The
story
so far.

Albania caught me off guard in the best way. I arrived in Tirana expecting something post-Soviet and grey, but the streets were full of colour — murals climbing old concrete facades, coffee bars spilling onto every pavement, the gold dome of the Resurrection Cathedral catching afternoon light against a cloudy Balkan sky. Skanderbeg Square felt genuinely grand, the bronze horse rearing up with the whole city spread behind it, and the Et'hem Bey Mosque sitting quietly at its edge like it had always been there, which it had.

The bus north to Shkodra changed the mood completely. That early morning on the pedestrian boulevard — the stone paving still wet, the yellow Ottoman-era shopfronts just catching the first flat light, almost no one around — was one of those moments where a place hands itself to you before the day gets going. The white mosque at the end of the boulevard was lit up in that golden way that only happens for about twenty minutes after sunrise. I stood there longer than I needed to.

The food and wine surprised me too. Albanian red wine from the stone-walled cellar I stumbled into in Tirana was proper, earthy, nothing like what I expected from a country most travellers skip. The burek — flaky, seeded, sitting in a pool of white sauce — was the kind of dish that makes you wonder why you'd ever eat anywhere else. Albania is one of those places that doesn't shout about itself, which is exactly why it stays with you.

Austria caught me off guard in the best way. I landed in Vienna expecting imperial grandeur and got exactly that — but also something quieter, something that settles in your chest on a cold evening when the streetlights are bouncing off wet cobblestones and the opera house is glowing amber against a black sky. I remember standing across from the Staatsoper one night, jacket zipped all the way up, just staring at that facade. Coming from Kathmandu, where old buildings often crumble or get swallowed by newer ones, it hit differently to see a city that had simply kept everything intact.

The Christmas market at Schönbrunn was the other thing I wasn't prepared for. That giant lit star arch spelling out 'Willkommen' in gold script, the palace glowing yellow behind it, the smell of glühwein and grilled sausages in the cold air — it was the kind of scene you almost don't believe is real until you're standing right in the middle of it shivering. And St. Stephen's Cathedral at night, washed in purple light during the market season — I kept walking past it just to see it again.

We also drove down to Velden am Wörthersee, and that was a completely different Austria — a lake, bare November trees, a grand yellow hotel sitting right on the waterfront under sharp alpine light. Vienna gets all the attention but that lake region stayed with me. The whole country felt like it had been built by people who genuinely cared about what things looked like, and somehow never stopped caring.

Bosnia caught me off guard in the best way. I came in from the coast not knowing what to expect, and Sarajevo hit differently — Ottoman fountains next to Austro-Hungarian architecture, a minaret framed against a green hillside, the whole city squeezed into a long narrow valley. The blue-hour light on Vijećnica that first evening made the building glow amber and gold against the darkening sky, and I stood there on the empty street just staring at it.

Mostar came next, and the Stari Most is one of those bridges that photographs can't fully prepare you for. Up close, the arch of pale limestone over that impossible turquoise water, the old towers on either bank, the mountains filling the background — it felt ancient and alive at the same time. Then Kravice, which I did not expect to be as wild as it was: a wide curtain of waterfalls dropping into a bright green pool, the mist cooling the air even on a hot afternoon.

Trebinje was quieter — a small town near the border with a very different feel, more Orthodox, more southern European. The monuments in the parks there carry a heavy history of the WWII years, and the old town archway and street murals feel like they belong to a place that hasn't tried to make itself into a tourist destination yet. Bosnia as a whole felt like that: a place still figuring out its own story after everything it has been through, and honest about it.

Dubrovnik hit differently than I expected. I'd seen the photos, the Game of Thrones stuff, the postcards — but nothing quite prepares you for the first time you see those limestone walls rising straight out of the Adriatic, the sea that deep shade of blue-green that almost looks fake. Walking the city walls in the heat of the afternoon, the old town spread below in terracotta and cream, the open water stretching all the way to the horizon — that's the kind of view that stays with you.

The Old Town itself is almost entirely on foot. The main street, Stradun, is polished marble that shines like it's always just been rained on, and the dome of the cathedral sits at the end of it like the whole street was designed to frame it. Off to the sides, the alleys are narrow and dark and cool, with lanterns hanging between the walls and the occasional line of laundry strung overhead. I got genuinely lost a few times and didn't mind at all.

The food was good in a straightforward way — fresh fish, local white wine, fried cheese with cherry tomatoes and sour cream by the sides. I had lunch at a waterfront spot where the sea was right there, centimetres below the terrace, that particular aquamarine that only shows up in shallow Adriatic coves. Croatia didn't try to be anything other than what it is, and that was more than enough.

Prague hit me differently than I expected. Coming from Kathmandu, I thought I had seen old cities, but standing inside the Prague Castle complex and looking up at St. Vitus Cathedral — that level of Gothic detail just carved into stone over centuries — it took a while to process. The sky that day was wide and pale blue, the kind that makes dark stone look even older.

Charles Bridge was the place I kept coming back to. Early in the morning the cobblestones were still wet, the baroque saints lining both sides stood in the mist with the Vltava below and Hradčany rising behind. By afternoon the bridge filled up and got noisy and warm, but I didn't mind. There was something about walking those same stones where traders and kings had crossed for seven hundred years — it just settled into you.

The food stalls around Old Town Square sold trdelník fresh off the coals, the cinnamon sugar still hot when you bit in. I ate one standing in front of the Týn Church with the Astronomical Clock ticking away on my left. The whole afternoon had that quality of a city that knows exactly what it is, not trying to be anything else.

Tallinn caught me completely off guard. I came from Kathmandu expecting grey northern Europe, but the Old Town was this riot of terracotta rooftops and limestone towers, all packed inside medieval walls that somehow survived centuries. Walking those cobblestone lanes on the first afternoon, with the flagstones still warm from the summer sun and seagulls cutting low overhead, I kept stopping every few steps just to look up.

The food and drink culture here is deeply woven into the architecture itself. Restaurants like Olde Hansa operate out of actual medieval buildings — stone vaulted ceilings, wooden beams — and the staff dress the part. Sitting in Town Hall Square with amber Estonian beer in front of me while a seagull dive-bombed the table was one of those absurd, perfect travel moments I didn't plan for. The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral on Toompea Hill was equally disorienting: this enormous Russian Orthodox church with its dark onion domes sitting just above the Lutheran spires of the lower town, two completely different worlds stacked on the same hill.

What stayed with me most was how compact and walkable the whole Old Town is. In an hour you can go from the viewpoints on Patkuli terrace — red roofs stretching to the Baltic — down through the gate towers and out to a quiet street cafe where a bicycle is leaned against the wall and nobody seems to be in any hurry. It felt like a city that knew exactly what it was and wasn't trying to be anything else.

Paris hit differently than I expected. I'd seen thousands of photos of the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame, thought I'd be numb to it all — but standing there on Île de la Cité with the cathedral rising above me, all that carved stone against a cold blue sky, I just stopped and stared for longer than I'd like to admit. There's a weight to Paris you can't prepare for. The Seine was grey and flat, the bare trees were still, and none of that mattered because the city looked exactly like it was supposed to.

I spent most of my time just walking. The street near Thoumieux where the Eiffel Tower appears at the end of the road like something out of a film — that's a real thing, not a curated shot. The city keeps doing that to you. You turn a corner and there's a monument, or you cross a bridge and the ironwork is covered in thousands of padlocks slowly going rusty above the Seine. At the Louvre I stood in the gallery in front of the Mona Lisa longer than most — not because it's big or dramatic, but because you can't quite believe you're looking at the actual thing.

The food was part of it too. I went into a patisserie near the Marais and just stood in front of the macaron display for a solid minute choosing. Ate them walking back along the river, didn't sit down, didn't Instagram the view — just ate and walked and let the city be. That felt like the right way to do Paris.

Greece hit differently from anything else I'd seen before. Santorini was the first stop, and standing on that caldera edge in Fira with the white cubes stacking down the cliff face and the Aegean just sitting there, impossibly blue, so wide it looked fake — I had to keep reminding myself this was real. The air smelled faintly of salt and dry stone, and even at midday with the sun overhead, there was something calm about it. That cruise ship floating far below just made the scale of the whole thing click.

Athens was the opposite of calm — ancient and loud and layered, all at once. Monastiraki square had this energy where you could stand in one spot and see Ottoman, ancient Greek, and modern Athenian architecture within the same eyeline. Then up on the Acropolis hill, looking down at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in that late golden light with the whole city spread out behind it, I genuinely felt small in the best way. The limestone seats have been there since 161 AD. That kind of age is hard to hold in your head.

The food grounded everything. A proper horiatiki with a thick slab of feta and Cretan olive oil poured over it, gyros wrapped tight with fries spilling out, olives in every shade from bright green to near-black heaped in wooden bowls at the market — eating in Greece felt like the whole country was making a point. I left with a bag of olives and a sunburn and a very specific kind of happy.

Iceland was one of those trips where the landscape just keeps hitting you — not once, but over and over, every hour of the drive. We did the Ring Road section through the south coast and I still don't fully believe the things we saw. The black sand beaches, the waterfalls coming straight off mossy cliffs, the glaciers sitting there like they've been patient for ten thousand years. Coming from Kathmandu, where everything feels old and dense and layered, Iceland felt like the earth had just been switched on.

The Blue Lagoon was the first proper stop and it set the tone. That milky blue water surrounded by lava rock, steam rising off it, snow dusting the edges — it looked unreal from the air and felt even stranger to actually sit in. We ended up at the Lava Restaurant that evening and the food matched the setting: small, careful plates, a glass of something cold, and that same blue water glowing through the window behind us.

The thing I keep going back to is the light. Even on grey days the green on those volcanic hills was almost too saturated to be real. A double rainbow appeared over a completely empty road and we just stopped the car in the middle of it. The plane wreck on the black sand south of Vik is one of the strangest things I've seen — just sitting there in the open, slowly rusting, sky going orange behind it. Iceland doesn't try to be dramatic. It just is.

Kosovo caught me off guard in the best way. I came expecting a post-war grey, but Pristina hit differently — the city is loud with colour and opinion, from giant yellow-and-blue letter installations outside the Palace of Youth to murals climbing the sides of apartment blocks. There's this energy here, young and a little defiant, like a country still figuring out its identity on purpose and in public.

The National Library pulled me in the moment I got a rooftop view of it. Those clustered silver domes against the green of the city and the hills behind — I'd never seen anything quite like it. And then a short drive away, Gracanica Monastery, sitting quietly in its compound under a deep blue summer sky, medieval brick arches still standing after 700 years. That contrast alone was worth the trip.

The street art and the statues told me more about Kosovo than any guidebook. The Heroinat monument, the Fehmi Agani sculpture crouched on the pavement, Mother Teresa watching over a Pristina square — they layer their history right out in the open. I left with the feeling that this is a place genuinely proud of where it came from, even if where it's going is still being written.

Liechtenstein was one of those places I almost skipped — it's tiny, wedged between Austria and Switzerland, and I wasn't sure there was enough to fill even a day. I'm glad I went. Vaduz is quiet in the way that only very small capitals can be: clean streets, almost no traffic noise, and the castle sitting up on the cliff watching everything below. The Alps press right up against the town from both sides, so wherever you stand, there's a wall of grey rock and green forest closing in the horizon.

I got a tourist stamp in my passport at the little tourist office — Liechtenstein is one of the few countries that still does this, for a small fee, and I thought it was worth it just as a keepsake. They also sell the princely estate's own Pinot Noir, Herawingert, right there. I bought a bottle, sat with it near the Vaduzer Hof on the main strip, and watched the afternoon light go orange on the yellow facade. Nothing was open particularly late and nothing was particularly cheap, but that wasn't the point.

The best moment was finding the old wooden covered bridge at the Swiss border — you're literally straddling two countries inside it, with the country signs right there on the post. Coming from Kathmandu, where borders feel heavy and complicated, crossing into a country on foot through a wooden bridge felt almost absurd in the best way. Liechtenstein took me about four hours to see properly and I think that's exactly right.

Luxembourg caught me off guard. I came expecting a quiet, forgettable stopover between bigger European cities, and instead found a country that feels like it was assembled from the best parts of a medieval storybook and a modern banking quarter — somehow both at once. The capital's old city sits on dramatic cliffs above river gorges, all sandstone walls and copper spires going dark in the winter light. Walking the cobblestones around the Grand Ducal Palace and Place Guillaume II, I kept stopping just to stare at how intact it all felt, like the centuries had barely touched it.

Vianden was the other surprise. An hour north, up into the Ardennes hills, the town sits right beneath a castle so large and complete it looks unreal from below. The Our river valley was grey and cold when I was there, trees stripped bare, but that only made the stone mass of the castle stand out harder against the sky. Inside, enormous tapestries hang in the halls — the kind that show the full mythology of an era in one frame. And down in the town itself, the streets were almost completely empty, just the odd car navigating past centuries-old facades.

Echternach rounded it out — the oldest town in Luxembourg, with a Romanesque basilica and a Gothic town hall facing each other across a cobbled square. The bare winter trees were still strung with Christmas ornaments, not yet taken down. It felt very local, unhurried, the kind of square where you could sit for two hours over a coffee and feel the whole week slow down. Luxembourg is small, and I think that's exactly its strength — everything is reachable, nothing is overcrowded, and the quiet lets you actually notice the details.

Moldova caught me off guard. I went in expecting grey post-Soviet monotony and came out with full wine glasses and a genuine fondness for the place. Chisinau felt like a city still figuring out what it wants to be — wide Soviet boulevards lined with chestnut trees, a cathedral square that goes quiet in winter, and restaurants serving mamaliga and wine from bottles that have been ageing underground since before I was born. The underground cellars at Cricova were something else entirely: kilometres of tunnels carved into limestone, oak barrels stacked floor to ceiling, the air cold and smelling of earth and fermentation.

Then there is Transnistria, which is its own thing altogether. You cross a checkpoint, your passport gets stamped by a country that no one officially recognises, and suddenly you are in a place that still runs on Soviet aesthetics — Lenin on a plinth, a parliament draped in red-and-green flags, T-34 tanks on pedestals at roundabouts. But then around the corner you find an ornate black iron kiosk in a park, or a white fairy-tale carriage left on a street corner, and the whole place becomes genuinely strange and interesting rather than just grim.

What I keep coming back to is how unhurried it all felt. Moldova is not on anyone's bucket list, and that is exactly why it worked. No crowds, no overpriced tourist menus, just a small country that pours its wine generously and lets you wander.

Montenegro caught me off guard. I came in from Croatia expecting something smaller, quieter, less dramatic — and then the Bay of Kotor appeared and I just stopped moving. That water is an impossible shade of blue-green, the kind you think only exists in edited photos, and the mountains drop straight into it like someone sliced them with a knife. The old walled city of Kotor sits at the foot of those mountains, and climbing the fortress walls above it in the midday heat was genuinely punishing, but then you push through a crumbling stone arch and the entire bay opens up in front of you, framed like a painting.

The old town itself felt like it was designed to confuse you in the best way. Every narrow lane turned into another narrow lane, stone walls pressing close on both sides, terracotta pots dripping greenery from the windows above. The cats own the place — they know it and they show it. One calico was sitting in a shaft of afternoon sun against a limestone wall like it had been placed there for the photograph. Inside the churches, the gold of the icons and the ceiling paint was warm and dim and it smelled like old wood and candle smoke.

I bought a ceramic tile from one of the souvenir stalls in the old town — the "10 Montenegrin Commandments," basically an entire philosophy of rest and avoidance of work. I laughed at it in the shop and then thought about it the whole ferry ride to Perast, watching St. George Island drift past, just a little church and a row of dark cypresses sitting out in the middle of the bay. Montenegro moves at its own speed. I think I understand why now.

Skopje hit me hard before I even left Macedonia Square. The square is an exercise in overstatement — colonnaded museums, colossal bronze warriors on horseback, fountains ringing with bronze figures — all of it new, all of it insisting on an ancient identity. I walked around it in the early morning when the stone was still cool and the light came flat off the mountains behind the city. At that hour, with nobody around, it felt oddly moving instead of absurd.

Ohrid was a different North Macedonia entirely. The road from Skopje drops you into a world of old stone, vine-covered walls, and that lake — blue in a way that doesn't feel real until you're standing at the cliff's edge above the Church of St. John at Kaneo and realising the water actually goes that colour. The church is tiny, Byzantine, crumbling just enough to feel honest. The air smelled of pine and heat and something faintly mineral from the lake.

The food was the part I wasn't prepared for. I sat down for what I thought would be a quick meal and got a wooden board the size of a cartwheel piled with cevapi, kofte, roasted peppers, ajvar, and things I couldn't name. The restaurant was strung with warm bulbs and smelled of charcoal. The Macedonians eat like they're in no hurry and I respect that completely.

Krakow was the kind of place I kept extending my stay in. The Main Square alone could eat up a whole day — that wide expanse of cobblestone with the Cloth Hall sitting in the middle of it, the Town Hall Tower watching over everything, and Eros Bendato crouching in front of it all like it has something to say. I'd sit at one of the outdoor tables with a coffee and just watch the light move across those cream-and-terracotta facades.

The trip to Auschwitz changed the whole mood of Poland for me. Standing at that iron gate and reading those words hammered into it — there's no way to prepare yourself. The brick barracks, the gravel paths, the absolute quiet of the place. I came back to Krakow that evening and walked through Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter, without saying much. Ended up at Singer, a bar built around antique sewing machines as tables, red wine in hand, walls thick with old photographs.

Down in the Wieliczka Salt Mine, everything carved out of grey salt — the Last Supper, nativity scenes, whole chapels — felt almost impossible. I kept running my hand along the walls just to confirm it was real. Poland moves between beauty and weight like nowhere else I've been, and that contrast is exactly what stays with you.

Bucharest surprised me in a way I wasn't ready for. I'd read about it being this grand, slightly crumbling city, but standing in the middle of it — under that wide summer sky, the heat pressing down on the boulevards — it felt more alive than the descriptions ever suggested. The Arcul de Triumf rose out of the morning light like it had all the time in the world, the Romanian tricolour catching a faint breeze.

What stayed with me was the contrast. From up high you could see how much green the city holds — Herastrau Park wrapping around the lake, the skyline beyond it all soft and low. Then you'd walk into Caru' cu Bere and find yourself inside something out of another century entirely, arched ceilings painted in deep greens and golds, carved wood columns going up and up. I sat in there for way too long, eating more than I planned.

The Palace of the Parliament is one of those things you have to stand in front of to really believe. Photos don't prepare you for the sheer scale of it — it just goes on and on, all that white stone baking in the sun. Bucharest is a city that keeps making you recalibrate your sense of scale, and I left it feeling like I'd only just started to understand it.

Belgrade hit differently from every other European city I'd visited — there was a rawness to it, an energy that didn't try to package itself for tourists. The first afternoon I walked down to the Sava, the old fortress up on the hill turning amber in the late-day light, and I just stood there watching the two rivers stretch out below. It felt enormous, and quiet, and completely alive at the same time.

The city runs on trams and coffee and an almost defiant local pride. Those old red trams clank through wide boulevards past buildings wrapped in climbing vines, and the murals on the side streets are full of attitude — giant black-and-white figures, dripping colour blocks, half-finished scenes that somehow say more than a finished painting would. The food followed the same logic: a wooden board arrived loaded with cured meats, soft cheese balls, little fried things, and bread still warm from somewhere, and the whole table just went at it.

I rented a bike one evening and ended up near the Cathedral on a corner where the street opened up and the church tower caught the last orange light above the rooflines. That's the moment I keep coming back to — not a sight, not a landmark, just a Belgrade corner at dusk with the trams going past and the whole city buzzing somewhere just out of frame.

Ljubljana caught me off guard. I'd been passing through on the way to Lake Bled and somehow ended up spending most of the day just wandering the riverside, crossing the Dragon Bridge again and again, looking up at those four green dragons with the cathedral domes framed perfectly behind them. The city is small enough that you feel like you know it after a single afternoon, but odd enough — between the Metelkova commune with its grotesque sculptures hanging off the walls and the bronze figures scattered through the squares — that you keep stopping and wondering how this place became what it is.

The drive to Bled was one of those moments where I genuinely had to pull over. Looking down from the viewpoint at the lake with that tiny island church sitting in the middle of it, the Julian Alps rising behind in layers of grey and green — nothing I'd seen online had prepared me for the actual scale and stillness of it. Bohinj was even quieter, the water flat and cold-looking with the old stone bridge and the church at the edge of the valley. Both places felt like they existed slightly outside normal time.

The food in Ljubljana was its own discovery. I sat down somewhere near the old town and ordered a plate of cured meats and dumplings without knowing exactly what would arrive, and it was exactly right — heavy and honest, with a glass of Brda red from the wine region near the Italian border. Slovenia is the kind of place that takes about four days to start making sense, and by then you already don't want to leave.

Stockholm hit me differently to any city I'd visited before. Everything felt deliberate — the way the water cuts between the islands, the way the old brick buildings hold their colour even on an overcast afternoon. I spent most of my time just walking between Gamla Stan and Södermalm, getting lost in alleys, stopping at corners I hadn't planned to stop at.

The old town is smaller than it looks on a map but every lane has something — a graffiti-covered passage that opens onto a cobblestone square, the cathedral tower rising above ochre walls, a whisky bar with a taxidermied deer standing outside like a bouncer. The food was genuinely good too. Swedish meatballs with lingonberry and mashed potato at a proper restaurant, not a tourist trap — that's a plate I still think about.

The best moment was the rooftop at golden hour, looking out at the city as the sky turned orange behind City Hall and Riddarholmen. The railway tracks below, the church spire glowing, the water catching the last light — it felt like the whole city had been arranged for that one half hour. Stockholm is the kind of place that makes you want to stay a little longer than you planned.

Istanbul hit differently from the moment I landed. The city doesn't let you settle — there's always a dome on the horizon, always a ferry horn across the water, always a smell of sesame bread or grilled corn pulling you somewhere. I spent most of my time just walking, getting turned around in Sultanahmet, ending up at the Bosphorus shore without meaning to.

Topkapi Palace was the one place I could have stayed for a full day. The clock collection alone — all those gilded European timepieces gifted to Ottoman sultans — had me pressing my face against the display cases. And then you step out onto the terrace and the strait opens up in front of you, container ships moving in slow motion, the Asian shore sitting low and hazy across the water.

The rooftop terrace above Sultanahmet, with the kilim cushions spread out and the New Mosque sitting in the middle distance, is the kind of spot that ruins you for ordinary cafes. I had tea up there as the light went orange, watching the Bosphorus Bridge glow in the distance. The baklava from the shop near the Grand Bazaar, the mushroom soup in that flower-covered restaurant, the pistachio dondurma outside Galata Tower — Istanbul fed me well and I was happy to let it.

I came to Vatican City on a cold morning when the light was still low and the cobblestones were wet. Walking into St. Peter's Square for the first time, I didn't expect the scale of it — the colonnade wrapping around like two arms, the obelisk dead centre, and that facade rising at the end of it all. From Kathmandu I'm used to temples that feel intimate, human-sized. This was something different: architecture that wants you to feel small on purpose.

I climbed up inside the dome, which I hadn't planned to do, and that view from the top stopped me cold. The whole oval of the square laid out below, and then Rome spreading in every direction to the mountains on the horizon. The city looked ancient and endless at once. Inside the basilica, I kept stopping at the sculpture — the baldachin over the altar is this enormous bronze canopy, gilded and twisted, and you stand under it and your neck cranes back and there's still more going on above you. The papal tombs and the saints carved into the nave walls each had their own weight and drama, marble drapery folded so convincingly you half expect it to move.

I stayed until dark that night and walked along the Tiber back toward Castel Sant'Angelo. Seeing it flood-lit and reflected in the river, I understood why this city has held onto people's imaginations for so long. Back home we have our own old things, our own sacred geometries. But standing on that riverbank in the cold air watching the fortress glow against the dark sky, I felt genuinely far from Kathmandu — and glad for it.

Antigua hit differently from the moment I stepped off the ship. The air was thick and warm, carrying salt and something faintly sweet, and the water colour — that impossible flat turquoise — looked almost fake against the white sand. Coming from Kathmandu, where the closest thing to a beach is a riverbank, I kept stopping just to stare at it. The beaches here genuinely change the way you think about what a coastline can look like.

But what surprised me more was how much history the island holds quietly alongside all that beauty. The Anglican Cathedral in St. John's stands there weathered and cracked, its stone walls gone almost silver-grey from decades of sun and humidity. The old locomotive outside the museum, number 15 painted that loud shade of green, used to haul sugarcane across the island — now it just sits there in the heat while tourists like me lean against it for photos. Cricket is religion here; the Viv Richards Stadium told me that before I even walked inside.

The high point — literally — was climbing up toward Shirley Heights and looking back over English Harbour. The whole south coast spread out below: sailboats dotting the bay, the hills dry and brown-green, the water shifting from pale aqua near shore to deep blue at the horizon. That view made the whole trip feel earned. I cracked a Carib on the beach afterward and thought, yeah, this place deserves its reputation.

Aruba hit differently from the moment I landed. The trade winds are constant — you feel them the second you step outside — and the sky is this deep, almost electric blue that I kept trying to photograph but could never quite capture. Eagle Beach with its famous divi-divi tree was the first thing I wanted to see, and standing there with the powdery white sand and that bent, wind-sculpted tree framing the turquoise water, I understood why people come back to this island year after year.

We rented ATVs and rode out to the California Lighthouse on the northwest tip — the terrain out there is dry, rocky, completely different from the resort strip. The lighthouse is bleached white against a hard blue sky and the wind at the top is strong enough to knock you sideways. Downtown Oranjestad has this Dutch colonial architecture painted in pinks and yellows that looks almost theatrical, and the Royal Plaza building is the kind of thing you photograph just because you can't believe it's real. Renaissance Island was another world — a private beach where flamingos just wade around in the shallows like it's nothing.

Nights in Aruba go late. We found a rooftop bar in Oranjestad where a cruise ship sat lit up in the harbour like a floating hotel, and the warm air smelled like the sea. The food was good too — proper Caribbean plates, slow-cooked meat with rice and beans, nothing rushed. Aruba doesn't ask you to do much, and that's the point.

Bolivia was the one that broke my brain a little. Coming from Kathmandu I thought I knew high altitude — but La Paz sits in a canyon at nearly 3,700 metres and the air just hits different, thin and cold and somehow electric. The city drops steeply into a bowl of orange and brick-red buildings, and when you eat at a rooftop place at dusk the whole basin glows like a coal fire. I kept stopping in the street just to look at things: a building clad entirely in Iron Man armour, a gorge of pale clay spires cutting right through the urban edge, a market stall selling Singani next to flamingo sculptures.

Then there is Uyuni. I had seen pictures of the salt flat my whole life and I still wasn't ready for the actual scale of it — the way the white crust stretches to every horizon with nothing breaking it, and the sky above is a perfect hard blue. It got cold fast once the sun dropped, the kind of cold that makes your fingers ache in minutes, but the light at that hour turned the whole flat into a mirror of gold and copper. We set a table out there in the middle of nothing for dinner, two wine glasses and a checked cloth, and it was absurd and perfect.

The Cementerio de Trenes just outside Uyuni town is a different kind of place — rows of rusted locomotive hulks slowly sinking into the grit under a hard sun. The metal has gone deep orange and the boilers have split open. There is something very quiet about it, not sad exactly, just slow. Bolivia felt like that in general: things moving at their own pace, on their own terms, completely indifferent to what you expected.

Canada hit differently from the moment I landed. The scale of everything — the sky, the mountains, the water — makes you realise how small your frame of reference has been. Banff was the one that got me. Standing at the top of Sulphur Mountain with the whole Bow Valley spread out below, the green-grey river cutting through the valley floor and the Rockies stacked up in every direction, I just stood there for a long time not saying anything. Then we drove out to Lake Minnewanka and the water was this cold flat blue-green under a half-cloudy sky, and those peaks lined up behind it like walls.

Niagara was a completely different kind of overwhelming. Taking a helicopter over Horseshoe Falls was the decision of the trip — from up there you can finally see the whole shape of it, the curve of the Canadian falls, the white chaos of the water churning into that turquoise-green gorge, the tourist boats looking like toys below. From ground level the mist gets in your face and you can feel the vibration through the railing, but from the air you understand why it matters.

Calgary surprised me. I expected a quiet oil town but the downtown core has these sharp glass towers going up against a bright Alberta sky, flower baskets hanging off the buildings, and the streets feel easy and open. It was a good city to just walk around in without a plan. Canada is one of those places where you keep thinking you've seen the highlight and then the next thing is just as good.

Colombia hit me differently from the moment I landed in Cartagena. The old city is all pastel-coloured walls and carved wooden balconies spilling over with flowers, and the heat sits on you like a warm hand. I spent my evenings on a rooftop watching the twin domes of San Pedro Claver catch the last pink light while the Caribbean shimmered beyond the walls — that image has stayed with me longer than almost anything else from this whole trip.

Medellín felt like a completely different country. The city fills an entire valley, and at night you can stand on the hillside and watch it light up from the bottom to the ridge like someone slowly turning on a switchboard. The comunas — those brick neighbourhoods stacked up the slopes — carry a weight of history that you feel just standing there. The street murals down below in El Centro are massive and unapologetic, the kind of art that stops you mid-step.

Guatapé was the surprise. I climbed El Peñón early enough that the clouds were still low over the lake, and when I reached the top the whole valley opened up — a thousand green islands scattered across the water, stretching to every horizon. I stood there for a long time. The food in Medellín that evening — whole grilled fish and chicha at La Fogata — felt like the right way to close the day. Colombia gets under your skin fast.

Cuba hit me before I even landed — from the plane window I could see the coastline dissolving into that unreal turquoise-green water, islands scattered like dark shadows just beneath the surface. Nothing prepares you for the colour of this place from above.

Havana is a city that feels like it got stuck in a specific afternoon in 1958 and decided to stay there. The colonial facades are half crumbling, half gorgeous — cream and ochre peeling in long strips — and then a cherry-red convertible rolls past and the whole scene tips into something almost dreamlike. Riding in one of those open-top almendrones through the narrow streets of Old Havana, the buildings leaning in on both sides, the salt air mixing with exhaust, I kept thinking I'd imagined this city first somewhere and now I was actually inside it.

What got me most was the Plaza de la Revolución — the giant steel outlines of Che and Camilo on the ministry walls, the Jose Marti obelisk cutting straight up into the sky, all that open concrete baking in the midday sun. Quiet in a heavy kind of way. And then there are the little bars with cigar boxes nailed to the walls and hand-painted Coca-Cola murals that haven't changed since before my parents were born. Cuba doesn't try to be anything — it just is, completely, and that's what makes it so hard to leave.

Santo Domingo hit different from the moment I stepped into the Zona Colonial. The streets are narrow and sun-bleached, the stone walls are five centuries old, and everything about the place reminds you that this is where the New World began. Walking from the cathedral to the Alcázar, past iron lamp posts and walls draped in bougainvillea, I kept thinking — Kathmandu has old streets too, but nothing quite like this, where the cobblestones go all the way back to Columbus.

The fort along the Malecón gave the best view I found in the city. You sit on that warm rust-coloured stone above the highway, the Caribbean stretching out ahead and the Santo Domingo skyline spreading behind you, and it feels like the city is caught between two worlds — the colonial past crammed into one corner and the modern sprawl pushing outward in every direction. Up on a rooftop somewhere in the middle of it all, you can see both at once.

The food was a whole thing on its own. I ate lunch right on the edge of the ocean, the waves crashing maybe ten metres away, with sancocho and a grilled platter in front of me. Dinner one night was in a candlelit colonial courtyard in the Zona Colonial, the kind of place where the walls are thick and the wine is cold and you forget what time zone you're in. The DR surprised me — I came for a quick trip and left wanting more time.

El Salvador caught me off guard — I went in knowing almost nothing, and came out thinking it might be the most underrated country in Central America. The colonial towns alone are worth the trip: Suchitoto sitting up on a hill with its terracotta roofs and church towers framed by mountains, Ataco with cobblestone lanes and coloured umbrella canopies overhead. The light in the afternoon has this thick, golden quality that makes every yellow wall glow.

The volcanoes are what really got me. Standing on the rocky ridge of Santa Ana, looking across at the perfect cone of Izalco rising out of the green valley, the whole landscape felt raw and geological in a way that Nepal never quite prepared me for. And the crater lake at the top — that unnatural acid-green colour sitting in all that grey stone — I kept staring at it trying to make sense of the colour.

The food, the coffee, the pace of it — El Salvador moves slowly in the best way. Sitting inside Casa de la Abuela in Suchitoto with a layered coffee and a colourful tablecloth, rain just starting outside, I could have stayed the whole afternoon. The Pacific coast was the last stop — palm trees, a red-roofed villa, waves rolling in loud and constant. I left wanting more time.

Guatemala hit differently from the moment I landed. Antigua is this compact colonial city ringed by volcanoes on every side — you walk the cobblestone streets and every time a road opens up at an intersection, there's a cone of dark ash or green forest staring back at you. The yellow facade of La Merced, the crumbling arches of earthquake-wrecked churches, the Santa Catalina arch framing Agua volcano at the end of 5a Avenida — I kept stopping to just stand there.

We did Pacaya, which is a proper active volcano. The lava fields near the top are loose and black and nothing grows on them. It smells faintly of sulphur and the wind cuts cold up there. Standing at the base of that perfect dark cone with clouds wrapping around the peak, I felt very small in a way that Himalayan treks also give me — except here the mountain could genuinely spit fire at you any moment.

The food and drink culture surprised me. Ilegal Mezcal is made just outside Antigua, and trying it at a little bar with a bicycle parked against the wall felt like being let in on something local. Cerveceria 14 does craft beer in an open garden under the volcanoes — we sat there as the sky went dark grey and the mountains disappeared into cloud, and it was one of those evenings where you stop checking your phone. Guatemala is not a place you rush through.

Mexico hit differently from the moment I arrived. The Pacific side pulled me straight to Valle de Guadalupe — this dry, sun-bleached wine valley in Baja California where every restaurant sits open to the desert and the vines grow low and dusty in the heat. Lunch there wasn't just eating; it was sitting under a big umbrella with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc while a mountain ridge cut into the blue sky behind the rows of grapes. I hadn't expected wine country to feel this raw and unhurried.

Then the Caribbean side — Cozumel. I rented a bicycle and just rode. The coastal road wraps around the island and the water is that impossible shade of turquoise that looks fake in photos but is completely real when you're there with the salt wind in your face. One evening I sat on a concrete jetty as the sun dropped into the horizon, the sky going orange and deep pink, sailboats bobbing in the distance. That blue bicycle leaning beside me felt like the right prop for that moment.

Chichen Itza was the thing I'd seen in textbooks since school — and standing in front of El Castillo, the actual stone pyramid, still got to me. The scale of it, the precision of every stepped tier under that open Yucatan sky, made Kathmandu's own ancient temples feel like something I share with these builders across centuries. Mexico kept doing that — moving between ancient and alive, desert and sea, a stone grill with a perfect steak and fish tacos eaten off a paper plate in front of a shark mural.

Asunción surprised me in a way I hadn't expected. Coming from Kathmandu, I thought I knew what a crowded, layered capital felt like — but this one had a different weight to it. The heat sat heavy the moment I stepped out, the kind that makes the whole city feel slightly slowed down, and the streets around the old centro had this mix of grand colonial stone and peeling paint that I found genuinely interesting. Nothing felt polished for tourists. It felt like a city that was just living its life.

I spent most of my time on foot around Plaza de la Constitución and the waterfront. The Palacio de los López — that pink presidential palace — was right there behind the big ASUnción sign, and I stood in that open plaza for longer than I planned, just taking in how strange and calm it felt for a capital. The Panteón de los Héroes was the one that really got me though. Outside, it's this domed neoclassical mass that looks almost too formal for the surrounding streets. Inside, the geometry of the arches, the tiled floors, the dim coloured light coming through the dome — it was one of the quietest places I've been in a long time.

Food-wise, I ate at an outdoor restaurant where the trees came right over the table and the afternoon light filtered through green. The plates were heavy — proper Paraguayan portions — and the whole thing, a glass of local wine included, cost less than I'd spend on lunch back home. That's the thing about Paraguay: it doesn't shout about anything. It just sits there, doing its own thing, and if you slow down enough, it's a really good place to be.

Puerto Rico hit differently from the moment the plane banked over the Caribbean — that water below is an almost unreal shade of turquoise, shallow reefs visible right through it from 30,000 feet. Landing in San Juan felt like stepping into something between a Latin American city and a tropical island, all at once.

Most of my time ended up in Old San Juan, which is small enough to walk end to end but dense with things to stop at. The cobblestone streets are uneven blue-grey adoquines that ring under your shoes, the buildings are painted in terracotta and mustard and cream, and the whole place sits right on the water with the Atlantic on one side and the bay on the other. Castillo San Felipe del Morro is the obvious centrepiece — that wide green lawn rolling up to the fort walls with the lighthouse sitting on top, the wind constant and strong off the ocean. I spent longer than I expected just lying on that grass.

The food was a highlight I hadn't really prepared for — mofongo stuffed with shrimp, grilled fish, thick red bean soup, all of it heavier and more satisfying than I expected from somewhere so warm. The real ending to each day, though, was the sunset from the coastal hill near El Morro. The sky went orange and gold over the Atlantic, palm trees silhouetted against it, the old city quiet behind. That's the image that stayed with me.

Saint Lucia hit differently from the moment the ship docked. The Pitons — those two volcanic cones — are everywhere you look from Soufriere, and no matter how many times you glance up at them they still feel unreal. The light here has this thick, tropical quality, like the whole island is slightly overexposed. The waterfront promenade at Soufriere smelled of rain-damp brick and salt air, and the clouds were stacking up behind Petit Piton in that dramatic Caribbean way that makes you feel like the weather is performing for you.

I wandered through the craft markets along the harbour and it was sensory overload in the best way — rows of Bounty rum miniatures, hand-carved wooden masks, ceramic mugs printed with Saint Lucia's name, little toy planes made of local wood. The vendors were easy-going, not pushy at all, and the whole place had the feel of an island that knows exactly what it is and isn't trying to be anything else. The Marigot Bay coconut liqueur bottles lined up in a row caught my eye — I ended up buying one.

The drive through Castries gave me a different side of the island — the pyramid roof of Pointe Seraphine rising out of the waterfront, the steel sculpture by the harbour roundabout catching the afternoon light through the palm fronds. Saint Lucia is small enough that you can hold most of it in your head by the end of a single day, but every corner you turn throws something at you that you weren't expecting.

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.

Armenia caught me off guard in the best way. I'd come expecting old churches and apricot trees, and I got both — but what I didn't expect was how raw and quiet everything felt. At Odzun and Haghpat, the pink tuff stone just sits there on the hillside, ancient and unfussy, with the Debed Canyon dropping away behind it and big clouds rolling in from the north. Standing inside those arches, the air smells like damp grass and old stone.

The drive through Lori Province was something else — winding roads, sudden drops into green gorges, Soviet war monuments appearing out of nowhere beside a wheat field. That MiG jet under its concrete canopy near Alaverdi felt like a time capsule nobody had touched in thirty years. Armenia carries its Soviet chapter openly; it doesn't hide it or rush past it.

Yerevan's Vernissage market on a weekend afternoon was where everything loosened up — old rubles, Chinese jiao, Bangladeshi taka all clipped side by side on a blanket, waiting for someone to take them home. And then there's the brandy. Armenian brandy is not a tourist gimmick; it's genuinely something the country is proud of, and rightly so. A 3-year V.S. poured in a bare cafe with iron chairs and marble floors tastes exactly like the place feels — straightforward, a little serious, worth your full attention.

Bangladesh caught me off guard in the best way. I came expecting a flat, crowded delta and left with memories of faded pink palaces, Armenian churches half-buried in graffiti-covered graves, and rickshaw murals so detailed they felt like paintings in a gallery — except they were just on a street wall in Old Dhaka.

The food alone was worth the trip. A small bowl of fuchka eaten under a tree somewhere near the waterfront — that sharp, sour tamarind water flooding the crispy shell — is the kind of thing you think about on the flight home. The evenings got stranger and more fun; one bar had a full-sized car mounted to the ceiling above a roulette wheel, and I sat there with a cold Hunter Beer just trying to take it all in.

What I keep coming back to is Old Dhaka. The Armenian Church standing quietly in its walled compound, Ahsan Manzil glowing that impossible shade of pink against a hazy sky, the Durga Puja pandals lit up at night with their painted gods. Dhaka moves fast and loud, but every now and then it stops and shows you something that has been there for a very long time.

Cambodia hit differently from the moment I arrived in Siem Reap. The heat was thick and the air smelled of rain and old stone, and before I'd even settled in I was already out at Angkor — walking the long causeway toward that main facade, staring up at the five towers and genuinely not knowing what to say. No photo prepares you for the scale of it. The sandstone goes dark grey under overcast sky and the whole complex just sits there in total silence except for the wind through the palm trees.

Ta Prohm was the one that got under my skin the most. Those silk-cotton trees have forced their roots through every crack in the walls over centuries, and standing underneath them felt genuinely eerie — roots as thick as a man's torso wrapped around carved doorframes, the canopy cutting the light into thin white slices. Bayon was the other surprise: dozens of stone faces carved into every tower, and you only notice them gradually as you walk closer through the rubble-strewn grounds.

Phnom Penh was a different pace entirely. I went out late one night and found the Independence Monument lit up gold against a deep blue sky, fountains going, the Cambodian flag catching the breeze. The food throughout the whole trip was something I wasn't expecting to love as much as I did — green curry, papaya salad, spring rolls with peanut sauce. Simple places, good food, the kind of meal where you just sit and keep ordering.

Georgia caught me off guard. I came expecting wine and old churches, and yes, those things are everywhere — but what I didn't expect was how the whole city of Tbilisi sits on top of itself, layer after layer: ancient stone, Soviet concrete, glass bridges, sulfur baths, all crammed into river gorges and hillsides. Standing at the Mtatsminda viewpoint, with the Kura winding through the city below and the Caucasus somewhere in the haze to the north, I kept thinking it looked like Kathmandu — chaotic, layered, alive — but warmer and drier and somehow more at ease with itself.

The food hit hard from the first meal. Khinkali are not just dumplings — eating them wrong (biting in before the broth runs out) is apparently a crime, and every Georgian will tell you so with great affection. The Adjarian khachapuri came out looking almost too dramatic on its wooden board, a boat of bread and molten cheese with a runny egg cracked into the middle. And then there was the wine, which Georgia claims to have invented eight thousand years ago. Standing in a winery holding a bottle of Kindzmarauli, the sweet red that Stalin supposedly loved, I decided not to argue.

What stayed with me most was the small stuff: the bronze tamada statue on the cobblestones raising his horn to nobody in particular, the Leaning Clock Tower that tilts at a confident angle and nobody seems to care, the giant bike sculpture rusting above a highway overpass with a glass hotel tower behind it. Georgia keeps putting strange, stubborn things in your path. The churches are ancient and the details in the carved bronze doors are extraordinary. You walk up to them and feel the weight of something very old and very sure of itself.

India was the kind of trip that kept pulling me somewhere new every few hours. From the Rajasthan heat bouncing off pink sandstone in Jaipur to the cool stone corridors of Hampi's ruins, nothing quite sits still here. There's a scale to everything — the palaces, the temples, the statues — that makes you feel small in the best way, like you're standing inside a story that started a thousand years before you arrived.

The south was different from what I expected. Mysore at night, with the palace wrapped in a hundred thousand lights, looked almost unreal — like a film set, except the air smelled of jasmine and the whole city had come out to sit on the lawns in front of it. Hampi was the one that got under my skin most, though. Walking through those red boulder-strewn ruins in the dry heat, carved columns going on and on in every direction, it was hard to believe the whole place was just out in the open under an ordinary afternoon sky.

The Nilgiris hills were the exhale at the end of it all — red dirt roads, eucalyptus everywhere, the air suddenly cold, and a fresh coconut handed through a jeep window somewhere along the way. I went into India expecting noise and colour, which I got, but I didn't expect just how much of it would feel this quiet when I was standing right inside it.

Israel hit differently from anything I'd expected. Jerusalem was the first jolt — you walk through the Old City and suddenly the centuries are all stacked on top of each other. Crusader stone underfoot, Byzantine mosaics overhead, the call to prayer echoing off the same walls where church bells ring ten minutes later. Standing at the Western Wall and then looking up at the golden dome of the Rock on the same terrace felt genuinely surreal — like two worlds occupying the exact same ground, somehow not cancelling each other out.

The road south to the Dead Sea was its own kind of revelation. The landscape turns bone-dry fast — pale cliffs, cracked earth, the occasional lone palm. Then you come over a ridge and there it is: that flat blue mirror sitting 420 metres below sea level, ringed by brown hills fading into Jordan on the far shore. We stopped at a bar that proudly calls itself the lowest drinking spot on Earth, which felt like exactly the right way to mark the moment. And yes, I floated — just lay back in that impossibly salty water with a magazine, horizon stretching out, not a current pulling me anywhere.

The street art in the Negev was the surprise I hadn't planned for. Some stretch of flat-roofed buildings completely covered in murals — bold colours, unexpected faces, the kind of work that makes you slow down. Israel kept doing that: just when I had a version of it fixed in my head, something else showed up to complicate it, and I was glad.

Jordan hit me differently from any other country in the Middle East. Petra was the obvious reason to come, but it kept surprising me — every time I thought I'd seen the best of it, there was another carved facade around the next bend, another staircase cut into the cliff leading somewhere quieter. The hike up to the Monastery took about an hour of steep rock steps and I was sweating through my jacket, but when the building finally opened up in front of me against that blue sky, the scale of it just didn't make sense. How do you carve something that big out of solid rock?

The Petra by Night experience was something I hadn't planned for but ended up being the thing I talk about most. Hundreds of paper lanterns lit along the Siq, and then the Treasury glowing purple and green and blue in the dark — no crowds really visible, just silence and coloured light on two-thousand-year-old stone. Sitting cross-legged on the ground in that canyon listening to a Bedouin musician play, the cold air coming in off the mountains — it's one of those moments that doesn't compress into a caption.

Outside Petra, Jordan felt wide open. Driving through the desert past wind turbines spinning in empty sand, or standing on the ridge above Petra with the canyon falling away on all sides and the Jordanian flag catching the wind — the country is physically huge and mostly quiet. Amman surprised me too, especially the King Abdullah Mosque with its enormous blue dome. The food was another story: hummus, lentil soup, warm khubz straight off the griddle, mansaf on the side. I ate well every single day.

Vientiane hit me differently than I expected. Coming from the chaos of Bangkok, I thought any capital would feel hectic, but this one moves at its own pace — wide avenues half-empty, temples sitting quietly in the afternoon heat, the Mekong just a short walk away. The Patuxai arch caught me at dusk on my first evening and I just stood there on the platform watching the sky go pink and orange behind it. That moment felt very still.

The temples were the real reason I lingered. Pha That Luang's gold is almost aggressive in the afternoon sun — it doesn't glow so much as blaze. Nearby wats had a different register: deep red rooftops, white stucco walls, mythological statues frozen mid-story in the courtyards. At Buddha Park out on the edge of town, the concrete figures have this weathered, almost unsettling quality — hundreds of gods and demons tangled together in the long grass. I spent a couple of hours there just walking between them.

Food-wise I ended up at a local place where the pho came with a full plate of fresh herbs and a side of dumplings I didn't order but was very glad appeared. That evening I found a rooftop bar and ordered something cold and yellow and watched the last of the light drain out of the sky over the city. Laos didn't try to impress me. It just was what it was, and that was enough.

Flying into the Maldives, you look down from the plane and the atolls look almost fake — like someone dropped teal paint into the middle of the Indian Ocean. The water is that specific shade of blue-green that you only see in screensavers back home in Kathmandu, and then you land and it's actually real, right there under your feet.

Most of the trip was built around water. The overwater bungalows sit on stilts above a lagoon so clear you can see the coral through the floorboards. I spent one morning just lying on the deck with my feet up watching clouds roll over the bungalows — nothing urgent, nowhere to be. The stingrays in the shallows didn't care about me at all, which was both reassuring and slightly humbling. Below the surface, nurse sharks cruised slow and unbothered through schools of fish while I kicked around trying not to knock into anything.

The pace here is completely different from anywhere else I've been. Even the heron on the beach moved like it had nowhere to be. Coming from a landlocked city of mountains and fog, I wasn't prepared for how much of this place would just be open sky, flat horizon, and that constant low sound of water moving against sand.

Nepal is the place I keep coming back to even though I grew up here — or maybe because of that. There's something about standing at Boudhanath, watching the city spread out in every direction from the stupa's white dome, that resets you. The air smells of incense and dust and something old, and the morning light turns the whole place gold before it gets busy. Bhaktapur is the same — those tiered pagodas and carved wooden lattices have been standing for centuries and they still look like they're daring the sky.

The mountains are what most people come for, and honestly, they're right to. I've been up to the Everest region and to Mustang, and both times the scale caught me off guard — the way the Himalayas just sit there, massive and white, while the valley below carries on in green and brown. The eroded canyon walls of Mustang look almost alien, all those vertical ridges carved by wind and time. And standing on the snowfield near EBC with Nuptse and Lhotse filling the whole frame behind the helicopter — that morning was so cold the inside of my nose froze, but I didn't want to leave.

Back in Kathmandu, the rhythm is different. A good espresso at a cafe in Thamel, a plate of steamed momos with that tomato-chilli dip, a full dal bhat thali with every side dish you can eat — this is how I slow down. The city has chaos and colour and contradictions, but it always feels like mine.

Manila hit me differently than I expected. I'd imagined something tropical and easy, but the city is layered — colonial stone walls from the 1500s sitting a few kilometres from glass towers in BGC that would look at home in Singapore or Dubai. I spent a morning in Intramuros walking the old fort, where the air felt heavy and damp, and the moss-covered walls swallowed up the city noise completely. Then an afternoon in Bonifacio Global City where the streets were wide and clean and the buildings caught the afternoon sun like mirrors.

The Manila American Cemetery stopped me cold. I wasn't expecting to feel much — just another historical site on the list — but those rows of white crosses stretching out under enormous rain trees, with high-rises rising in the background, made the scale of what happened here very real. The grass was so green it almost didn't look real, and the whole place was quiet in a way that felt deliberate.

The food and the details are what I keep going back to. The coloured xiaolongbao at a dim sum place in BGC, each dumpling a different shade — grey, red, green, yellow. The dramatic bronze sculpture outside La Cathedral Cafe in Intramuros. The jeepney I found parked on a side street, chrome and paint and old American muscle, somehow still running. The Philippines doesn't try to be one thing, and that's exactly why it stays with you.

Singapore hit differently from anything I'd expected. Coming from Kathmandu, I'm used to cities that feel lived-in and a little rough around the edges — Singapore was almost the opposite, this impossibly clean, glass-and-green city where the skyline looks like it was designed by someone who really wanted to show off. Standing at Merlion Park with that wind off the bay and the CBD towers stacked up behind the fountain, I kept thinking: this is actually real, not a render.

Orchard Road during Christmas season was another world entirely. The Cartier Ferris wheel spinning in front of a Dolce & Gabbana LED facade, Dior and Tiffany decked in red and gold inside the mall — it was excessive in the best way, that kind of over-the-top festive energy that Singapore just commits to fully. The air-conditioning blasting out of every door, the smell of food from the basement hawker levels, the whole thing.

Sentosa was genuinely fun. Universal Studios has this Ancient Egypt zone where the prop statues are absurdly large and the whole set feels more real than it has any right to. We ate at Din Tai Fung twice — those xiao long bao are the reason. I'd go back to Singapore for the food alone, honestly.

Sri Lanka hit differently from the moment I landed in Colombo. It has this coastal heat that sticks to you, and every few kilometres the landscape shifts — mangroves, old churches, Hindu temples painted in loud yellows and pinks, all crammed together without any sense of contradiction. Negombo was my first stop and it felt like the island was showing me everything at once: fishing boats that looked centuries old, a Catholic cathedral that could have been transplanted from colonial Europe, and a Hindu kovil two streets away blazing in turmeric gold.

The coastline along the west was grey and choppy when I was there, with the Indian Ocean pushing hard against the sand and the hotels sitting awkward behind coconut palms. The beach had rocks jutting out, the waves weren't gentle, and the sky was the colour of wet cement. I liked it more for that — it felt honest rather than postcard-perfect.

What stayed with me was how Sri Lanka holds its different histories without making a big deal of it. A roadside Calvary in a quiet neighbourhood, a Dutch colonial-era church two blocks away, a temple with a fresh garland over the door — all of it just existing together, ordinary, like this is simply what a Tuesday looks like here.

Thailand hit me like a wave of gold and heat. Bangkok on the first morning — the Grand Palace compound glinting in that flat, hard midday light, the white walls almost painfully bright against the blue sky. Everything there is scaled to make you feel small: the tiered roofs stacked on top of each other, the chedis pushing straight up, the mosaic fragments catching the sun from every angle. I had come from Kathmandu where temples are worn and mossy; here they polish everything until it shines.

From Bangkok we went south to Koh Samui, and the island had a completely different register — saltier air, looser days, and the Big Buddha sitting on its hill above Nathon with the sea haze behind it. The staircase up to the temple is lined with naga serpents in green and gold, and at the top the statue sits so tall it reads almost like a silhouette against the sky. Nearby, the giant Guan Yu shrine surprised me — that deep red face, the gold armour, the sheer scale of it felt like something out of a different century entirely.

The food was its own journey inside the trip. One night a table arrived covered in small bowls — a dark tamarind broth, something sour and herby, a coconut-based curry that smelled of lemongrass — and the warmth of the light in that room, candles and timber, matched the warmth of everything in the bowls. That is the thing about Thailand: the colour and the flavour never really let up.

Vietnam hit differently from what I expected. Ho Chi Minh City — Saigon, as everyone still calls it — moves at a pace that doesn't let you stop and think. The river at night with Landmark 81 blazing purple above the waterline, the mopeds threading past century-old pagodas in the shadow of glass towers: nothing quite sits still long enough to feel like it belongs to only one era.

I kept eating. That's the honest truth of the trip. A bowl of pho at a place with a hand-painted mural on the wall, sugarcane juice with ice going watery in the heat, a bamboo platter of herbs and fried things at a street stall — every meal felt like the point of being there, not a break between the actual sights. The food is precise in a way that sneaks up on you: every herb placed for a reason, the broth tasted every few minutes.

The harder parts didn't disappear. Walking through the War Remnants Museum and standing next to those old U.S. Air Force planes in the open courtyard — the camouflage paint faded, the serial numbers still readable — that weight stays with you through the rest of the day. Vietnam carries its past right on the surface and doesn't apologise for it, which I respect. By the time I left I felt like I'd only just started to understand what the country actually is.

Botswana hit differently from the moment I crossed into the bush. The sky here is impossibly wide — deep blue with those little puffball clouds that drift over the savanna like they have nowhere urgent to be. I'd come expecting dust and heat, and got plenty of both, but what stayed with me was the quiet. Not silence exactly, but a kind of low hum — insects, wind through acacia leaves, the distant crack of a branch somewhere in the tree line.

Chobe was the main reason for the trip, and it delivered. We were out in the game vehicle before the air had even warmed up, pushing through dense green scrub on dirt tracks that barely qualified as roads. When the guide killed the engine and pointed into the bush, I thought I was looking at a pile of rocks — then one of the lions rolled over and yawned. Three of them, completely unbothered, maybe four metres from the vehicle. My heart was going faster than I'd like to admit.

The evenings at the lodge were their own reward. Cold drink in hand, that big carved eagle above the entrance catching the last of the light, the smell of whatever was sizzling in the kitchen drifting across the open dining area. Botswana is not a cheap trip and it is not a casual one, but it earns every bit of what it costs you.

Eswatini caught me completely off guard. I'd crossed into it from South Africa expecting a quick transit, and instead ended up spending two full days barely moving — just sitting in the bush at Hlane, watching the light shift over the yellow grass and the flat acacia canopy. The air had a particular weight to it, dry and warm, and the red laterite soil stained everything.

The traditional Swazi village at Mantenga was a different kind of quiet. Those beehive huts — built low and round with thatched grass pulled tight over a reed frame — look deceptively simple up close, but the craftsmanship in them is real. Behind the compound the mountain rose green and jagged under grey cloud, and the whole place felt cut off from the rest of the century in the best possible way.

The evenings in camp were something I hadn't expected. Dinner in the park lodge — rack of lamb and a glass of red wine with candles on the table — felt almost absurd given that lions were somewhere out there in the dark. That contrast, rough bush all day and then this small civilised warmth at night, is what stays with me most about Eswatini.

Mauritius caught me off guard. I expected resorts and postcard beaches — and yes, those exist — but the island kept offering something else the moment I stepped away from the tourist trail. The north coast around Mont Choisy had this wide arc of white sand fringed by palms, water so clear and shallow you could wade out fifty metres and still see every black lava rock under your feet. The light in the late afternoon turned the whole lagoon a colour that didn't feel real.

Port Louis was where the island's layered history actually made sense. Standing on the ramparts of Fort Adelaide with an old colonial cannon in front of me and the whole city sprawling down to the harbour below, I could feel how many different hands had shaped this place — Dutch, French, British, then the island's own. The old Dutch windmill tucked into a courtyard nearby felt like it had just forgotten to fall down. Then out at Grand Bassin, the crater lake up in the hills, there were enormous Hindu deity statues rising out of the grey water — Shiva, Ganesh, Durga — and the clouds sat low and the whole place felt genuinely sacred rather than just decorative.

The food was unapologetically mixed-up in the best way. A red-bowl of beef noodles at a no-frills Chinese-Creole spot, a can of local Blue Marlin beer with calamari at a beach bar playing something vaguely reggae — nothing felt performed. On one of the rougher southern beaches I found a dark cowrie shell in the driftwood and pocketed it. Small thing, but it felt like the island handing me something to remember it by.

Maputo caught me off guard. I'd flown in expecting a sleepy capital, but crossing that suspension bridge into the city felt like a proper arrival — concrete towers framing the sky, yellow railings catching the morning light, the Indian Ocean haze somewhere behind me. The city has this particular quality where colonial-era grandeur and crumbling modernity sit side by side without much apology. The railway station alone was worth the detour: all deep green and white plasterwork, so ornate it felt slightly out of place, the kind of building you'd expect in Lisbon, not here.

The street art around the fish market was one of those moments I didn't plan for. A huge mural painted across a bare wall — bright purple and sky blue, fishing boats, the sea. I stopped the car just to look at it properly. The craft markets had the same kind of energy: dark ebony sculptures piled high, each one more detailed than the last, and shops with painted figurines that felt more like art galleries than souvenir stops.

The food I had in Maputo was genuinely good — grilled prawns on skewers, fried snacks with cold dipping sauce at a candlelit table, samosas with green salad. Nothing was fussy. Evenings were warm and slow, the kind where you sit outside with a glass of red and listen to the city settle. I'd come back.

Cape Town hit me differently from the moment I landed. Coming from Kathmandu, I'm used to mountains, but these ones drop straight into the ocean — that combination of Atlantic blue and raw sandstone rock is something I wasn't quite ready for. Lion's Head was the first big climb, and standing at the top with the whole coastline curving away below me, the city laid out like a map, I just stood there longer than I needed to.

The days filled up fast — Boulders Beach where African penguins walk the sand like they own it (they do), the drive to Cape of Good Hope where the wind tears at you and the sea looks like it goes on forever, and Clifton Beach where the water is absurdly turquoise and cold. I took a sunset catamaran out of the V&A Waterfront one evening and watched the harbour cranes turn orange in the last light. That was one of those unplanned hours that ends up being the thing you remember most.

Groot Constantia was the one stop I hadn't expected to love as much as I did — one of the oldest wine estates in the country, and the rosé we opened on their terrace on a hot afternoon was exactly right. I ate a full mezze spread at a restaurant near the waterfront that first night, red wine included, and thought: this city really does know how to eat. South Africa is the kind of place that keeps offering you something new every few hours if you let it.

Victoria Falls hit me harder than I expected. I had seen the photos before — everyone has — but standing at the viewpoints with mist soaking through my jacket, the roar so loud you have to shout into your friend's ear, that is something the photos never capture. The falls run so wide that you can't take it all in from any single spot; you keep moving, hoping the next gap in the spray will give you the full picture, and it never quite does. That feeling of the place being bigger than your ability to frame it stayed with me.

The rest of the trip had a slower rhythm. Game drives out of the Victoria Falls Private Game Reserve in the early morning, the dirt track still damp, the bush a deep grey-green under overcast skies. Sundowner stops in the middle of nowhere with a folding table set up beside the Land Cruiser — that particular brand of Zimbabwe hospitality where nobody rushes anything. The lodges along the Zambezi have a way of making you feel like the river is your own backyard.

I also came away with a ten-trillion-dollar Zimbabwe banknote, which someone sold me as a souvenir. It is a real note from 2008, a reminder of just how fast a currency can collapse. I held it and looked at the Balancing Rocks printed on it — those same granite formations you see everywhere on Zimbabwean emblems — and it felt like holding a small piece of a very strange chapter of history. Zimbabwe is a place that carries a lot, and yet the mood everywhere I went was easy, even warm.

Australia came to me through the sea. We sailed out of Perth on a Royal Caribbean ship, and the moment that city skyline started shrinking behind the stern I remember thinking — so this is what the edge of the world looks like from the Indian Ocean. The air was sharp and bright, that particular southern-hemisphere sharpness that feels almost surgical compared to the haze back home in Kathmandu.

Perth itself caught me off guard. I expected a sleepy coastal city and got this odd, confident mix of gold-rush sandstone and glass towers — the old Town Hall clock sitting square in front of skyscrapers like it has nothing to apologise for. Down at Hay Street Mall the pavement blazes white in the midday sun, and the whole strip has this relaxed weekend energy even on a weekday. A white fabric sculpture outside a Victorian brick church near the CBD kept catching the wind and snapping like a sail — that image stuck with me as somehow very Perth: old and new, still and restless at the same time.

The cruise leg was its own world — the ship's central atrium lit gold and amber at all hours, a theatre with hundreds of plush rose-coloured seats, and dinners that stretched across half the evening. Out on the top deck in the afternoon the Indian Ocean filled every direction, that deep swimming-pool blue you only get far from shore. I had squid-ink pasta one night and a surf-and-turf the next, completely unable to decide whether I was in Australia or somewhere else entirely — and I think that's the point.