It is not surprising that so many Americans consider America to be a world unto itself, which partly at least, explains American provincialism and why many Americans are so apparently incurious about the rest of the world. If I have failed to convey the complexity of America, I am not alone. Much of the reporting of the place by most foreign correspondents - British, European and Australian - fails the complexity test.

This is not unique to the coverage of the United States. But for foreign correspondents whose job is to cover America, getting past the cliches about the place and the prejudices they have brought with them is a huge challenge. The baggage we bring with us is considerable. American popular culture has long been globalised. For much of my time here, America felt like a giant movie set. And sometimes, it felt like being in the middle of a television sitcom. It is so easy and so tempting to describe and report on an America of gun madness, violence, junk-food fed obesity, scary religious fundamentalism, sickly sentimental patriotism and swaggeringly stupid politicians such as the President, George Bush. That America exists, but it is not the whole story, not by a long shot. It is not even half the story. Perhaps the best time was when I was able to travel across the country, to what is often described as the heartland: the midwest and the plain states and the south-west.

I remember a Saturday night dinner at an old hotel outside a small town in Kansas where all the townsfolk, grandparents and their children and their grandchildren, gathered each week for a fried chicken feast, a place that felt like it was still living in the 1950s, and where we were made welcome, we strangers and even invited into people's homes for a visit. This happened everywhere: at baseball games, on train journeys, even in coffee shops; people offering hospitality and meaning it. Even in Washington, that most competitive of cities where everyone it seems is out to become a master of the universe, there was a real sense of neighbourhood and neighbourliness.

Once, when we had been away a few weeks travelling, we returned a few days before Christmas to find our front door decorated with holly and a note welcoming us back home. America is probably the most welcoming place in the world, where millions every year come to seek a new start and where there is no test of blood or tribal connections they have to pass to become Americans. It is not without significance that unlike Europe's Muslims, America's 2½ million-strong Muslim community is highly assimilated, an economic success story and slightly more optimistic about America's future than the general population, according to recent research by the Pew Research Centre. And an overwhelming majority of American Muslims, more than 90 per cent, are opposed to Islamic extremism. Much of American popular culture is trashy and much of its commercial media is mindless and fixated on celebrity, but the best of American journalism, print and broadcast, is better than anything elsewhere, British journalism included.

America is full of contradictions that it would take a lifetime to unravel. For instance, while the Bush Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans was inept and heartless, there was a great outpouring of generosity from Americans who donated several billion dollars that went to supporting the mostly poor and black victims. And tens of thousands of displaced people from New Orleans and the Mississippi coastal region were welcomed and resettled in cities in Texas that were not renowned for their history of great race relations. Foreign correspondents in America often deliver a one-dimensional sense of this place, of this superpower that will play an important role in determining the future of all of us. Me, I have grown to love the place, for all its failings. I will miss writing about it.

Michael Gawenda's book American Notebook will be published in early August.