Currently sitting in a hotel lobby in Kathmandu, waiting to head out to the airport, and the beginning of a very long flight back to Australia. It’s a strange place to spend a few hours. Groups of trekkers come and go; around the edges of the room are piles of trekking gear, brightly coloured waterproof duffle bags, hard-shell suitcases; people are either coming or going, bone-tired after their time in the mountains or fresh-faced and looking forward to their trekking adventure.

I’ve just come back down from the mountains after spending two weeks at Manang Artist Residency, in the small village of Ngawal. At an altitude of 3650m, the village is difficult to access and requires a slow ascent to help the body acclimatize. I caught a tourist bus up to Besisahar, then a jeep to Chame the following day. When it started snowing, it looked like I’d be in Chame much longer than planned – no jeeps were heading up the mountain, and the guest house owner murmured something about ‘waiting for a warm day’.

When I finally got a jeep, we were one of the few vehicles on the road, and it had started snowing in earnest. The grey sky closed in and the narrow road wove its precarious way between cliffs. Yet the first time I saw these mountains, properly, it wiped a hole in my mind. There was a blank space where language and thought used to be; instead, just these huge rocks climbing higher and higher into the sky, something beyond human scale, a vastness I had never seen before.