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I visited Syria in November 2010, just a few months before the uprising in spring of 2011. Many of the places I visited have since been destroyed, people’s lives uprooted and hundreds of thousands of people killed. Palmyra was a ruin dating back at least 4000 years, though probably more, in the Syrian desert, 250km northeast of Damascus. When I visited, we were able to wander through the Temple of Bel, climb up the hill to the Palmyra Castle with views over the ruined city, with the sun setting behind the hill.

I visited this natural formation near this small town in western Turkey in October 2010, and I’ve still never seen anything like it since. Pamukkale means “cotton castle” because of the way the thermal pools forming down the hill from the spring give the impression of a white castle structure. Wandering around the pools, feet in the water, it’s easy to imagine you’re on another planet, or at least it was for me as a sci-fi nerd and someone who’s never experienced a place like this before!

Here, I’m going to look through my past travels from just over a decade and reflect on some of the places that most stand out in my mind. From Beijing, I took a day trip to hike part of the wall, starting at Jinshanling (about 150km from the capital) to Simatai, which took around 3 hours. The part of the wall closest to Jinshanling was quite consistently restored, mostly in the 1970s, but parts of the route we hiked were also very rugged and clearly hadn’t been touched for some time. Since it was spring when I visited, there wasn’t yet much growing, leaving the land looking barren.

, so I thought I’d look back at over 10 years of travel photos I’ve racked up and return to some of the most unique, unusual, odd and memorable places I’ve visited around the world. This monumental square, originally built for the Ibero-American Exposition World’s Fair in 1929 is now home to government offices. I first saw images of the square, like many other millennial no doubt, in the Star Wars prequel “Episode II – Attack of the Clones” and when I learned it was a real place, felt compelled to visit. I lived in western Spain in late 2012, and took a couple of trips to Seville, and this was one of the first places I visited there.