I’m Anthon Jackson, a writer and photographer born in Ogden, Utah and based in Aarhus, Denmark. I’ve authored, co-authored and updated more than 30 travel books over the years, working for Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Insight Guides and other series. 

In a childhood as an embassy brat, my shifting home bases skirted the Indian Ocean: Australia, India, South Africa, Singapore, Ethiopia—no more than a few years in each. Toward to end of university days back in Utah, the family home for generations, I felt compelled to pop into Walmart for an $80 point-and-shoot camera, secured a few hours prior to a flight for Cairo and Amman, where Arabic studies ensued. ‘You will want a camera,’ I’d been wisely advised, not long before hearing that ‘you will need to choose a major.’ In part, I’d leaned toward becoming a student of the Middle East for the blank and mysterious space it filled on the map, a giant desertscape poised just over my childhood string of pins: until then, my brushes with the so-called Islamic World had come only along its outermost fringes.

A year and a hundred-plus breathless posts later, I’d wound up with a fledgling blog and an expanding love for the region, its peoples, histories and light. When invited as a journalist to Tehran (by any real gauge, I was not), I was a little less stingy about buying a camera for the trip, a Nikon D80. Once again, it was secured only hours before the trans-Atlantic flight.

A few years of wanderings later, I’d wound up with a family of four in quiet Aarhus, Denmark. Since then, my sporadic travels always taken their launch from this northerly base.

In resurrecting my long-defunct blog as placessaved.com, I hope to inspire (in myself as much as in you, dear reader) a sense of the wonder of exploration, a thrill so easily lost in the grind—but always out there, in countless rare, unsung and compelling places, as if waiting to be found.