Abandoned mosque and mausoleum of Shahin al-Khalwati, Cairo
It wasn’t long after the appearance of Google’s Saved Places feature (2017) that pins began swarming large swathes of my map: placed to save past journeys, to enhance future stopovers or inspire dream routes somewhere out on the horizon. I set up savedplaces to share my own entries, stories and photos from the road—some old, others new. In part, I hoped to revive my long-defunct blog (‘Wanderings,’ it was aptly called then), begun in the days when smart phones and apps remained years away (for me, at least), when cybercafes still reigned and the most reliable maps were found in outdated books. In about equal part, I hoped to create something entirely new: a home for my entries from the road, one perhaps just a bit better suited to the way we travel today. I wanted to preserve for myself and to share with others the most memorable places I’ve been lucky enough to reach—in the hope that my own assemblage of pins may inspire an addition or two to your own!
I’m Anthon Jackson, a writer and photographer born in Ogden, Utah. I’ve co-authored more than 20 titles over the years, working for Rough Guides, Lonely Planet and other series. For these I’ve ‘covered,’ among other places, Italy, Pakistan, India, Oman, Turkey, Jordan and Indonesia.
I can’t pinpoint much other than luck for landing me in the worlds of travel, writing and photos. An American Embassy brat, my childhood’s shifting around would form 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, I was pained to part with $80 for a point-and-shoot camera, bought the night prior to my departure for six months of Arabic studies in Cairo and Amman. You will want a camera, I’d been told.
You will need to land on a major, I’d been told not too long 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 that 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. Invited as a journalist (by any real gauge, I was not) to Tehran, I was less ambivalent about buying a camera now 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 (‘Wanderings’ was, aptly, the name of the blog), returning as much to the mostly familiar as exploring the entirely new, I wound up with a permanent base—and eventually, a family of four—in quiet Aarhus, Denmark.
Still restless as ever, I generally jump at the next chance to hit the road east or south. By reviving this blog and sharing my entries from the road, I hope to reclaim a sense of its wonder, sometimes lost in the course of the daily struggle—but always there to be found.
Get in touch: janthonjackson[at]gmail.com
