United States

I came to the US expecting scale, and the country delivered — but in ways I didn't fully anticipate. The Eastern Sierra stopped me cold on a road trip: that flat, vast basin with sagebrush running to the horizon and a volcanic crater ridge cutting across the blue sky felt nothing like anything I'd seen in Nepal or anywhere else. The light out there in the afternoon is almost white, and the silence is absolute in a way that a Kathmandu street never is.

California kept pulling me in different directions. One day I was standing at the edge of the Torrey Pines cliffs watching paragliders ride the thermals above the Pacific, the sandstone eroding away in orange and gold layers. A few days later I was in Yosemite with El Capitan and Half Dome filling the whole sky at Tunnel View — a view I had seen in photographs my entire life, and it still didn't prepare me for the actual thing. The redwoods at Big Basin were something else entirely: fire-scarred, ancient, looking straight up through them and losing sense of where the ground ends and sky begins.

The helicopter over Manhattan at golden hour was the kind of moment I keep coming back to. The grid of the city, Central Park sitting in the middle of it like a green rectangle someone forgot to build on, the East River catching the last light — from up there the whole place made a strange kind of sense. I also didn't expect to find a Danish windmill village in the middle of Santa Barbara wine country, but Solvang was exactly that, and I ate a pastry and walked the cobbled lanes and felt pleasantly confused about what continent I was on.