501 Places

What better way to summarise a year of travel than with a few poorly collated photographs? I hope that some of these make you hungry (I’m fairly sure that quite a few of them won’t)

Five-storied red pagodas, carefully manicured gardens, geisha girls and futuristic skylines: just a few of the most popular images of Japan. During our month travelling around the country we saw all of the above. Yet Japan is a country we hear relatively little about and in the course of our travels we stumbled across plenty [...]

Japanese castles don’t really conform to the the Europeans understanding of what a castle should be. Built at a time of relative stability, most of the castles were constructed as a show of wealth and power rather than as a fortification. The consequence of this is a series of buildings dotted around Japan that are [...]

The Shiretoko Peninsula on the north east tip of Hokkaido, the northernmost Japanese island, is designated a World Natural Heritage Site. The narrow spit of land that juts out into the Sea of Okhotsk is home to a huge variety of wildlife while the surrounding waters provide some of the world’s best whale watching. Sadly [...]

There’s something magical about an approaching storm. Of course, you may not feel this way if you’re stuck out in the open without shelter and about to get soaked. Wandering as we were through the lovely historic city of Evora in Portugal’s Alentejo region, we could admire the increasing menace of the blackening sky against [...]

We spent yesterday walking the streets of Paris and visiting the famous spots we’ve had the pleasure to see many times before. Paris is choc-full of instantly recognisable monuments and symbols, and on a sunny day is a photographer’s dream. Add to the mix tens of thousands of tourists on any one day and you [...]

Making the most of a glorious sunny day, we got off the tube at Hammersmith and started walking towards the river with no fixed plans in mind. A few hours later we had arrived at St Pancras Station, feet aching but having seen a wonderful cross-section of London life across many of its different neighbourhoods. [...]

I’ve written extensively about our adventures in El Salvador over the last couple of weeks, and have enjoyed hearing from others who have ventured to this small and much over-looked country. Before I move on to the many other highlights of our Central American journey I wanted to collate some of our best memories into [...]

This is one list I couldn’t resist compiling. It’s impossible not to be impressed by the many colourful, creative and downright bizarre depictions of the birth of Jesus that are displayed in central America’s many churches. Months of hard work culminates in elaborate scenes that portray the Christmas story, each with their own unique twist. [...]

Many folks in the UK are waking up to a white landscape this morning. It’s very pretty to look at, all the more if you don’t have to go out in it. But we often forget just how universal this white stuff actually is. In Britain we talk idly about how cold and dark our [...]