I’m Anthon Jackson, a writer and photographer born in Ogden, Utah. I’ve contributed as an author to more than 30 travel titles over the years, working for Rough Guides, Lonely Planet and other series. I’ve covered, among other places, Egypt, Italy, Pakistan, India, Oman, Turkey, Jordan and Indonesia.

I can’t pinpoint much aside from luck for landing me in the worlds of travel, writing and photos. A US Embassy brat, my childhood moves formed something of an arch around the Indian Ocean: Australia, South Africa, Singapore, Ethiopia—no more than a few years in each. During university days back in Utah, the family home, I spent $80 on a point-and-shoot camera, only a few hours prior to departing for Cairo and Amman for a few months of Arabic studies. You will want a camera, I’d been told (you will need to land on a major, I’d heard just before that). I’d leaned toward becoming a student of the Middle East in part for the dark, empty space it encompassed at the top of my childhood’s arch of pins around the Indian Ocean: until then, my brushes with the so-called Islamic World had come largely at its farthest fringes.

A year and a hundred-plus breathless posts later, I’d wound up with a full-fledged blog and a developing love for the region. Invited as a journalist to Tehran (by any real gauge, I was not), I was less ambivalent about buying a camera than a year before, shelling out somewhat more than $80 this time, again just hours before a long-haul flight headed east.

After several more years of shoestring wanderings, returning as much to the familiar as exploring the strange and new, I wound up with a permanent base—and eventually, a family of four—in quiet Aarhus, Denmark.

In resurrecting the old blog, I hope to inspire (in myself as much as in you, dear reader) a sense of the wonder often lost or forgotten in the daily struggle – but never too hard to find.