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.

Peter Orosz

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.

A brilliant late morning view on the fifth — or was it the sixth? — of fourteen days I spent in coronavirus quarantine, in Brighton, England. It was on the afternoon of this day when I experienced not a complete loss of smell but a peculiar olfactory shift, where the smell of the perfume I had used for a decade turned to window cleaner for a few hours.

Looking west into Tottori Prefecture from the summit of Hyō-no-sen 氷ノ山, in Japan.

On a recent afternoon’s walk in Helsinki, across the water from the louring power plant on Hanasaari.

Tiny mushrooms in the undergrowth on Kissváb-hegy, one of the hills on the Buda side of Budapest.

Early morning on the Elron train from Tartu to Tallinn.

“It’s supposed to be warmer in September, not like this,” the woman at the bar said as she drew my beer, “but it was so hot in July I guess we’ve already gone through our quota of warm days for the year.” Behind the old dormitory building of the University of Tartu, a few hours before the autumn equinox, I was dressed as I would have been for mid-November in Budapest, where I had lived for twenty one years. The pale ale was good, and so was the gin, and when I finished both I put on the blue knit gloves I had last worn in Gojal, then walked home under a crepuscular sky alive with the evening calls of jackdaws.

“‘Zar’ means ‘money’, ‘mas’ means ‘Moon’, and ‘gul’, of course, means ‘flower’,” Zarmasgul said. Her eyes were the faded turquoise of my father’s, who wasn’t Kalash but Hungarian. We stood on the porch of her house, far above the emerald fields and the silty river below, across steep hillsides of glittering scree and gnarled holly oak. “It’s all you need in life, isn’t it?”

In mid-September, when the earth and the sky begin to cool, the path of the setting sun lines up with the streets of downtown Budapest, and for some weeks one can sit and read in the golden glow of these afternoons. They feel like they should, and will, last forever, and in the distant towns of some tropical highland they perhaps do.

There is, on the very edge of Budapest, where it dissolves into the hills, a lone cedar of Lebanon, which is almost impossible to photograph well. I failed better here than on my previous attempts but I failed regardless, showing little else than the very beautiful way my camera renders out-of-focus areas, a fact that has everything to do with the engineers of Leica and nothing with either this cedar of Lebanon or me. Trees are a bitch to photograph, anyway.

If you make the long mountain crossing from the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang into the Fergana Valley of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, one long day in the pre-plague years, Sary-Tash is where you stop for a break and a gasp of thin air; and the first ramparts of the Pamirs rise unobstructed across the dun grasslands of the Alay Valley.

Eighty two years and some months after the Swiss photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach crossed the Khyber Pass from Afghanistan into what was then the British Raj and is now Pakistan, on December 22, 1939, I found myself on the same spot and re-composed the picture she had taken of the train station at Landi Kotal. This is how I learned that she had definitely used a longer lens. The trains were long gone, the tracks on the way down to Peshawar a twisted, washed-out mess, but it was the same barren mountains framing the horizon, and the sky, I suppose, was the same dusty blue.