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There was snow on the ground as I arrived two weeks ago in Switzerland, just as there was snow across the English Home Counties when I finally returned back home to Asia.

Indeed, snow was very much the defining motif of my trip to Europe — and it was “snow” in all its different permutations: snow drifts some more than a meter high, soft, powdery and much-beloved by the skiing set, as well as the dirty-brown slush that is the snow we have to endure in the cities.

This is not forgetting the leg-breaking, black, icy snow that manifests itself late in the evening as temperatures drop with the sunset — the snow that forces you to wear either clumpy boots or sharp metal “crampons” that keep you from falling over.

And early one morning, shovel in hand, there was also the incredibly crumbly snow that I shoveled section by section so that my car could be freed of its deadening embrace.

Traveling through Europe, I spent much of my time either drudging through the snow or anxiously scanning the hourly weather reports to check whether or not the freezing cold front had closed in on me.

I watched as news reports came in from Bosnia, Poland and Eastern Europe of cities paralyzed, rivers iced over and people dying of hypothermia. When, after much anticipation, England received just four inches of snow, the relief was palpable. In fact, the obsession with snow and freezing Arctic-like weather was not unlike the anxiety that accompanies the arrival of monsoon storm clouds across Asia.

But back to the snow. I certainly won’t forget the extraordinary experience of driving between Davos and Klosters late one night in the middle of a dramatic snowstorm with furious flurries seemingly charging straight at the car headlights. In retrospect, the sight was both ethereal and exciting, especially when later, having arrived at my destination, I stood transfixed at the hotel room window, looking out into the white-infused gloom.

However, the most magnificent snow-inflected moment was when I stepped away from the melee in Davos, boarded a small funicular tram and emerged some 90 meters above the town at the historic, fin de siecle Schaltzalp Hotel — the setting for Nobel laureate Thomas Mann’s novel “The Magic Mountain.”

High above the town, with the mountaintops alone for company, I remember standing on a deserted terrace and looking around. The sight was gorgeous, of course, especially the snow-covered mountains, but it was the silence that was the most surprising and serene.

The snow had carpeted the surrounding landscape. Dense and startlingly white, it appeared to have smothered all life — everything was still and unmoving, leaving only a profound and unwavering silence.

As I turned and scanned the valley for some sign of life, for something — anything — that hadn’t been overwhelmed by the snow, I thought of the endless cacophony and movement that accompanies my life in Jakarta or anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Indeed, noise is ever-present even in the middle of nature with crickets, beetles and cicadas providing an unending chorus to our lives.

In “Snow,” his masterpiece on the battle between secular and religious Turkey, the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk gave what I think is an apt description of the stuff when he wrote of “the silence of snow.” It’s something his protagonist, Ka, stranded by a blizzard in the ironically named town of Kars (“kar” is the Turkish word for “snow”) sees. “A sign pointing the way back to the happiness and purity he had known, once, as a child … Years later, he would still recall the extraordinary beauty of the snow … the happiness it brought him was far greater than any he’d known in Istanbul.”

Gazing out at the snow back then and thinking about it now, I could definitely understand what Pamuk meant about the “silence of snow,” but am less appreciative of the memories it evoked than Ka. Striking as the snowy views in Switzerland and England were, part of me couldn’t wait to get back to Southeast Asia with its wonderfully damp, clammy humidity and its unending siren of bugs.

Indeed, the feeling I got when I landed in Singapore was one akin to relief, of coming back “home” after being away for a long while. It struck me how much I had changed (despite having grown up in Britain), of how alien Europe, and one of its most common tropes, the snow, had become.

Karim Raslan is a columnist who divides his time between Malaysia and Indonesia.