The Long Walk to the Garden

I walked to the Bogotá Botanical Garden because I could.

It was roughly four miles from my apartment, far enough that taking an Uber would have been the obvious choice. But by then I had begun using walking as a way of learning Bogotá. A destination gave the day structure, and the miles between my apartment and wherever I was going gave me something else: time.

There were larger questions in my life that I could not answer by walking. I was in a period of professional transition and did not know exactly what would come next. Bogotá gave me room to think about those questions, but it did not solve them.

Walking was different.

The walking itself required no theory. I had a place to move toward. Each block removed a block. The city did not become simple, but the distance did.

At the garden, my attention narrowed again. I photographed a bee buried in the center of a brilliant pink flower, enormous leaves rising above me, sunlight passing through the canopy and palm trees reflected in the water. The camera broke the afternoon into small decisions: stop here, frame this, walk on.

Afterward, I continued to Simón Bolívar Park and walked around before beginning the long way back. I took a different route home, moving through another part of Bogotá rather than retracing the four miles I had already walked.

By then, walking had become one of the ways I understood the city. From an Uber, Bogotá arrived as a sequence of destinations. On foot, there was everything between them: residential streets, intersections, shops, parks, people going about an ordinary afternoon. Places that had seemed separate on a map began to connect.

Eventually I made it back to the apartment.

Nothing about the day had answered the larger questions I was carrying. I had walked across a piece of Bogotá, spent an afternoon looking closely at plants, wandered through a park and walked home another way.

For that day, having somewhere to walk had been enough.