Seven countries, fifty-four places — field notes and photographs from the road, 2019–2026.
This atlas began as a shoebox problem: seven years of photographs scattered across phones, drives and cloud albums, each one a place I could still find on a map but could no longer lay side by side with the others. What follows is the tidied version — fifty-four places in seven countries, each earning its pin with the photograph that proves it. The trips were never one journey: a November week in England, an Arctic spring in Norway, a winter that ended in Wenzhou. Laid together, they trace a single habit — go somewhere, look carefully, bring back proof.
The map is the table of contents; the photographs are the chapters.
Every place in the albums below, pinned. Tap a pin and I will take you to its photographs. A \u2764\uFE0F marks the cities Yue and I visited together.
In November 2023 I based myself in London for a week and let the rails radiate: west to Bath's Roman water and Kew's glasshouses, south to the white cliffs at Dover, and deep into the past at Stonehenge. London supplied the rest — the Thames at Chelsea, Big Ben after dark, and the British Museum beneath its tessellated sky.
I first met the Hive as a photograph, so walking up to it at Kew felt like stepping inside a diagram. Wolfgang Buttress designed it for the UK Pavilion at Expo 2015 in Milan; it now stands permanently at the Royal Botanic Gardens. Thousands of aluminium pieces lattice into a beehive, and the lights inside answer a real hive nearby in real time — the whole structure quietly breathing with the bees.
I reached Stonehenge half expecting it to be smaller than its legend. It isn't. The sarsens stand some 13 feet high and weigh up to 25 tons each, ringed by earthworks far older than any name we have for their builders. Raised between roughly 3000 and 2000 BC, it remains the most famous argument in British archaeology — and standing there, I understood why nobody has won it.
I took this after dark, when the tower earns its postcard. Strictly, Big Ben is the 13-ton bell inside; the tower is the Elizabeth Tower, and the building behind it is the Palace of Westminster, the seat of Parliament. Nobody pedantic enough to make that correction has ever loved the view less for it. I include myself in both counts.
I walked Chelsea Creek at the blue hour and found the neighbourhood's past still standing: the red-brick Lots Road Power Station, twin-chimneyed, which generated power for the Underground from 1905 until 2002. The Chelsea Waterfront towers have grown up around it, but the silhouette was kept — wisely. It is the best thing on the creek.
From the hills above Dover I could hold the whole idea of the place in one frame: the ferries below, Dover Castle — the largest castle in England — on the hill above, and France somewhere in the haze beyond the white cliffs. This is England's front door, and it has been guarded like one for two thousand years.
I stood under this roof longer than I stood in front of most exhibits. The Great Court's tessellated glass — the largest covered public square in Europe — arcs over the old Reading Room, and Norman Foster's roof, completed in 2000, turned a forgotten courtyard into the museum's living room. On a grey London day, the light in here is the exhibit.
The Great Bath steams gently whether or not anyone watches. I watched. The water still arrives hot from the Mendip Hills, exactly as it did when the Romans built the baths around the spring two thousand years ago — their engineering outlasting their empire by a comfortable margin.
Kew at lantern time: I crossed the lawn toward the Temperate House as the lights came out. Decimus Burton designed it in the 1860s, and it remains the largest Victorian glasshouse in the world — a cathedral for plants that prefer their weather temperate.
In April I travelled up the Norwegian coast, from fjord country to the top of the world: Stavanger's swords and the Lysefjord, Oslo's stave-church timber and opera-house marble, then Tromsø — and beyond it Svalbard, where the road signs warn about polar bears and the sun barely negotiates with the horizon.
The Lysefjord does not do modest. For over 40 kilometres the water runs between cliffs that shed waterfalls like mountains shrugging off rain. I came for the famous viewpoints and stayed for the scale of it — southwestern Norway showing off, and entitled to.
I ended my Oslo evening at Bjørvika, where the harbour does its best thinking. Out in the water floats She Lies, Monica Bonvicini's steel-and-glass iceberg, anchored off the Opera House and turning slowly with the wind and tide, while the city lights doubled themselves on the fjord. Cold, quiet, perfect.
I photographed Tromsø across its harbour in the snow: the bridge to the mainland, the triangular Arctic Cathedral on the far shore, the mountains holding everything in place. Some 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, it is one of the largest cities in the far north — and the traditional jumping-off point for expeditions that went a great deal further north than I did.
Nothing in my travelling prepared me for the stillness of a Spitsbergen fjord in April: dark water, snow peaks, a light that feels borrowed. Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost town, sits on this shore at 78 degrees north — where, in April, the sun has only just returned from the polar night, and no one is taking it for granted.
From the heights above Tromsø after dark, the city turns into a scatter of warm windows under the blue Arctic night. I had climbed hoping for the northern lights everyone promises. The town itself, glowing against the snow, was the photograph I kept.
Inside the stave church I lowered my voice without being asked. Painted walls, a simple altar, murals on nearly every surface — in the apse a painted Last Supper has watched over the altar for three hundred years. Congregations have changed around it. The paint stayed.
Three bronze swords, ten metres of them, planted in the rock at Hafrsfjord, where Harald Fairhair is said to have united Norway in 872. I caught them at sunset, silhouetted over the water — less a war memorial than a full stop at the end of the Viking age.
I did Peru in three altitudes. Lima on its Pacific cliffs; then Iquitos, where the Amazon is wide enough to have weather of its own; then up — to Cusco, Chinchero and the terraces of Machu Picchu, where the air is thin, the light is hard, and the Inca stonework still fits tighter than a mortarless joint should allow.
Every Machu Picchu photograph is taken from somewhere near this hut, and now I know why: from the Guardhouse terrace the whole citadel composes itself — terraces below, Huayna Picchu behind, the Andes doing the rest. I took my turn at the rail like everyone else, and I regret nothing.
Our lodge near Iquitos, and the long boat that was our road, our bus and our supply line. Iquitos is often called the largest city in the world that cannot be reached by road — everything and everyone arrives by boat or by air. Including, for a few days, me.
Inside the citadel I kept running my hand along the walls. The Inca fitted these stones without mortar so precisely that five centuries of earthquakes in the cloud forest have not shifted them. From the terraces, Huayna Picchu stands across the valley like a guard who never left his post.
I did not expect the dolphin to be pink, or to leap. The boto — the Amazon's river dolphin, the largest of its kind — is born grey and pinks with age, hunting by echolocation through the flooded forest. This one arced clear out of the water beside our boat: showing off, or saying hello. I chose to take it as both.
Lima ends in a cliff, and I walked its edge at dusk. Below Miraflores the Costa Verde highway threads the shore; above it the city stands on the cliff top, high over the Pacific — the last drop of the Andes' long fall to the sea.
The church at Chinchero made me stop just inside the door. Gilded altarpieces under a frescoed arch — and under all of it, Inca masonry, because the Spanish built their church on the foundations of a palace. The town sits at 3,760 metres, higher than Cusco itself. I climbed its steps slowly, and blamed the view.
From the hills above Q'enco, Cusco fills its valley bowl — a sea of rooftops under the Andes. This was the capital of the Inca Empire, and the Spanish city sits exactly on top of it, wall by wall. I stood there a long time, reading the two cities at once.
September, a traverse. I started with Sydney's harbour — ferries, the Opera House sails, the Bridge by night — then flew north to Cairns and the Reef, and finally inland to the red centre, where Uluṟu and Kata Tjuṯa stand in the desert like punctuation.
Everyone photographs the Opera House from the water. I went in. The foyer's fan of glass and steel frames the Harbour Bridge like a held breath, and Utzon's geometry — every sail a slice of one sphere — is as striking from within as from without: all ribs and light.
I will not pretend I was ready for Uluru at sunset. The monolith rises 348 metres from the desert plain and burns orange as the light goes — sacred to the Aṉangu, who have lived in its shadow for tens of thousands of years. You do not simply look at Uluru. You attend to it.
The postcard, earned in person: from Mrs Macquarie's Point after dark, the Opera House sails and the Harbour Bridge lit together across the water, the city glowing behind them. I had seen this view a thousand times in other people's photographs. It is better in mine, because I was there and cold.
A green-and-gold ferry slid under the Bridge while I watched from the shore — as ferries have since the 1870s, and as the Coathanger, the world's tallest steel arch bridge, has kept watch since 1932. Sydney's harbour is a working harbour that happens to be beautiful, which is the best kind.
From the air the Reef stops being a place and becomes a pattern: coral strewn through turquoise shallows for some 2,300 kilometres along the Queensland coast — the largest living structure on Earth, built polyp by polyp. I pressed my face to the window like a child. No regrets.
In the last light the whole harbour composes itself: bridge to one side, the Opera House sails in the middle, the city stacking up behind. I took this from across the water, and stayed until the ferries turned their lights on.
The Reef at eye level, behind glass: I spent an hour in the Cairns Aquarium's reef tank, watching its corals and blue fish go about their business. It is the dry way to meet the Great Barrier Reef. The wet way leaves from the marina a few streets over. I did that too.
In early winter I followed the Nile the way the temples do: Cairo and the Giza plateau first, then south to Luxor's floodlit colossi, Kom Ombo's doubled sanctuary and Abu Simbel at the Nubian edge — with Alexandria's Mediterranean light as the coda.
From across the Nile at sunset: the 187-metre Cairo Tower on Gezira Island in front of me, the city's towers in the haze — and faint on the horizon, the silhouette of a pyramid at Giza. Five thousand years, watching the modern city learn to glow.
I had seen the pyramids in a thousand images and still was not prepared for their scale against the city: Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure across the sand, camel trains crossing in front, modern Giza spreading to the plateau's edge. Built around 2600–2500 BC, they were the tallest human-made structures on Earth for more than 3,800 years. Standing there, that number stops being a number.
An evening felucca ride is the calmest way I know to watch the Nile go by. These wooden sailboats, rigged with great lateen sails, have worked the river for centuries. Ours drifted more than it sailed, which was exactly the point.
Inside the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the reading room steps down in great terraces beneath an angled glass roof — the largest reading space in the world. Opened in 2002, it revives the ancient Library of Alexandria on what is believed to be nearly the same ground. I am a mathematician; I treated the visit as a pilgrimage, and I make no apology for it.
From up here the Nile still draws Cairo's map, as it has for a thousand years: bridges, houseboats, the traffic of the corniche, the Tower standing over Gezira. Cities rearrange themselves around it. The river declines to — and from my window seat, the whole arrangement made sense.
Luxor Temple after dark is theatre: the colossi of Ramesses II floodlit before the pylon, the night sky doing the rest. The temple lay buried under the town for centuries before its excavation in the 1880s — a medieval mosque still stands in its court, at the height where the sand used to reach. I stayed until the crowds thinned and the floodlights owned the stone.
Kom Ombo glows in the late light, and its plan is a riddle with a neat answer: everything is doubled — two entrances, two halls, two sanctuaries — because it served two gods at once, Sobek the crocodile and Horus the falcon. I walked both halves and could not pick a favourite god.
Four colossi of Ramesses II, cut into the cliff above Lake Nasser — and in the 1960s cut out of it again, hauled stone by stone to escape the rising water. I stood in front of them doing the arithmetic of awe: the statues are immense, and the rescue was bigger.
Two journeys, five years apart. In 2019 I walked Suzhou's gardens in spring rain and watched the Yellow River run muddy through its loess gorge. In the winter of 2024–25 I returned: the Great Wall in the cold at Badaling, the Longmen Buddhas at Luoyang, summit snow on Mount Emei — and the lakes and canals of Hangzhou, Shaoxing and Wenzhou to close the year.
Badaling in winter is the Wall with its sleeves rolled up: bare hills, a hard blue sky, the wall snaking over the ridge from watchtower to watchtower. This Ming-dynasty section, in the mountains northwest of Beijing, guarded the pass to the capital. It is the Wall's most visited stretch — but in the cold, I had whole bends of it nearly to myself.
Shaoxing at its stillest: white walls, black tiles, covered wooden boats with yellow lanterns waiting along the bank, willows over glassy water. They call it the Venice of the East; it is threaded with canals the way its famous yellow rice wine is threaded through every dinner. I slowed down here. The town insists.
The pavilions on West Lake were built for exactly this: the view composed like a painting, one frame at a time. Through the dark lattice the lake lay grey and calm, with hills along the far shore. I sat inside the frame for a while before I took the picture.
Beside Lingyin Temple, the limestone cliff of Feilai Feng — the Peak Flown From Afar — holds some three hundred Buddhist figures cut into the rock between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. I found this seated Buddha through the trees: mossed, weathering, entirely unbothered by either.
Dawn on the Golden Summit of Mount Emei, 3,099 metres up: the gilded Samantabhadra — ten faces stacked above a Buddha seated on elephants — dusted with snow, the moon still up, the temple roofs below white with frost. On clear mornings the summit stands above a sea of cloud. I had climbed through the dark for exactly that. That morning, it did.
Late autumn on West Lake: I framed this pavilion through the willows on the eastern shore, the ginkgo overhead turning. The gardeners planted the frame centuries ago. I just stood where they intended.
Suzhou's gardens were built to be walked slowly, and rain improves them. Every turn of the path is a composed picture — rockery, water and pavilion held in fixed relation. I walked this one at the pace it was designed for.
From the bridge, the Yellow River shows its working: braided channels, silt-thick water, the colour of the loess it is carrying to the sea. In its great northern bend the river runs through a gorge of the very earth it is made of. I watched it longer than I meant to.
At Fengxian Temple I stood under a Buddha seventeen metres tall and felt correctly small. The great figure of the Longmen Grottoes was carved into the cliff above the Yi River under Wu Zetian's patronage — Tang-dynasty limestone that has kept its serenity for thirteen centuries.
Wenzhou's old town kept one neighbourhood at walking scale: timbered houses, tiled roofs, red lanterns under the eaves, lanes too narrow for cars. I photographed this facade in the New Year quiet, when the lanterns were up and the lanes were nearly empty.
The home map, filled in trip by trip. I have stood at a monument in Indianapolis dressed for the holidays, crossed Boston and Cambridge in the blue hour, watched the Sphere wear the moon over Las Vegas, and looked down on Pittsburgh's three rivers from the hilltop — and, in October 2026, sat in the General Assembly Hall in New York, quiet between sessions. And one card is home itself: Houston at sunrise, the city Yue and I share.
Indianapolis dresses its monument for the holidays: the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument rising over Monument Circle, its lights strung each winter as a tree — by local accounting, the world's largest Christmas tree. I am inclined to let them have the record.
I ended my Boston day in the Public Library's courtyard, as the colonnade lights came on against the blue hour. McKim modelled it on Rome's Palazzo della Cancelleria — an Italian room that happens to be in Boston. I sat by the fountain until the cold signed the evening closed.
Memorial Hall is Harvard showing off in brick: High Victorian Gothic, a polychrome slate roof, a rose window — raised to the university's Civil War dead, and still the most theatrical building on the Yard. Some buildings you photograph. This one I orbited, twice.
The Sphere wore the moon the night I was in Las Vegas. At 112 metres tall, its screen is the largest on Earth — and the moon, craters and all, is one of its quieter costumes. The Strip does many things; restraint is not among them, and I mean that as praise.
Pittsburgh from Emerald View Park on Mount Washington: downtown and its bridges, the Allegheny and the Monongahela meeting to form the Ohio. It is the postcard angle, earned by the climb — and the rivers explain the city better than any museum label I have read.
Between sessions, the General Assembly Hall sits empty: the golden backdrop, the curved rows of delegates' seats, 193 delegations' worth of chairs waiting for the next vote. I had wanted to see this room since I first saw it on television. It is smaller than it looks on screen, and larger than it looks in photographs.
Home, at sunrise: the downtown skyline over Buffalo Bayou from Eleanor Tinsley Park, shot from the air on a February morning. Every other card in this atlas is somewhere I travelled; this one is where I live — the city Yue and I share, and the reason its pin is a heart.
ATLAS · FIFTY-FOUR PLACES · SEVEN COUNTRIES · 2019–2026