kathmandu valley & beyond · jan 2026 – baishakh 2083
i've been walking a lot lately. i mean a lot. and somewhere between the altitude and the silence, i figured out a few things about myself i probably couldn't have found sitting still.
hike 01 — syambhonath chowk → batase dada
january 31, 2026. saturday. no plan, just a direction. syambhonath chowk to batase dada — a trail i didn't choose randomly. this path is connected to something inside me in a way i'm still struggling to explain.
the more i walked it, the more i felt like i was existing in two moments at once. i kept seeing a past version of myself walking just a few steps ahead — same route, different weight on his shoulders — and me trailing behind him, watching. it was strange. i wasn't remembering him, i was seeing him, like he was still there, still moving, still in the middle of a conversation i could almost hear the echo of.
walking solo made me realize i can get high just from playing with my own thoughts.
what made this trail different from every hike after wasn't that it was the first. it was that i went further up from the exact coordinates where my past self had stopped. i crossed a line he never did. and that mattered more than i expected it to.
walking alone that day, i realized i don't need anything to alter my state. no alcohol, nothing. the movement itself, combined with whatever is going on inside my head — that's enough. that was probably the first real thing i learned on foot.
hike 02 — basantapur → parliament → tinkune → home
this wasn't really a hike. it was a city walk — basantapur to singha durbar, maitighar to baneshwor, the parliament building, tinkune, sinamangal, all the way back to my place. what made it unusual was the silence. it was the evening before elections. barely any vehicles, security forces on every corner, the streets almost eerie.
it felt safe to walk, even past 10:30 at night. and then i reached the parliament gate.
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i stood there for maybe 45 minutes to an hour. i wasn't planning to. september 8, 2025 — nineteen people killed. nineteen innocent lives lost to a government protecting its chair. i had wanted to join that protest. i remember the feeling clearly: something inside me kept screaming that they would do exactly what they did, that they would use force, that going would cost someone everything. and i didn't go.
i don't know if that was instinct or cowardice, maybe both, maybe neither. but standing in front of that gate in the quiet election-eve dark, i felt something heavy and real. i paid my gratitude the only way i could in that moment — by staying and being present. i owed them at least that much.
i also went there carrying regret about not going home to vote. i wanted to be part of the change. that election felt important and i missed it. both things sat on me as i walked home.
hike 03 — jamacho dada — first official solo
this is where my mind fully opened up. jamacho was the first time i called something an official solo hike, and i enjoyed every single step of it — not despite being alone but because of it.
i went from thinking about a project i'm currently building to spacetime curvature. why does the moon orbit earth? why does earth orbit the sun? why does the sun orbit Sagittarius A*? all at different speeds, all spinning and moving simultaneously, all held in place by something as invisible as geometry. i'm not a physicist. i want to be clear about that. but i have this compulsive need to understand why things exist, and that why keeps pulling me toward philosophy.
have i ever read a single book on stoicism? no. but i somehow love marcus aurelius.
i'm not a self-help person. i've never been the type to read the stuff on the bestseller shelf. but stoicism found me through a strange door — through civilizations. i've spent a lot of time reading about the indus valley, about babylon, ancient egypt, the patterns of how humans build and destroy and rebuild. my first real "religious text" growing up was basically a brief history of homo sapiens. so when i landed on marcus aurelius, he wasn't a new name. roman emperor, philosopher-soldier, a man inside one of history's great civilizations. i knew who he was. i just didn't know he and stoicism were the same thing until they suddenly clicked together on a trail going up jamacho.
hike 04 — taudaha → champadevi → chandragiri hills
i was already deep in block universe theory at this point — the idea that past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, that time isn't a flow but a fixed structure we move through. and on this hike, it became something i could feel rather than just think about.
think of block universe as an hourglass. the top bulb is what we call the future. the bottom bulb is the past. the narrow neck in the middle — that thin, impossible passage — is the present moment. and walking up through the hills, i felt like each second was a grain of salt passing through that neck. not falling. passing. each one filling a void that the brain immediately rushes to fill with sensation, memory, thought.
i've worked on BCI projects before so the mechanics of how the brain processes experience isn't entirely foreign to me. but knowing something technically and feeling it physically are completely different things. i couldn't put it into words then and i'm not doing much better now. some things just live in the body.
hike 05 — phulchowki — 2700m — birthday
my birthday. phulchowki hill. 2,700 meters above sea level — the highest i've ever physically been.
i chose this day and this trail on purpose. exactly 365 days before, something broke. and this past year was honestly one of the hardest i've lived through. i was at a real low — for most of it. and i wanted to mark surviving it by going up instead of going through it again in my head on a couch somewhere.
at the top, the thing i kept thinking was simple: this earth has the deepest ocean trench and the highest mountain peak on the same planet. that's the full range. and i'm somewhere in the middle of my own range — that's not a failure, that's just how it works. ups and downs aren't a malfunction in the journey of life. they're the journey.
it was a good birthday. maybe the best one in years because i actually did something with it.
hike 06 — shivapuri — new year 2083
gate → bishnudwar → peak → station → bagdwar → namo buddha → back to gate. the first day of 2083.
i wanted this year to start differently. if i'm honest with myself, every previous new year looked the same: in bed, scrolling, watching everyone else's story instead of building my own. this time i went into the forest before sunrise.
for the first time, i was creating my own new year story — not watching everyone else's.
my head on this trail was somewhere between light-as-a-wave and light-as-a-particle — the double slit problem, the observer effect. i couldn't quite get deep enough into it to write anything worth reading, so i'll leave it here. but one thing i did land on was speed being relative.
there's no absolute speed. speed only exists in relation to something else — your frame of reference. and reference is, at its core, philosophical. think about this: you're on a bus going 80 km/h. you toss your phone up from your seat. why does it land back in your hand? because you and the phone are both already moving at 80 km/h. the bus isn't dragging you along — you're part of the system. but if the driver slams the brakes at the exact moment the phone is in the air, god knows whose head it lands on. reference shifts and everything you assumed was fixed suddenly isn't.
i walked out of shivapuri thinking about that for a long time. how much of what we think is stable is just shared velocity. how much changes when the frame does.
six hikes. one year. something shifted. not all at once, but gradually, like the way a trail reveals itself around each bend. i went looking for altitude and found perspective. i went seeking silence and discovered my own thoughts. i went into the mountains carrying weight and came back wondering what weight was worth carrying at all.
the most important thing i learned might be this: movement changes everything. not just the physical kind, but the mental kind too. sometimes you have to walk yourself out of your own head to find what's actually in there.
and i'm still walking.