Borderlands.

Pulling into the border town of Sunauli, rickshaw-wallahs yell through the windows and block the exit of the bus. Some only offer a ride to immigration, others are willing to change our money, do our paperwork for us. Only a few hundred meters away, I need one last chai in India before I go. Tucking into a dhaba, the scene seems fitting. Dirty tables, greasy food, the owner's young daughter serving us and getting twice the amount of pakora we asked for, the street in front if us lined with trucks and teeming with all kinds of traffic. Leaving feels much easier than just a few days before.

If we weren't paying attention, we would have walked right into Nepal. Because India and Nepal have an open border with each other, the immigration "office" is just a wooden shack easily obscured behind the vehicles and people walking through. Our paperwork is ridiculously convoluted, the border "guard" looking at our Indian visa saying that they expire today - as if we didn't know already. Sending us on our way, Nepal's immigration office seems pleasantly professional, organized, and straightforward. "Welcome to Nepal."

A four kilometer bus ride takes almost an hour, the bus packed by the bus driver literally picking people up and squeezing them into spaces I didn't think were possible. The roof of the bus is full. We should have walked.

The ATMs don't want to work. I've been in transit for well over 24 hours now. It's hot and dusty. The street food looks slightly different. Signs are almost all in Nepali. We had planned on getting on another bus to Lumbini. I don't want to.

So we don't. And, after finding a room and eating, I embrace the reality that I don't have to.

Maybe it was the exhaustion from a long day of travel. Maybe it was some sort of reaction to crossing into a new country. Maybe it's the acknowledgement of our time on the other side of the globe almost being at an end. But I feel like I'm in a liminal space, between worlds. Like I've taken in my fill and need some time to process while I'm still here.

One last eight hour bus ride, we've arrived in the Kathmandu Valley. The rain is refreshing, and walking laps around the Boudha stupa with hundreds in the evening, that feeling of liminality - of being still yet moving forward, of being here in a foreign country but preparing to go there where things are supposedly familiar, where things are the same as in India, but different - isn't so hard and scary as those first few hours.

It's a lot like that feeling of being on the verge of something, but without knowing where the edge is and what's coming next.

It's like being in no-man's land.

It's good.