Travagando Diaries
merlin entertainments — bogotá, bucaramanga, cali — 2023 + 2024
the first time colombia put me on the calendar, i wasn’t supposed to have any time.
it was 2023. brand usa, aviareps handling the logistics. a week that belonged entirely to work on paper — meetings in bogotá, a day flight to bucaramanga, a day flight to cali, back to bogotá by 8pm. the kind of schedule where you eat from the minibar and call it dinner.
except we had a travel day.
my boss and i looked at each other and made a decision. we were going up.
monserrate sits at 3,152 meters above bogotá — a mountain with a church at the top and the whole city laid out below it. you can hike up or take the funicular. we hiked. and standing at the top looking down at a city that just keeps going, growing, spilling into every corner of that valley — this is what you work for. not the title. not the itinerary. the moment where the schedule falls away and your lungs fill with something that isn’t conference air. we had earned this. every early flight, every back-to-back, every yes when the ask was unreasonable. the view was the point. the view was always going to be the point.
we took the airtram down. we found a restaurant. we ordered paella in colombia — not where paella is from — and it was spectacular.
the day trips were a different kind of travagando.
bucaramanga on a wednesday. cali on a thursday. both cities that send serious travel volume toward orlando — tour operator offices, distribution networks, the kind of ground you cover in business hours. we did our thing.
and then i had an hour.
one hour in a centro you’ve never seen is enough time to feel something. not enough to understand it. i walked through markets. heard things frying. watched people move through their afternoon like it belonged to them — because it did. i found a peruvian restaurant. i walked until i had to turn back.
i always feel it a little — the tourist guilt of passing through somewhere briefly. but sitting in my room would be the real guilt. the guilt of being somewhere and giving it nothing. one hour outside means one hour of learning someone else’s pace, someone else’s afternoon. what they eat standing up. how they talk to strangers. the way a market moves. that kind of immersion doesn’t live in any textbook — it lives somewhere inside you. sometimes a city you’ve never been to will trigger something. a smell. a sound. the light hitting cobblestone a certain way. and suddenly it feels like recognition. like a place you’ve been missing without knowing what it was. how beautiful is that.
somewhere along the way i made friends with a driver.
this happens when you’re the kind of traveler who asks too many questions and tips too well. by the end of the week he knew i hadn’t seen everything. on the last day, he took me to laguna de guatavita.
if you haven’t heard of it — the muisca people considered it sacred. this is the lagoon that gave birth to the el dorado legend. emerald green water sitting inside a crater in the mountains, 45 minutes outside bogotá, looking like something that shouldn’t exist.
he talked the whole way there. about bogotá, about his family, about things that happen when you let a city raise you. i mostly listened. there was a warmth to him i can only describe as abuelo energy — unhurried, generous, the kind you don’t manufacture.
i paid him, obviously. but what he gave me wasn’t on any meter.
i came back in 2024.
brand usa south america sales mission again, this time promoting madame tussauds new york. são paulo first, then bogotá. the work was the same kind — pitch, connect, be useful. the difference was my colleagues. some of them had been to bogotá seven, eight times. they moved through it like locals. i was more than happy to follow.
we went to andres carne de res.
if you know, you know. if you don’t — it’s less a restaurant and more a theatrical experience that happens to serve food. murals floor to ceiling, aerial performers spinning above the tables, every corner doing something different from the corner next to it. the kind of place that answers the question of what bogotá does at night.
we found the brewery. we found the neon signs and the mezcal bars and the cobblestone neighborhoods bogotá has been quietly polishing.
and then, as always, i set off on foot.
not far. not a plan. just the question i always ask of new cities and return cities alike: what’s here that wasn’t before? what stayed?
bogotá kept most of it.
the altitude that makes your lungs negotiate. the mountains on every side that make you forget how large the city is until you’re looking down at it from monserrate and it just keeps going. the warmth of people used to being underestimated by tourists who flew past them on their way to cartagena.
i was one of those tourists before i wasn’t.
i’ve been twice now. neither time was mine to plan. both times were mine to keep.
this is travagando. the hour that wasn’t on the itinerary. the driver who knew a lagoon. the colleague who’d been here eight times and still made room for the one who hadn’t.
because while this is the linkedin version of the job — in my heart, i will always wander just a little bit more.
next: ireland. technically study abroad. technically work. technically one of the best decisions i never made on purpose.