The Mountain in Me

A Place Remembered Before It Was Ever Seen

“Some journeys don’t begin when the ticket is booked. They begin when a place starts whispering in your bones long before you know its name.”

– The Unwritten Road

 

It wasn’t the peak that pulled me in.

Not the grandeur of Everest. Not the myth of Annapurna. Not the promise of flags fluttering at high passes.

It was something quieter.

A hush just beneath the surface like a forgotten prayer lodged behind the ribs. A gravity I couldn’t name. A tug that wasn’t about elevation, but excavation.

Nepal had been living in me longer than I realized not as a destination, but as a memory I hadn’t earned yet. A feeling that had no timestamp. A knowing without explanation.

When I finally landed in Kathmandu, it wasn’t a sense of arrival I felt it was recognition. As if the air already knew me. As if the dust on my boots belonged there.

I came looking for landscapes.

Instead, I found mirrors.

In the soft chant of monks at dawn, in the curve of a stupa’s shadow at noon, in the silence that descended with the dusk. I found reflections in strangers’ smiles, in shared bowls of thukpa, in eyes that held both storm and stillness.

Over four weeks, I moved north from the chaos of Thamel to the austerity of Mustang. Through prayer wheels that turned more than time, and through trails that didn’t just test the legs, but the soul. Every village, every bend, every impossible sky carved something open in me.

What I was chasing, I came to understand, wasn’t just altitude.

It was home.

Not a house. Not a street. But a feeling. A returning. A mountain that lived inside me long before I saw its shape on the horizon.

This isn’t a guide.

It’s a confession.

Of what happens when you stop taking photos of a place and let it start taking photos of you.

Of what it means to remember something you never learned,

and to be held by a land that asks nothing of you

except your full, unfiltered self.

 

Kathmandu The City of Crowds and Silence

A City at the Edge of Breath

 

“Kathmandu glows with noise until, out of nowhere, it hushes you. A bell rings, a chant begins, and suddenly, the chaos is one breath deep, and the silence stretches like granite.”

– The Unwritten Road

Kathmandu didn’t welcome me gently.

It came at me like a brass band in a narrow alley loud, unfiltered, unapologetic. The kind of city that meets you at the door with a lit cigarette and a story halfway told.

Tribhuvan Airport was a blur of weathered signage and shouted names. Outside, the air smelled of clove smoke, warm dust, and exhaust fumes. Taxi drivers waved laminated photos of hotels I wasn’t staying at. A small boy tried to sell me a map. I hadn’t even found my breath yet.

This wasn’t a city that waited for you to arrive.

It happened to you.

Thamel was where I based myself a tangle of sound and saffron-colored walls, guitar strings from rooftop bars, and the low hum of shopkeepers calling you “friend” without irony. My guesthouse was squeezed between a momo stall and a trekking agency called “Himalayan Promises.” Its wooden staircase creaked like it had opinions.

 

The room had a window that didn’t close all the way and a bathroom light that flickered like it had survived something. But the bed was warm, and the view overlooked the tangled crown of a Bodhi tree beneath it, a man in jeans and mala beads read Bhagavad Gita next to a white woman editing drone footage on Final Cut Pro.

That was Kathmandu.

Ancient, modern, sacred, surreal all crammed into a single frame, a single breath.

The Noise That Teaches You How to Listen

On my second morning, still disoriented by jet lag and the thousand things I didn’t understand, I started walking without a map. Just feet on stone. Dust in nostrils. The kind of wandering that isn’t about getting anywhere just about getting away from where you were.

I don’t remember how I found Pashupatinath. I remember only that the air changed first  thickened with smoke and mantra. I followed the sound of conch shells and bells until I stood by the Bagmati River, where the holy met the human with unflinching honesty.

There, men were being burned.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Bodies laid out on funeral pyres, orange marigolds clutched in their hands, the scent of sandalwood and flesh rising like invisible thread into the grey sky.

It was shocking.

And yet it wasn’t.

Because no one looked away. Not the families. Not the priests. Not even the monkeys, who sat like sentinels among the stone railings.

A small group of schoolboys stood behind me. One of them pointed toward the flames and said, “Tomorrow, my grandfather.”

Just like that.

Not sad.

Not afraid.

Just true.

 

We in the West hide death behind curtains and corridors. Kathmandu places it by the river, dresses it in flowers, and invites you to see that life and death are not opposite ends they’re just different temperatures of the same fire.

A Chai Shared in Silence

That evening, I returned to Thamel. My feet were blistered, my mind full, my soul quiet in a way it hadn’t been in years. At a corner stall lit by a single bulb, I met a monk. Or maybe he met me. He sat sipping chai, his robes slightly stained, his slippers nearly see-through. He nodded at the bench. I sat.

We didn’t speak for a long time.

Not because there was nothing to say, but because the city had already spoken enough for both of us.

Finally, I asked him why people came to Kathmandu why they stayed, why they returned, why they built temples on street corners instead of hills.

He sipped slowly, then smiled.

“Because life is noise,” he said.

“Here, for a second, it’s not.”

 

Bhaktapur  A City of Quiet Stone and Beaten Paths

Where Time Took Off Its Shoes

“Here, history isn’t in the guidebook it’s in the cobblestones beneath your boots, in temples that lean with age, and in eyes that know the soil is older than fear.”

– The Unwritten Road

If Kathmandu was a thunderclap, then Bhaktapur was a long, slow breath held between lifetimes. The moment the bus doors folded open, the decibels dropped. It wasn’t silence not the hollow kind but a gentle hum of living history, of prayers folded into the corners of doorways, of footsteps softened by centuries of repetition.

I walked in slowly, as if entering someone else’s childhood home.

No honking. No neon. No rush.

Just red brick underfoot and the soft scrape of slippers against stone. Children with windblown hair chased pigeons through the courtyards like they were chasing eternity. Laundry fluttered from wooden balconies like silent conversations. And the air smelled like something remembered a mix of wood smoke, earth, and incense.

Time, Stilled but Not Forgotten

Bhaktapur wasn’t just old.

It was comfortable in its age.

The temples didn’t announce themselves they leaned slightly, as if bending under the weight of all the wishes whispered to them. There was a kind of unspoken reverence here, not performed for cameras but woven into daily life.

I wandered into Durbar Square and let myself just… stand.

The sun poured down like honey over the intricately carved windows and spindly staircases. An old man swept leaves in front of a shrine, pausing every few strokes to adjust a loose sandal. A woman knelt beside him, arranging marigold petals with the kind of attention most people reserve for prayers or grief.

History here didn’t need a plaque.

It lived in gestures.

The Clay and the Lesson

In Pottery Square, I tried my hands quite literally at shaping earth. A local potter, his fingers tinted with the same color as the surrounding bricks, invited me to sit. He didn’t ask where I was from. He didn’t ask my name. He simply pressed a lump of clay into my palm and said, “Spin.”

The wheel started. My confidence faltered.

The clay wobbled like a drunk memory.

My hands, more used to keyboards than kilns, hesitated.

He watched me struggle for a while, then gently covered my hands with his. His touch was steady, practiced. He didn’t correct me with words only with warmth. “Don’t control,” he murmured. “Just feel.”

I failed.

Repeatedly.

Twelve pots, maybe more, collapsed under my overthinking.

 

He laughed each time not at me, but for me. He poured butter tea from a thermos into tiny cups and handed me one. “You know,” he said, sipping, “imperfection is the only perfect thing here.”

That stayed with me.

Long after the clay had dried under my nails, the idea lingered that maybe we weren’t supposed to shape everything perfectly. That maybe the beauty was in the leaning, the cracking, the trying.

The Long Light of Afternoon

I spent the rest of the day sitting on the steps of an old temple, feet dangling above centuries. The sun moved like a slow dancer across the square, draping every brick in nostalgia. Tourists came and went snapping photos, clutching water bottles. But the city didn’t seem to notice them. Bhaktapur wasn’t performing. It simply was.

A boy walked by with a basket of sel roti. He handed me one without asking for money. I thanked him. He shrugged. “You look like you needed one.”

I bit into it sweet, warm, a little misshapen. Perfect.

That evening, as the sky turned lilac and the temple bells rang again in the distance, I understood something I hadn’t known I was looking for:

That grandeur doesn’t need noise.

It doesn’t shout.

It whispers.

And if you’re still enough, Bhaktapur will whisper back.

 

Nagarkot : Where the Sky Becomes a Feeling

When the Horizon Moved Closer Than the Ground

“Here, clouds drift low enough to touch. The sky isn’t overhead. It’s inside you.”

– The Unwritten Road

 

The road from Bhaktapur to Nagarkot curled like a thought I wasn’t ready to finish. Every curve climbed not just the hill but something quieter in me a need for stillness that didn’t shout. We passed pine forests dusted in mist, schoolchildren walking home with umbrellas bigger than their bodies, and roadside tea stalls that smelled like comfort wearing cardamom.

Nagarkot doesn’t announce itself. It emerges.

A scattering of homes, a few sleepy lodges, and then almost accidentally the sky becomes everything. I reached my guesthouse late afternoon. The owner, a man named Suresh, greeted me like I’d been expected. “If it’s clear tomorrow,” he said, “you’ll see the gods wake up.”

I asked him what he meant.

He pointed east. “You’ll know.”

A Sky Worth Waking For

At 4:30 a.m., the air was cold and clean enough to taste.

Wrapped in borrowed blankets and coffee breath, I followed a quiet trail to the viewpoint. Others had gathered too a silent congregation facing east, shoulders hunched, eyes expectant.

The dark was thick. Not ominous. Just ancient.

Then the first stroke of light.

Not a burst. A whisper. A slow, deliberate parting of shadow.

The clouds, suspended like silk just above our heads, began to blush. Pink. Then orange. Then a kind of shimmering gold that had weight. Behind them, the Himalayas stood still, pale, and enormous. Annapurna. Manaslu. Dhaulagiri. Names I’d only known from maps now stood like old gods in morning robes.

I didn’t speak. No one did.

It wasn’t awe in the cinematic sense. It was something gentler. Quieter. A recognition.

Somewhere behind me, someone whispered in Nepali. I didn’t understand the words, but their rhythm sounded like respect.

 

And then, next to me, a man also Nepali, his eyes steady on the peaks said quietly in English, “It’s why we come.”

I nodded. Not just to agree. But to confess.

It’s why I came too.

And why I stayed longer than I meant to.

Cloud-Touched Afternoons

That day, Nagarkot unfolded slowly.

I walked trails lined with prayer flags that had lost their colors but not their purpose. I passed farms where women bent over rows of cauliflower, their laughter rising louder than the crows. Children played beside goats, shouting my name after I gave them none.

At a tiny teashop built from corrugated metal and stories, I met an old woman named Meena. She made me black tea and asked why I traveled alone. I told her I wasn’t sure.

She nodded. “Then you’re doing it right.”

The sky in Nagarkot didn’t just sit above. It wrapped around. It pressed in. Some afternoons, it fell entirely swallowing the road in fog until the world felt reduced to the few feet around your body and breath.

And in that reduction, clarity arrived.

I didn’t write much while I was there. I didn’t post. I didn’t measure time in minutes or metrics. I let the sun mark it. I let the wind name it.

That One Moment

On my last evening, I stood at the edge of the ridge, the air thinned out into near-silence.

A boy passed me with a kite red, torn, dancing like it had something to say. He let the string go and smiled as it soared, tangled and free.

Behind it, the sky turned soft lavender. And for a moment, I felt it.

That the sky here wasn’t just something you looked at.

It was something that moved through you.

A mirror.

A memory.

A message.

And in that one moment, I stopped searching for words.

Because finally, the feeling was enough.

 

Pokhara : Lake of Reflections

Where the Mountains Don’t Speak, They Listen

 

“Fewa Lake doesn’t just mirror the mountains. It reflects your own quiet desire to be part of something grand without being swallowed by it.”

– The Unwritten Road

 

The descent into Pokhara was like entering the breath after a long sentence.

Where Kathmandu overwhelmed and Nagarkot hushed, Pokhara simply… received. It didn’t try to impress. It didn’t blaze with urgency. It held out its hand, palm up, and let you arrive on your own terms.

The first thing I noticed was the air not thin like the highlands, but clean in a way that felt rinsed. You could smell trees here. And water. And life that had learned to flow without hurry.

From the hilltop bus stand, I caught my first glimpse of Fewa Lake. A shimmer of silver between buildings, framed by peaks still wrapped in morning. I didn’t rush toward it. I let the city ease me in past bakeries with fading French names, guesthouses built around mango trees, and old men sipping tea without a clock in sight.

Pokhara is a place that trusts you’ll find what you came looking for. Even if you don’t yet know what that is.

 

A Lake that Remembers

At dawn the next morning, I rented a narrow wooden boat with chipped blue paint and no motor. The boy who handed me the oar asked, “You need a guide?”

I shook my head.

“I think the lake knows the way,” I said.

He laughed. “She always does.”

The water was glass. The sky still wore its stars faintly, fading into soft pinks. I rowed slowly, each pull cutting through the reflection of Annapurna like a signature being written and then erased.

I didn’t aim anywhere. I just floated.

It wasn’t silence I found on the lake it was a kind of listening. A space where the mountain didn’t loom but lingered, where the water didn’t mirror for effect but for companionship.

I stopped near the small island temple in the lake’s center. Tourists hadn’t arrived yet. Even the birds seemed to wait. I closed my eyes and tried not to think. And for a few minutes, I succeeded.

I let the boat drift. The lake didn’t mind.

It felt like a conversation without words.

Breakfast and Stillness

Later, on the shore, I found a tin shack pretending to be a café two stools, one griddle, and a woman who wore her sari like a badge of quiet strength.

She made me chapati and poured tea that tasted like earth and memory. A dog curled at my feet. A monk walked past, his robe flicking sunlight into dust. No one hurried.

I opened my notebook to write. And then closed it.

Words felt too heavy. Too specific.

Pokhara didn’t ask to be recorded.

It asked to be received.

So I sat and watched as the lake changed colors with the sky. As light climbed the mountain like a secret returning home.

And I wondered if all places that feel like healing do so not because they change you but because they stop demanding you be anything at all.

The Museum of Air

In the afternoon, I wandered up to the International Mountain Museum a space filled with stories of summits and snow and loss. Photos of men and women standing atop the world. Flags planted. Smiles frozen in frost.

One display had a Sherpa’s worn boots under glass. The plaque read: “He summited 11 times. He never posted once.”

I stood there longer than I meant to.

Because in a world constantly curating its glory, something about those scuffed shoes felt more real than any viral view.

Pokhara has a way of softening what you thought you needed.

I came for the peaks. I stayed for the pauses.

 

 

Ghandruk : The Village That Breathes in Prayer

Where Trails Are Woven from Smoke and Song

“Some places don’t impress you. They invite you. With soft fires, slower steps, and skies that seem to recognize you before you introduce yourself.”

– The Unwritten Road

 

Ghandruk wasn’t a destination.

It was an unfolding.

A pause that became a prayer.

A footnote in the itinerary that underlined everything.

I hadn’t meant to stop here. The trail was supposed to be a transit, a warm-up on my way to Mustang a place everyone talked about with reverence and romance. But the road has its own religion. And sometimes, detours are devotion.

I left Nayapul with the weight of caffeine and mild ambition. My boots creaked. My legs argued. But the air above the first bend softened that resistance. It smelled of moss, of cinnamon wood smoke, of stories folded between pine needles. The early part of the trail followed a river that didn’t speak in torrents, just murmured over stones, the way elders whisper when they know you’ll listen.

Along the way, a boy of about nine passed me, barefoot, hauling a load of firewood in a doko basket strapped to his forehead. His shirt was torn, his grin full. He nodded and said, “Namaste, dai.”

I felt embarrassingly overdressed. Overprepared. Under-awake.

Ghandruk came into view like a hymn you don’t recognize but somehow remember terraced homes stacked like prayer beads against a sky that had nowhere else to be. Here, the mountains don’t loom. They watch. They wait. And if you’re lucky, they speak.

A Village That Doesn’t Perform

There are no curated photo spots in Ghandruk. No “must-see” lists taped to café doors. The beauty is in the uncaptioned. In the in-between.

The stone-paved paths wind around houses that have stood still while the world scrolls past. Red rhododendrons bloom like quiet declarations. Prayer flags strung from window to window carry more emotion than any broadcast.

I stayed with Aama Laxmi, a widow in her seventies with silver-threaded hair and eyes that had the patience of rivers. Her house was simple two rooms, a small verandah, and a kitchen filled with brass utensils, firewood, and the scent of cumin. She offered me dhal bhaat without a smile, but with an understanding.

Later, over a small fire and salty tea, I asked her what Ghandruk was like before tourists came.

She stirred the tea three times before replying.

“Same mountain. Same wind. Just more cameras now.”

She didn’t say it with resentment. Just resignation the kind that grows in villages that welcome but do not bend.

The Light Between Mountains

At dusk, the sky began to burn. Annapurna South blushed gold. Machapuchare, the fishtail peak, stood backlit and silent, as if refusing applause. And all around us, the air turned into something heavier not oppressive, but sacred. The kind of weight you feel when someone starts to pray.

Aama Laxmi lit a small butter lamp. She didn’t go inside the temple room. She simply placed it near the window, muttering a chant under her breath. I stood beside her, unsure whether to speak or bow.

“You miss him?” I asked, unsure if I was intruding.

She nodded once.

“Yes. But now I light this for peace. For anyone who needs it.”

We sat in silence. Not the awkward kind. The kind that builds bridges without needing bricks.

From the edge of the hill, I could hear a distant flute a shepherd somewhere in the valley below. His song didn’t rise. It settled. Like ash. Like memory.

The Night That Didn’t Need Words

That night, I lay in a room lit only by a single candle. No heater. No hot shower. Just wool blankets and the scent of eucalyptus leaves hung to dry above the bed. Outside, the mountains had folded into shadow. But the stars—good Lord, the stars—cut through the sky like secrets being spilled.

And in that perfect stillness, I realized something I hadn’t allowed myself to before: I was no longer chasing landscapes. I was being taught how to belong to one.

Ghandruk didn’t offer itself to me. It received me.

I wasn’t a tourist that night.

I was someone allowed to stay.

And maybe, that’s all we’re ever really looking for when we travel.

Not a postcard.

But a place that lets us be quiet without needing to explain why.

 

Annapurna Base Camp : The Place Where Silence Ascends

Where Altitude Peels the Soul Bare

 

“You don’t reach the top of the world. You arrive at the bottom of yourself breathless, broken open, and utterly awake.”

– The Unwritten Road

 

The journey to Annapurna Base Camp doesn’t begin on a map.

It begins somewhere quieter in the space between longing and doubt. In that first step that feels too early and the second that feels too late. You don’t climb this trail. You offer yourself to it.

I started from Chhomrong on a gray morning. The sky was hesitant, as if unsure whether to bless or test us. My pack was heavy, not with gear but with the need to be humbled. And in the Himalayas, humility arrives fast usually just after your knees begin to ache and just before your mind surrenders its grip.

The Long Climb Inward

The trail wove through villages that smelled of wood smoke and distant hope. I passed grandmothers sorting lentils on flat stones, their eyes bright beneath folded shawls. Children kicked bottle caps like footballs and waved with the kind of enthusiasm only innocence can afford.

As I climbed, the air changed less oxygen, more awareness.

Above Bamboo, I found myself alone on a stretch of trail flanked by cliffs and wild rhododendrons. Their blossoms, blood-red and delicate, stood defiantly against the rugged earth. Somewhere behind me, a landslide had taken out a small segment of trail. Locals had built a makeshift detour overnight. A reminder: here, the earth rearranges itself faster than your plans do.

Each village became smaller, quieter, more provisional. Dovan. Himalaya. Deurali. Their names floated like mantras in my journal syllables inked in fatigue and reverence. The lodges were wooden, damp, warmed by thin blankets and thicker smiles. Every meal was a repetition dhal bhaat, garlic soup, black tea. But it never bored me. Simplicity, I learned, can be deeply generous.

Machapuchare The Unclimbed God

By the time I reached Machapuchare Base Camp, the world had gone monochrome. Clouds crept in like slow whispers. The famous fishtail peak sacred, forbidden to climb loomed above the mist like a myth that chose to remain one. I sat on a rock and watched it disappear and reappear like a breath. I didn’t take a photo.

A local porter named Ramesh pointed to it with his chin.

“Unclimbed,” he said. “Some places are not meant for boots.”

He said it without sentiment. Just certainty. I believed him.

That night, I stayed in a lodge that had frost on its windows and silence in its halls. Outside, someone coughed. Inside, no one spoke above a whisper. At altitude, noise feels like intrusion. I dreamt of water that turned to stone. I dreamt of my father who always wanted to see the Himalayas but never did.

Annapurna The Arrival of the Still

The final ascent began before sunrise. The path to Annapurna Base Camp wasn’t steep, but it felt holy. Flanked by glacial rubble and the kind of silence that vibrates in the bones, I walked slower than usual. Not because I was tired. But because speed felt like sin.

And then without announcement or crescendo it unfolded.

The sanctuary.

A natural amphitheater of peaks, each taller than thought, encircling a flat basin wrapped in snow. Annapurna I, Annapurna South, Hiunchuli, and the silent sentinel, Machapuchare. They didn’t tower. They held space.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t cheer. I just sat on a rock and exhaled everything that wasn’t necessary. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t thinking of what came next. There was no summit. No milestone. Just sky.

The wind here didn’t bite. It blessed.

The sun didn’t burn. It unveiled.

I stayed for hours. I wrote nothing. Until later, over a modest dinner in a stone lodge warmed by tired trekkers and a single gas lamp, I scribbled in my notebook:

“Today, I stood in a place where fear had no foothold.

Today, I didn’t conquer anything.

I remembered something.”

That night, I slept in the belly of the gods.

And for once, I didn’t dream. I didn’t need to.

 

                                                                                                                                   

Upper Mustang : The Desert That Remembers the Wind

Where the Land Doesn’t Speak. It Recites.

 

“In Mustang, you don’t look at the landscape. You listen to it  to wind that has memorized every prayer ever whispered into the dust.”

– The Unwritten Road

 

If Annapurna was a revelation, Mustang was a riddle one whispered in a dialect older than names. A landscape not written in green or blue, but in ochre, rust, ash, and the gray breath of the wind. A landscape that didn’t show itself to be loved, but to be understood and only barely.

I reached Lo Manthang in the belly of a wheezing jeep. The road if you could call it that coiled like an afterthought along the spine of cliffs that looked like they’d been carved by ancient breath. My driver, Pema, drove with one hand on the wheel and the other out the window, feeling the wind like a blind man reading a familiar story.

“Mustang was once a kingdom,” he said. “Some say it still is. Just no crown anymore.”

A Land that Wears Its Age Without Apology

Upper Mustang didn’t greet me with warmth. It met me with wind. Relentless. Holy. It came down the valleys like a sermon, lifting sand and thought in equal measure. The houses here weren’t built they were grown from the stone. Square structures, flat roofs, thick walls smeared with mud and time.

Lo Manthang felt like a ghost still dreaming itself into relevance.

Its alleys were quiet not because no one was home, but because everyone was listening. The prayer flags here didn’t flap. They shook, thrashed with purpose. Every color blue, white, red, green, yellow fluttered like a pulse against the bleached sky.

I wandered the walls of the ancient walled city, boots crunching over gravel older than my surname. Children peeked from doorways. An old man sat cross-legged near a broken chorten, turning a prayer wheel with the same rhythm as his breath.

He didn’t ask me where I was from.

He asked if I had eaten.

The Monastery That Spoke in Silence

That evening, I entered Thubchen Monastery, ducking under a doorway carved with fading dragons. Inside, the air was thick with butter-lamp smoke and the breath of centuries. No chants. No monks visible. Just a novice boy no older than ten who padded across the room with a kettle and two small cups.

He poured me butter tea and gestured to sit.

No words. Just tea. Just being.

We sat together for what felt like an hour. He spun the prayer wheel beside him slowly, eyes closed, lips moving without sound. Not for show. Not for anyone. For time. For repetition. For the soft maintenance of something larger than comprehension.

In that moment, I felt small. And I welcomed it.

The Cave Where the Wind Prays Back

The next morning, I hiked up a shale path to Jhong Cave a five-story meditation cave carved into a cliff face. They say monks once lived here, for years, for decades, in silence. Some emerged enlightened. Others never emerged.

Inside, it smelled of dust, soot, and dry breath. The walls bore handprints in ash. In one chamber, faded charcoal drawings of deities still stared outward. I placed my hand on the stone. It didn’t feel like touching rock it felt like touching memory.

The silence wasn’t empty.

It was full of repetition.

It was alive.

I sat cross-legged for a while. Not meditating. Just matching my breath to the wind’s occasional moan through the cracks. It didn’t feel eerie. It felt exact. As though this was what the cave was waiting for not a visitor, but a listener.

The Truth in the Dust

Back in the village, a woman named Doma offered me lentils and flatbread in a tin bowl. Her hands were cracked, her laughter sudden. When I told her Mustang was beautiful, she waved the comment away like a fly.

“Beauty?” she said. “No. Mustang is real. Real is better.”

I nodded. That night, under a sky sharp with stars, I wrote by candlelight in my notebook:

“This place doesn’t perform. It endures.

Mustang doesn’t tell you what it is.

It waits for you to stop asking.”

Mustang didn’t want to be photographed. It wanted to be respected. It didn’t offer comfort. It offered truth.

And in its wind-chiseled silences, in its smoke-colored prayer rooms, in its vast, scorched openness I finally admitted something to myself:

I had come looking for beauty.

But I stayed… for the humility.

 

Kathmandu ; The City That Still Remembers

Where Chaos Becomes Ceremony, and Dust Turns to Prayer

 

“Not every ending is a return. Sometimes, it’s a remembering of how the beginning felt before the world told you what to seek.”

– The Unwritten Road

 

I came back to Kathmandu not with triumph, but with tenderness.

The dust still clung to the air like old stories. The horns still honked like impatient prayers. The same boys still played carrom in alley corners with a seriousness reserved for saints. But I was different. Not changed in a way you’d spot in a mirror not skinnier, not more tanned but thinned out somehow. Hollowed in the best way. I was no longer searching. I was carrying.

What, I wasn’t sure. Maybe a silence I had earned. Maybe a small sliver of the mountain still humming under my ribs.

I stayed again near Thamel, in a narrow guesthouse that smelled of damp wood and chai. Rajan, the old man at the desk, remembered me or said he did. I asked if the poets and climbers still came.

“Not as many,” he said. “Now we get influencers. But I still keep two rooms aside. Just in case the old kind shows up.”

He handed me a room key with a brass Ganesh tied to the ring. “For obstacles,” he said, “and how you pass through them.”

The Monkey Temple and a Thousand Quiet Observations

The next morning, I climbed the 365 steps to Swayambhunath, that ancient dome watching over Kathmandu like a forgiving parent. The monkeys were still wild, the incense still heady, and the prayer wheels still spun some with reverence, others for the ‘gram.

But the skyline had changed.

Not physically it was still the same sprawl of tin roofs and tangled wires but emotionally. It no longer overwhelmed me. It enveloped me.

At the top, I found a quiet patch of stone and sat cross-legged beside an old woman. She chanted in a hush, holding a string of mala beads like they were keeping her tethered to something real. She didn’t look at me. But I felt something like being seen without being observed.

Across from us, a couple lit a butter lamp. Their fingers touched briefly. Too long for practicality. Too short for show. It was intimate, quiet the kind of touch that doesn’t make it into photos.

A monkey stole a marigold garland and disappeared behind the stupa. I laughed. No one else noticed. Or maybe they did, and they were just used to joy sneaking past like that.

Durbar and the Cracks that Still Carry Grace

Later that afternoon, I wandered down to Durbar Square, where the old temples still stood in their fractured pride. The scars of the 2015 earthquake remained in stone, in memory but so did the strength.

Some of the carvings had crumbled. But not the carvings in people. Woodworkers, barefoot and shirtless, chiseled away at new beams beside piles of rubble, shaping history with calloused reverence. A boy kicked a football near a collapsed shrine. An old man fed pigeons with more care than most people feed themselves.

Kathmandu wasn’t trying to be perfect. It was trying to be whole. There’s a difference.

I ducked into a small street where a woman sold rudraksha beads from a faded cloth mat. No signs. No slogans. Just a quiet presence. I picked a single string unpolished, unassuming.

“For memory,” she said, when I asked what it was for.

“Not fashion,” she added, gently.

I didn’t ask what kind of memory. Some answers aren’t meant to be asked for.

The Rooftop, the Light, and the Weeping You Can’t Post

That evening, I found myself on a rooftop café, a cup of lemon ginger tea cooling in my hand. The sky turned soft, the color of forgiveness. Below, the city did what it always does moved, pulsed, screamed, whispered. A boy balanced plastic bottles on a wire. A girl sang behind closed shutters. A man prayed near his motorcycle before turning the ignition.

I looked down at my hands dusty, cracked, still ink-stained from notes I’d scribbled in Mustang and I felt something rise in my throat.

And I let it.

I wept.

Quietly.

Not for drama.

Not for Instagram.

Just… because.

Not for the beauty though there had been plenty. Not even for the journey though it had reshaped me in ways I hadn’t realized yet. But for something older.

For the part of me that had gone missing long ago lost to deadlines, algorithms, performance, persona and had somehow, in the broken alleys of Kathmandu, found its way home.

Maybe that’s all we ever really want from travel.

Not escape.

But return.

To the version of ourselves that listens again. That believes again. That weeps without apology and walks without rushing.

I left Kathmandu the next morning before sunrise. No fanfare. No grand goodbye.

Just a rudraksha on my wrist,

And a stillness in my chest I hadn’t felt in years.

 

What the Mountains Left Behind

Where the Trail Ends, But the Tether Holds

“You don’t return from the mountains with souvenirs. You return with softer eyes, quieter questions, and a heart that knows how to kneel.”

– The Unwritten Road

 

It’s been weeks since I came down from the mountains from the places where the air thins but the spirit swells.

My backpack lies unpacked in the corner of the room, its zippers half-open like a story mid-sentence. My boots are dusted in silence, still crusted with Himalayan earth and I can’t bring myself to wash them. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

I scroll past the photos on my phone with a strange detachment. They feel flat. Too sharp in color and too clean in frame. They show the peaks, yes. The lodges. The temples. The smiles. But they don’t show the stillness between footfalls. The weight of breath above 4,000 meters. The way silence can feel like companionship when you finally stop resisting it.

People ask me:

“How was Nepal?”

They ask like it’s a souvenir shop. A transactional memory.

And I want to answer them. I do.

But how do you explain a place that wasn’t experienced through language but through bone?

How do you describe a mountain that didn’t speak to you but stared until you blinked first?

Nepal was altitude and ache.

It was lungs burning with thin air and eyes watering from wind that carried more prayer than oxygen.

It was being lost without panic.

Alone without loneliness.

Stripped down and somehow, more complete.

A Pilgrimage Inward

There were moments raw, granular that still shimmer in the soft hours of morning. The woman in Ghandruk who lit a candle for peace even after losing her husband to war. The young monk in Mustang who turned his prayer wheel without needing an audience. The mountain at Annapurna that didn’t arrive suddenly but revealed itself slowly, like truth earned.

The city of Kathmandu that reminded me: the world can still be sacred and chaotic in the same breath.

And then there was me.

Unpacked. Untethered. Listening for something I didn’t know I needed and realizing, perhaps for the first time, that the quiet wasn’t out there. It was inside me all along, just waiting for the noise to dim.

Nepal Didn’t Change Me.

It reminded me.

That I am not what I chase, but what I choose to carry.

That wholeness is not something to seek, but to remember.

That silence isn’t absence it’s invitation.

To kneel.

To soften.

To return.

 

Not All Goodbyes Are Departures

I left Nepal the way I entered it on a flight cutting through clouds that looked less like scenery and more like scripture. But something stayed behind.

Or maybe something came with me.

A thread. A hum.

A fragment of stillness I now wear beneath my shirt like a sacred string no one sees but I always feel.

And I realize now

Nepal was never just geography.

It wasn’t just monasteries, or switchbacks, or stamps in a passport.

It was memory.

It was mirror.

It was a whispered answer to questions I hadn’t yet asked.

So no, I didn’t leave Nepal.

And no, I didn’t discover it either.

I remembered it.

Too late to rush through it.

But just in time to be changed by it.

And every now and then standing in traffic, brushing my teeth, scrolling through a screen I’ll hear something. A bell. A breeze. A footstep behind silence.

And I’ll know:

The mountain is still in me.

And I am still, somehow, on the trail.