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photographic highlights

It’s hard to sum up four and a half months on the road from Norway to India. Here are a few photographs to remember the journey by.

A study in blue and white: the church overlooking the caldera in Oia in Santorini.

The Treasury at Petra, Jordan comes magnificently into view after walking for more than a […]

nose jobs in iran: everybody’s getting one

I’d read about this phenomenon somewhere before we arrived in Tehran so it didn’t come as a surprise but Kate didn’t believe me until we’d seen the third or fourth person walk past with nose adorned with a delicate white post-surgical plaster.
It really is all the rage here. Pity the young woman (and even the […]

flying in the name of god

Day 89: Kate boards the Iran Air Fokker 100. We took three such flights: Tehran to Yazd, Shiraz to Esfahan and Esfahan to Tehran, and flew in a Fokker 100 each time. Air travel in Iran is incredibly inexpensive by international standards. None of our flights set us back more than $30, and each replaced […]

a memorable emerald mirrored mausoleum (try saying that quickly 5 times)

Day 84: The southern city of Shiraz was our jumping off point for the greatest of Persian archeological sites, Persepolis. We were also able to visit two magnificent mirrored tombs, only one of which (the Imamzadeh-ye Ali Ebn-e Hamze) was photographable.
The other, the Mausoleum of Shah-e Cheragh, took a bit of getting into. […]

yazd terrace view

Day 83: From the terrace of the Silk Road Hotel, the dome and minarets of the nearby Jameh Mosque and the adjacent mausoleum were in perfect alignment.
The magnificent old city Jameh Mosque, with its imposing twin minarets, by day.

descent to the qanat (old city, yazd, iran)

Day 82: The city of Yazd was famous for its ancient water channels (qanats) which still run beneath the mud brick houses of the old city. I photographed this local boy decending the long flight of stairs down to the qanat, lit from above through a natural skylight.

windsor hotel, cairo

Days 74-77: What a grand old place this is. With an creaking elevator operated by an attendant, rooms that have not been updated since Winston Churchill’s time and an in-room telephone that connects only with reception, it was everything that we had hoped for in a central place to stay in Cairo.
When we asked […]

religion, priority and hugeness

Day 73: It was here, at the Temples of Karnak, that our guide introduced three concepts that have come to define our archeological experiences in Egypt.
The first was “religion”. This referred to the religious context of most of the scenes depicted in Egypt’s archeological wonders, its funerary monuments and its temples.
The second was […]