13:00.

The door opens and you emerge with grace and glory. The minute you are out of the vehicle, you are blasted with immense amounts of heat and nothing but a forest in front of you. So you do what you are trained to do. Go In.

You walk through the forest and find yourself trudging through a botanical garden in 95 degree heat. You look to your left and discover your arm is covered in mosquitos. You look down and see lizards running across your shoes. In this intense moment of survival there is only one option…

I mean that’s what I do anyway…

So the question is–why? Why must you endure the itchyness of thousands of mosquito bites and go through heat-stroke induced near-death experiences? How could there possibly be a benefit to this? Well here comes the curveball. There is an upside. And this is it…

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Besides having a high chance of getting heat stroke, a botanical garden isn’t as boring as you would think. You just have to go to the right one. Lemme give you an insider tip, but shh don’t tell anyone. There is a botanical garden in the Heart of Miami called The Kampong. It was founded by a horticulturalist by the name of David Fairchild, who, during his travels around the world, collected exotic plants from almost every where he went. And because of the massive amounts of biodiversity in his backyard, it is now one of the five National Tropical Botanical Gardens in the United States….

Ok. I can tell you have already lost interest, but trust me because this place is one that shouldn’t be missed. Yeah, I know not everyone wants to look at some plants, but this place is really so much more.

I mean this place is crazy. They have plants from Malaysia all the way to the Caribbean.

This place is so cool that they have this tree that was like, “Why have one root when you can have hundreds above ground.” I mean these plants are just beast.

Some of these plants are even famous movie stars. Like the tree from above can be seen on many occasions in the TV show Lost (but really, who still watches Lost?).

Well if you aren’t into trees, The Kampong might have something else for you. Flowers. Yeah, I can see your interest level rising. This garden is covered in thousands of plant species that are crazy beautiful and if you like photography, you can definitely snag so crazy awesome photos here.

I can already see the Instagram captions. I never want to leave. Botanical Gardens are actually pretty cool. This place is Kampawesome. 

And if you can’t find something that sizzles your bacon, you can always just take a couple squad photos with some trees and call it a day.