There is something raw and unsexy about sweltering heat with suffocating humidity, but I didn’t let the muggy air cloud what I have based this entire year around—a brief trip to the Colombian coast ahead of turning 40.

A marker for me, the trip was to add more dives to my scuba diving logbook and time in biodiverse natural spaces.

As I stood in a tropical forest both in naïve wonderment of a 200-year-old tree and actual wonder if I was going to melt into the dirt and become human porridge for the many circling hawks to consume, I thought, “God…it’s really f*cking hot.”

After a couple more hours hiking alongside wild cows and turning my face up at congregations of frog eggs in lakes—“Umm, ¿Qué es eso?” I asked my Colombian guide with both curiosity and a case of the ickies—I threw in the towel in hopes that I wasn’t going to disintegrate into the stifling heat. Climbing into a canoe and heading back through mangroves in the sticky morning air, I felt like I could swim through its thickness.

I arrived back to a beautiful eco-lodge, hungry with probably-cow-but-maybe-horse-poo on my shoes and extremely sweaty. Even the locals grimaced up at me with looks of discontent, “Que calor,” they muttered. After a scrub and some breakfast, I fell into my room’s hammock for a nap. And it was….even hotter than before. Like, hotter-than-f*ck hot.

Read what I learned about how air conditioning affects the environment and the changes I’ve made here: Reducing My AC Usage: Lessons from an Eco-Lodge Stay.