People gather in the evening at the tomb of Hafez, the 14th-century Persian poet, to stroll with their friends and read poems out loud, in Shiraz, Iran.

Peter Orosz

There’s a path on Gellért-hegy, the hill in the center of Budapest, which reveals this view with very little to suggest it beforehand. I used to run here in the years I lived nearby, and on most days I did so I would pause for a longer look. The Danube would often be spectacular but never this specular: I took the picture on the first spring of the coronavirus, when all traffic on the river ground to a halt. It’s the kind of picture a tourist would take, or someone saying farewell.

On the Western slopes of Hakusan, the great dormant volcano on the border of Western and Central Honshu in Japan. The snow-dabbed mountain filling most of the frame is Mount Bessan, a sub-peak of Hakusan.

Komakusa (Dicentra peregrina) in bloom on Mount Iwate, a volcano in north-east Japan. The flower’s Japanese name is written with the characters for “horse” and “grass”, a hint at the shape of its pink flowers, and it thrives on these barren, volcanic slopes. All the way to Kamchatka, apparently, but I’ve yet to visit Kamchatka.

My favorite racing car, Scuderia Serenissima’s Ferrari 250 GT SWB Breadvan from 1962, up close at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, some 13 years ago. The noise was heaven, and the heavens approved of my cavalier attempts at manual focusing a strange analog-digital camera (which I still have and use).

An early spring practice game of freestyle polo in Chitral, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan.

What they call an early summer evening in Zood Khun, Chapursan Valley, Upper Hunza, Pakistan.

The highland village of Katashina, in Gunma, Japan, is not lacking in cables.

A yak-shaped void in a meadow near the shrine of Baba Ghundi, in Chapursan Valley, Upper Hunza, Pakistan.

Moonlit fields between Koya and Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, south of the last foothills of the Zagros Mountains.

A sika deer in the highland forest near the summit of Mount Miyanoura on Yakushima, an island slightly south of the Japanese mainland.

The night sky through the skylight of a Pamiri house, in Yarzrich, Chapursan Valley, Upper Hunza, Pakistan.

A young boy watches the pandemonium after a game between the A-teams of NLI and GB Scouts at the polo ground in Gilgit, Pakistan. The Scouts came back from 2–6 down to win 8–7 at the last gasp.

Teahouse on the Shandur Pass, the broad meadow at 3,738 m/12,264 ft between Upper Chitral and the valley of the Gilgit River, in the Hindu Kush.

A dark grey stream flows into the Chapursan River, between the villages of Raminji and Yarzrich, in Chapursan Valley, Upper Hunza, Pakistan.

Boiling water for afternoon tea inside the shepherds’ hut at Kukhil, a highland pasture 3,500 meters (11,500 feet) above sea level on the left bank of the Batura Glacier in the Karakoram.

Looking towards Rakaposhi, the twenty-seventh highest mountain on Earth, at 2 AM on a moonlit night.

Dusk in a village on the western shore of Lake Biwa, in Shiga Prefecture, Japan.

Takakura Yū, a Japanese master thatcher, works on the ridge of the roof of an enormous medieval farmhouse north of Kyōto. This is a preview from my next book, “A Something Like Peace”, set to be published in early 2023.

🌕✈️🏔

📍 Hunza
🏔 Diran (7,266 m/23,839 ft)

The view from a public bathhouse on the Inland Sea, in the village of Nagahama, Ehime Prefecture.

The Alifakovac neighborhood of Sarajevo on a winter afternoon as seen from across the river.

The seascape of the Bungo Channel, the strait connecting the Pacific Ocean with the Inland Sea between the islands of Shikoku and Kyushu, on a late winter afternoon. This picture is an outtake from my book “The Wilds of Shikoku” and was taken on the Pacific side of the Sadamisaki Peninsula, in Ehime Prefecture, Japan.

A self-portrait on what turned out to be the coldest day of last winter (around –22 °C or –8 °F), taken in the afternoon light on the left bank of the Emajõgi River in Tartu, Estonia. The Sun was accompanied by a pair of parhelia and the air glittered with ice crystals all day.

Early morning at the Hachiman Shrine of Misaki, a village near the tip of the Sadamisaki Peninsula, in Shikoku, Japan.

One half of the village of Bolbar, deep in the canyon of the Sirwan River, in the Hawraman region of Iranian Kurdistan.

The many uses of a Honda Beat, a kei roadster from the early 1990s, in Takachiho, Miyazaki, Japan.

On the beach in Tallinn near the Linnahall, that crash-landed Soviet UFO of a music hall just across the park from the old town. It was a brilliant but cold afternoon in late September, and in this shaded spot the leaves, kelp, and feathers were all covered in tiny droplets of dew.

An autumnal afternoon in the small amphitheater of snow peaks which rise from the turquoise waters of Big Almaty Lake, a short drive south of Almaty, Kazakhstan, and a mile above it.

A strangely alien view of Budapest on an unseasonably cold day, looking south-east from Normafa.

On an evening in the grand cacophony of Peshawar’s bazaars, somewhere on the way from Cunningham Tower to the Lahori Gate.

A tiny tea-field shoehorned between an even tinier cemetery and the steep, forested hillside, in Shiiba, Miyazaki, Japan.

This photo is also from my just-published visual field diary “These Walking Dreams”, about a 4,300-kilometer walk I undertook from one end of Japan to the other in the spring and summer of 2017.

I’ll be posting more from the diary this week! Link in bio.

High above Darkot, the village at the head of the Yasin Valley in the Hindu Kush, Kamran wraps a wool blanket around his shoulders in the early spring rain. In these high valleys of Pakistan, this garment is called a garam chador: a warm tent.

Two girls watch the sea at Ōita City‘s Kōzaki Beach, in Ōita, Japan.

This photo is from my just-published visual field diary “These Walking Dreams”, about a 4,300-kilometer walk I undertook from one end of Japan to the other in the spring and summer of 2017.

I’ll be posting more from the diary this week! Link in bio.

The crumbling north face of the volcano Daisen, the highest point of Chūgoku (Western Honshu), as seen looking south-east from the summit trail, in Tottori, Japan. 

The dome of Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran, as seen from a back alley on a spring morning.

The washed-out railway in the valley of the Csarna-patak, in the Börzsöny hills of northern Hungary.

Looking northeast from the left bank of the Yarkhun River, in Upper Chitral, towards the Hindu Raj subrange of the Hindu Kush.

Architecture of doom in the valley of Shiiba, in Miyazaki, Japan.

Two oak trees in temperatures dipping towards –20 °C on the outskirts of Vasula, in Tartu County, Estonia.

Electrum light on the morning after an 18-hour night, the longest of the year, in the countryside northwest of Tartu, Estonia.

On a night walk by Cerro de los Siete Colores, the hill above the town of Purmamarca, in Jujuy, Argentina.

Walking towards Tirich Mir, the thirty third highest mountain on Earth, on a spring day in Chitral.

A Gallardo Superleggera parked in front of the Lamborghini factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese, Italy.

A votive offering tied to a branch of a tamarisk tree near the ruins of Merv, in Turkmenistan.

An early evening game of badminton under the 350-year-old walls of Badshahi Mosque, in Lahore, Pakistan.