Jay Tindall

As one few thousand people a year are privileged enough to visit Upper Mustang, Jay Tindall brings us a tale of princes, caves, and isolation in an ancient kingdom.

Jay Tindall takes his camera in to the caldera of the Ijen volcano complex for a look at yellow sulfur spewing from a mountain and a turquoise lake of acid.

Jay Tindall takes his camera to the Turkmenistan desert for a look into the famed Darvaza gas crater, otherwise known as the Door to Hell, in the dead of night.

In the arid season of Salalah in Oman, there are no pastoral wadis or natural greenery around the beaches, but there is Highway 47 leading all the way to Yemen.

Traffic without end, water that never stills, and a market straddling a railroad – the chaos of Bangladesh’s Dhaka is unending and arresting.

“Your lips are turning blue,” said the Kiwi pilot, shouting over the roaring chopper. “That’s the first sign of altitude sickness.” If the blades are turned off, the helicopter won’t start again in the thin, dry air.

Baikal is the deepest and purest lake on the planet, a frozen sea in the heart of Siberia and an adventurer’s icy paradise of driving, helicopters, and dog sleds. From the Old Believers to the Buryat bone crushers, its shores and islands are sacred to those who call Baikal home.

Flying over vast, rolling steppe for three and a half hours without seeing anything so much as a village, let alone a city, is a powerful reminder that Mongolia is the most sparsely populated country on the planet.

Today the great orange ape of Asia is found only in a few remote reserves. Tanjung Puting in Indonesian Borneo plays refuge to these gentle, intelligent beasts, a chance to swing back from the brink.

Kamchatka is a mysterious destination in Russia’s Far East, located along the “Ring of Fire” and known for its more than 200 volcanoes and diverse wildlife.

The old man had wrinkled skin that was weather-beaten from years spent working in the fields and seemingly possessed no teeth.  “I’ve been sitting in the same spot, every day, for the last 10 years,” he said, through my translator.  He told us about his 10 children. 

As the sunrise woke me, I got my first glimpse of Oman. The contrasting view of the beach below and the rocky Al Hajar mountains was a fitting introduction to a journey that would take me all over the diverse terrains of this fascinating country.