plenty of good working options throughout the city. Remote Year booked two different Work & Go offices for us, since we were too large a group to fit into a single office here. We had spaces at their larger office up in Chico Norte, a cute neighborhood with lots of cafes and restaurants nearby, as well as a smaller office located right in Zona T, the heart of the bar-hopping and shopping district of northern Bogotá. The smaller one also featured an amazing rooftop view, as an added bonus.

But pretty often, we moved beyond our work spaces this month, discovering more than a few adorable cafes with delicious food and workable Wi-Fi connections.

Canasto Picnic Bistro was my personal favorite, a charming white-awning-ed restaurant just off of Park Virrey, which definitely lived up to its name in its picnic-esque vibes. After missing New York’s plethora of brunch options, it was refreshing to be able to hole up at Canasto and devour their variety of quinoa/egg dishes while getting some real writing done. (Their bruschetta was also to-die-for level delicious.) Not to mention, this was the first place in South America where I was served real tea—whole leaf green tea! With a sieve and enough hot water for multiple brews!

Masa, a bit further south in Zona T, also proved to be a great workspace. The service left a little something to be desired (no matter what you ordered, there was always at least one thing wrong with the dish—though it tasted delicious all the same, so I can’t complain too much), but the atmosphere and tasty fresh salads couldn’t be beat.

Another exciting find, for me at least, was Taller de Té. This one was a bit farther afield—I had to take an Uber about 30 minutes south to reach it, down near Chapinero. But it was definitely worth the trip. If I’d been excited by Canasto’s tea offerings, just imagine how much more thrilled I was to find a whole selection of teas, from oolongs to green and white varietals, some mixed with fruits or herbs (sorry Shunan), and others just pure tea.

My last week in Bogotá wasn’t all business—we made some time one night to play an escape room at Trap in Palermo. We escaped with time to spare, though not without having to call for a clue, alas. Still, I had a lot of fun solving puzzles with my new friends!

I also volunteered at Fundación Jeymar, an elderly care center, one day that week. Our group makes an effort to organize volunteer efforts in each city we visit, something I appreciate (though of course, when you are traveling and volunteering, you have to be very careful to avoid just falling into the “poverty tourism” trap—winding up in situations where you aren’t helping and may even be doing more harm than good to the local economy).

This particular volunteer day really did feel like a good choice. We went early to set up a “store” created from clothing, home goods and hygiene supplies that had been donated to the care center—laying out the items in a coherent, easy-to-browse way that meant people wouldn’t need to dig through garbage bags or heaped bins of donated items to find what they needed.

But the best part came when we got to interact with the elderly folks who attended the day center. We brought birthday cakes to help them celebrate the February birthdays, sang Happy Birthday in Spanish together (and taught them the English version), played tejo (the old people kicked my ass), a local ring-toss game, and a backyard version of bowling.

None of them seemed to mind that only half of us spoke Spanish, and that brokenly. I had a great conversation with one woman, who told me all about her four daughters (and her ex-husband, who left her because he wanted a son, remarried, and wound up with three more daughters—we agreed she was better off without him now).

Another woman gave me plenty of unsolicited dating advice (“Get married and have babies already,” she said, which was only mildly terrifying, though at least she followed it up with a caveat: “But make sure you marry someone at your level. Otherwise you’ll either feel left behind, or like you’re dragging him through life all the time.”).

Not to mention, most of the women enjoyed shouting flirty remarks at the few guys in our volunteer group…

It felt like a fitting end to our month in Bogotá—a way to get to know another generation of locals. Everyone we met there was proud of their country, their city, and the advances that both have made in recent years.

By the end of the week, though, as much as I enjoyed my time in Bogotá, I was ready to move on to Medellin and start exploring another facet of this fascinating, surprising country.

I didn’t know much about Colombia coming into this trip, but somehow it finds a way to surprise me every day with the diversity of experiences, cities, nature and ways of life here.

On to the next stop!

Real tea at Canasto!

Working lunch with quinoa

Chocolate and tea selection at Taller de Té

Also, Taller de Té was just adorbs in general

My first month on this adventure was a whirlwind. Trips, tours, parties, excursions every day (and most nights, too). Month two was where the need for normalcy started to set in. The desire for at least some semblance of a routine, even if it’s a routine that will change frequently.

It probably helped that, due to scheduling, we were in Bogotá a little longer than Mexico City. Long enough to feel settled, albeit temporarily.

By week 3, I didn’t feel pressure to run around the city trying to experience absolutely every inch of the place. Some of my friends were off doing cool things, and some of them were working their butts off, and some of them were taking it easy at home. If Mexico made me feel like I had to be on 24/7, constantly in the middle of the action, Bogotá had the opposite effect.

Instead of going out on the town bar-hopping or clubbing or just trying to keep up with the hectic pace of life, one night I went to my friend’s rooftop for a pizza party. Another, a group of us had a girls’ night and saw 50 Shades Darker (yes, it’s as awful as you’d expect—but somehow enjoyable with enough smuggled tequila and a theater full of Colombians also laughing at the terrible dialogue).

One Friday, a huge group of us ventured over to a friend’s house for a homemade Italian dinner, cooking tons of different pasta dishes, fish, and gnocchi. The gnocchi turned out to be tricky without a food processor, but we had tons of fun tasting all the dishes, singing along to 90s music and just enjoying the company of the other travelers on this adventure with us.

Later in the week, I had a friend over to watch TV—but we failed to make the TV work, and wound up playing Rummy 500 with a deck of cards we smuggled into a bar instead. The next night, we had more friends over (some of whom had actual technological skills) and managed to work the TV for a sci-fi night (re-watching favorite episodes from Firefly and Next Gen, obviously).

Another night, we watched Devil Wears Prada with some people who had never seen it before, then started Narcos. It was a little trippy, but a lot more powerful, to watch the scenes play out in neighborhoods of the city that we’d already explored. Neighborhoods that until relatively recently still looked like that show. I’m still only part of the way through season 1, but I need to binge it at some point and catch up, if only to better understand one aspect of the history of the country we’ve been living in.

At some point, the altitude hit me—Bogotá is ~8,600 feet above sea level, the highest place I’ve ever lived. Mexico City, at only 7,300 feet, didn’t bother me. But I felt it here. Even just walking down the street to work made me feel as though I’d just run a mile. At night especially, I struggled to take deep, even breaths—which made it pretty difficult to fall asleep. Suddenly I understood why in medieval times, people talked about the “hag on the chest” sensation. Some nights it really did feel as though someone were sitting on my chest, weighing me down.

Coca tea saved my ass. I tried over-the-counter and prescription medications for altitude sickness, none of which seemed to make a noticeable difference. But the moment I finished drinking a cup of coca tea in La Candelaria, my lungs seemed to expand to twice their size, oxygen flooding my brain. Maybe it was psychosomatic, but either way, I’ll take it. Slowing down in this city probably also helped my recovery a bit, too.

All in all, Bogotá was a good follow-up from Mexico City. A break from the hectic pace of Remote Year thus far, and a return to “normal” life—if you can call our nomadic lifestyle normal. For this month, at least, it felt that way.

But even on chill weeks, we still have some fun. Just like this baby on a llama in a park.

And ordering a basket full of bread and cake for breakfast

Also, we did some art therapy with my Bogotá roommate’s mom!

I didn’t want to make the same mistake in Bogotá that I did in Mexico City—namely, waiting until my last week to try to cram in all the local tours. So I signed up for the free walking tour of the historic district, La Candelaria, the very first week I was here.

The walking tour covered both older and more recent Colombian history, including a few basics about the emerald trade, the FARC war, the Colombian revolution (which led to Colombia’s independence from Spain), and even the local beer wars that started back in the early 1900s and are still brewing (haha, sorry…) today.

But the tour wasn’t all talk—we sampled a local beverage called chucula. Chucula was developed when the price of cocoa began to skyrocket in the region. It’s basically a chocolate replacement, a mix of various spices and just a couple of cacao beans, rolled into tight-packed balls that you can dissolve into hot cups of water or milk to create a hot chocolate-esque beverage. I liked it even more than hot chocolate, because it still had a hint of chocolate-y flavor without being overwhelmingly sweet or rich. But that could just be my taste buds!

After the chucula, we also tried chicha, a traditional corn beer that tastes (to me, anyway) like a cross between sour beer and cider. I enjoyed it, though I think it would be hard to drink more than a pint of it, since it’s pretty sour.

Chicha used to be crazy popular in Bogotá until the Bavarians rolled into town and started an ad campaign to demonize the drinking of chicha. All so they could run it out of business and fill the resulting gap with their own beer, naturally!

That was my first introduction to the beer wars here, but it wouldn’t be the last. Later in the week, I went on the Bogotá Craft Beer Tour, which took us from a small microbrewery in La Candelaria out through the other neighborhoods, stopping at a tiny brewery called Madriguera located in what looked like someone’s renovated house, another bar built by a brother-and-sister brewer-and-architect duo, and to eat and drink at a delicious local restaurant, Cervecería Gigante.

Along the way, our guide talked about the pushback these local microbrewers have encountered as they get started here in Bogotá. It’s difficult to break into a market dominated by Bavaria, a Colombian beer company owned by Anheuser-Busch. Local, small-batch brewers are still fighting same battles that chicha ran into over a century ago—being stigmatized and out-campaigned in a tough market. But there’s a growing resistance to bigger beer companies here, and a push toward drinking locally made microbrews, which will hopefully only continue to grow in the future.

On another downtown walking tour through La Candelaria, I learned more about the other battles that have been fought (and are still being fought) on Colombian turf. Bogotá has some of the most beautiful and varied street art I’ve ever seen, and the graffiti tour walks you past some of the best examples of work in different styles. But the guides also talk a lot about the politics of street art here—the violence and wars the art depicts and protests, as well as the current move by the government to promote street art (and in doing so, cut down on unauthorized graffiti tagging).

It was a fascinating tour, all in all, but it didn’t even come close to walking us past all the art La Candelaria and the surrounding neighborhoods have to offer. There’s now even a panel of art in Palermo created by some other members of my Remote Year group (Meraki pride, woo!).

Venturing a little ways outside of Bogotá itself, I visited the two salt mines nearby: Nemocón and the better-known Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá. If you want my advice, I’d say first of all, don’t visit both—that was a pretty repetitive exercise!

Personally, I preferred Nemocón. It’s a bit smaller, and you can still find the actual salt in the mines. Not to mention carvings made in said salt, a lickable wall, natural deposits that people imagine depict nativity scenes or trees, a massive salt pond mirror that’s so convincingly reflective that standing next to it feels like you’re about to plunge off a ledge, and of course, Salt Jesus.

Fun fact, Nemocón was also the location where The 33 (that movie about the trapped Chilean miners) was filmed. You can explore the set and imagine just how claustrophobic it must have felt to be those guys.

Zipaquirá, on the other hand, was much larger, but also way more touristy. The Salt Cathedral itself is lovely, but left me wondering where all the salt was (the sculptures inside are either carved from rock or marble). Plus, the mall tacked onto the outside is just strange. Unless you’re shopping for some tourist emeralds, then I guess it’s a good stop to make.

The last tour I did, which I actually went on a couple weeks later, but I’ll include it here for good measure, was to Lake Guatavita. Best known as the origin of the myth of El Dorado, our local guide explained Guatavita as the Muisca’s version of the Aztec temples. The Muisca people worshipped the moon here, so it made sense that rather than building grand temples to try and reach the sky, they would make a sacred space of a deep, nearly perfectly circular lagoon instead.

Many sacred lakes dot the hillsides in this region, but Guatavita is the largest and best-known. It was here that future tribal rulers were crowned—though not until they had undergone extensive trials to judge their worth, including living for 9 years in total darkness within a cave (a year for every month their mothers carried them to symbolize their gestation and rebirth) and exiting naked to a ritual where nude women danced around them, trying to seduce them. If they reacted at all (yes, you know what I mean), they were deemed unfit to rule.

But, our guide assured us, every ruler who reached that phase of the trial passed. They were then covered head-to-toe in gold dust, and swam out to the center of Lake Guatavita in the final ceremony.

All in all, there are a plethora of tours both within Bogotá’s city limits and outside it. If you’re ever in the city, I’d recommend deciding what parts of local history call to you, and checking out the tours that cover those topics!

Ellens in the Salt Cathedral

Yes, I licked this wall

Salt Jesus

Chicha cups

Street art in Candelaria

More street art

Political commentary via street art

View from the hike up to Guatavita

My last week in Mexico City was a whirlwind of preparations. Booking future side-trips, figuring out how many pesos I’d need to get through one last week, stocking up on items I needed to buy for the rest of my trip… And figuring out how to repack my bags in a semi-reasonable manner.

But I saved plenty of time for exploring the city, too.

I finally made it to the pyramids in Teotihuacán. The Sun and Moon pyramids are the most famous, but there are actually around a dozen pyramids scattered around the site, with more earthen mounds that have yet to be excavated hiding still more pyramids beneath them.

There, we learned about the mysterious origin of the so-called City of the Gods. Built between 100BC-250AD, it was the largest city in the Americas prior to Colombus’s arrival. Most people associate it with the Aztecs, but actually, by the time they discovered Teotihuacán, it had already been abandoned for centuries. The city fell around 750AD, most likely due to an internal uprising, though the jury is still out on that one.

Recently, archaeologists discovered several new tunnels beneath the site, including a tunnel beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent that’s still being excavated. Our guide, a local archaeologist with UNAM, plied the team working on the excavation with tequila, but sadly, they didn’t have anything new to report yet.

In addition to the pyramids, I trekked out to El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary with a couple friends. This is a sanctuary for the monarch butterflies, who fly there from Canada every winter, then fly home every summer. For the moment, in the depths of January, they were in hibernation mode—but they still venture out during sunlight hours to eat/breed/all that good stuff.

I’d never seen the monarch migration up-close, so it was definitely worth the trip (which involved an Uber, a bus, a taxi we paid to sit and wait for us to return, then a 45-minute hike into the mountains, for which I was not at all dressed properly. By the way, it’s a lot colder in the mountains…).

When we reached the top of the mountain and our guide pointed out the butterflies (in Spanish of course), I thought I had misunderstood him. All we could see in the trees were black clumpy masses, like clusters of dead leaves waiting to fall. Then he explained—the butterflies huddle together for warmth, so tightly packed that only the black edges of their wings are visible.

That is, until the sun hits. Then they wake up and start to fly between the trees, down to the ground… Even landing on us more than a few times.

Dude butterfly

Luckily for us, we ran into another American woman traveling with her daughter, who had just finished raising some monarchs in her classroom for release. She taught us how to tell the males from females (males have black spots on their hind wings), among other useful tips.

After a carne asada (think Mexico’s version of a backyard cookout) on my Spanish teacher’s rooftop, followed by a day of relaxing at Hotel Habita‘s rooftop pool (pro-tip: even if you aren’t a hotel guest, they only ask that you spend a minimum of $200 pesos/~$10 USD at the poolside bar in order to hang out for the day—easy to do when they have an extensive food menu, not to mention micheladas on hand), I powered through the last few to-dos on my Mexico City list.

That included the free walking tour of the historic district downtown, which I cannot recommend enough. It’s one thing to read about the Aztec’s afterlife beliefs, but quite another to be taken down into the bowels of the city (below the modern street level, since Mexico City is slowly sinking) and led through an artistic representation of that underworld.

Chillin’ underground with Mictlantecuhtli

Plus, once the tour finished, we were in the perfect spot to enjoy a delicious mole and some cocktails at La Casa de las Sirenas, a mezcal bar downtown.

Our last night in Mexico City, we celebrated with a Remote Year-organized boat ride along the canals of Xochimilco, another must-do. There, you can still see the chinampas, vast floating rafts on which the ancient Mesoamericans cultivated farms and built homes. Mexico City used to be built on these rafts as well, until the lake where it originally sat drained. It’s truly a wonder of ancient architecture and ingenuity—and pretty fun to sail between, too.

But after that, it was time to say our (slightly hungover) goodbyes and board our flight to Bogotá. I’ll miss Mexico City, the history, the food, the art, the culture, and did I mention the food. But there will always be time to go back and hit any of the spots I missed. Until then, it’s off to the next city on our list!

Thousand-year-old street art

Just your casual erosion-exposed tomb beneath the sinking cathedral…

Also your casual giant baby Jesus in said sinking cathedral

Elevator at the historic post office in downtown CDMX

Street parade protesting gas prices

Boarding our fleet of boats on the Xochimilco canals

Canal selfie!