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Sub-Saharan Africa

Tsauchab River and Sossusvlei Lakebed, Namibia

Namib Desert, Sossusvlei, Namibia

Victoria Falls, Zambia and Zimbabwe border

flamingos on Lake Bogoria, Kenya

The Great Migration, Kenya

Daasanach Village (primarily agropastoral people) along the Omo River, Ethiopia
 

Mauritius is an island nation in the Indian Ocean about 1,200 miles off the southeast coast of the African continent.  Mauritius became an important base on the trade routes from Europe to the East before the opening of the Suez Canal. Mauritius is known for its varied flora and fauna and was the only known home of the dodo, which, along with several other avian species, was made extinct by human activities relatively shortly after the island's settlement.

Nairobi, Kenya

Kibera is the largest slum in Nairobi, and the largest urban slum in Africa. Most Kibera slum residents live in extreme poverty, earning less than $1.00 per day. Unemployment rates are high. Persons living with HIV in the slum are many, as are AIDS cases. Cases of assault and rape are common. There are few schools, and most people cannot afford an education for their children. Clean water is scarce and therefore diseases caused by related poor hygiene are prevalent. A great majority of people living in the slum lack access to basic services, including electricity, running water and medical care.

The handsome, long-haired Gelada Baboon found in the Ethiopian Highlands, is the only grass-grazing monkey in the world. Dexterous fingers enable Geladas to deftly pick blades of grass and herbs to eat and dig up tubers. Over 90% of their diet is grass blades. Geladas live in matriarchal societies; family units join to form large foraging bands of 30 to 350 animals. They are the most terrestrial primate, besides humans. The gelada’s most striking feature is the hairless, hourglass-shaped pink or red area of skin located on the chest. In females, pearl-like knobs of skin surround this skin patch. Males have a long cape of hair on the back. Geladas live in one-male reproductive units that contain one breeding male and 3 to 5 females and their offspring. Though females are about one-third smaller than the males, they run the show and decide when an aging male should be replaced by a younger rival (though he will fight to defend his status). Females remain in their natal group; males migrate out at maturity and try to take over a breeding unit of their own. If he succeeds, females can choose to support or oppose him. Instead of using his brawn, the new male will groom the females to charm them into favoring him.

Cape Town, South Africa

sunset over Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro from a viewpoint in Amboseli, Kenya.
 

Pansy Island, Bazaruto Archipelago, Mozambique

Dakar Senegal

Djibouti City, Djibouti countryside

Hombori Tondo is the highest mountain in Mali and a significant archaeological site, with caves inhabited more than 2,000 years ago. Nearby is an ancient Dogon village (Its exact age is unknown.) of the same name, known for its rock-built houses with narrow alleyways and tunnels.

Following the rainy season each year, the Okavango Delta in Botswana becomes a massive inland sea attracting hordes of wildlife that come in search of food and water.

Koutammakou, the Land of the Batammariba in north-eastern Togo, is listed as a World Heritage Site.
 

An old plantation preserves the past in Africa's smallest nation, São Tomé and Principe.

Green hills give way to a wide river valley in landlocked Swaziland.

Circular huts are the traditional houses of the Sotho people of Lesotho.

Bandiagara Escarpment, Mali: Sandstone cliffs in the Dogon country of Mali rise almost 1,640 ft into the air and are dotted with ancient cave dwellings of the Tellem people. These people carved their caves into the cliffs of the escarpment so that their dead could be buried high above the flash floods that are common in the area. In the 14th century, the Dogon people drove out the Tellem and they've stayed there ever since.

Mogadishu Somalia: The Italian lighthouse on the edge of Old Harbor was built more than a century ago but is now abandoned.

Timbuktu, Mali: Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, Timbuktu was an intellectual and spiritual capital. A center for the propagation of Islam, it also houses three great mosques that reflect the city's golden age. Today, its monuments are under threat from desertification due to armed conflict in the region as well as the looting and smuggling of cultural objects, notably ancient manuscripts.
 

Elephants in the Okavango Delta, Botswana: The Okavango Delta is the world's largest inland delta, flooding seasonally, and is populated by five ethnic groups of people, sharing it with hundreds of species of animals.

Sardine Run, South Africa: During the sardines' migration along the coast of South Africa, all marine predators are looking for sardines.

The Democratic Republic of Congo

Madagascar

Seychelles

A new Chinese-built 293-mile railway in Kenya, linking Nairobi with the port city of Mombasa, is the nation's biggest infrastructure project since independence. Trying to position itself as the gateway to east Africa, the new railway has battled corruption accusations and environmental concerns. The World Bank warned that building a new railway, instead of refurbishing the old one, was by far the most expensive option and the new line cuts through a key wildlife migration route.

 

Tin Flats City, Cape Flats, South Africa 2011, photo by Marcus Lyon

Bo-Kaap, Cape Town, South Africa

Khayelitsha is a partially informal township in Western Cape, located on the Cape Flats in the City of Cape Town, South Africa, photo by Marcus Lyon (2012)

Rwanda

The Congo is the second-largest rainforest in the world, but unsustainable hunting and extraction of resources like diamonds and petroleum, are threatening the region.

Laisamis, Kenya, February 2020: Kenya battled its worst desert locust outbreak in 70 years, threatening the food security of millions.

 

A family celebrating the 2021 new year in Dakar, Senegal

 

 

 

 

 
             

North Africa and Southwest Asia

The Wailing Wall, Jerusalem

Dubai, UAE, from above

Sahara Desert, Libya

Sahara Desert, Libya

Asilah, Morocco

Petra is an historical and archaeological city in southern Jordan, established possibly as early as 312 BC as the capital city of the Arab Nabataeans. Petra is famous for its rock-cut architecture such as the Royal Tomb shown here. According to Arab tradition, Petra is the spot where Moses struck a rock with his staff and water came forth.
 

El Jadida is a port city on the Atlantic coast of Morocco.

Jerusalem, Israel

Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi UAE

This prominent circular feature in the Sahara desert of Mauritania has attracted attention since the earliest space missions because it forms a conspicuous bull's-eye in the otherwise rather featureless expanse of the desert. Described by some as looking like an outsized fossil in the desert, the structure, which has a diameter of almost 30 miles, has become a landmark for shuttle crews. Initially interpreted as a meteorite impact structure because of its high degree of circularity, it is now thought to be merely a symmetrical uplift that has been laid bare by erosion. Paleozoic quartzites form the resistant beds outlining the structure.

Khartoum, Sudan's capital city

the kasbah of Aït Benhaddou in Morocco
 

The port of Leptis Magna in Libya was one of the crown jewels of the Roman Empire. The 1,000-year-old city is one of the best-preserved archaeological sites in the world and houses the remnants of several civilizations, from the Berbers to Byzantium.

Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

Nile River Delta

Sprawling over parts of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and the UAE, the Empty Quarter—or Rub’ al Khali—is the world’s largest sand sea. Roughly the size of France, the Empty Quarter holds about half as much sand as the entire Sahara Desert.

Palm Islands UAE

World Islands UAE
 

The Pearl Qatar: The multi-billion dollar man-made island is being built on one of Qatar’s previous major pearl diving sites.

Countries in the Middle East have the highest number of migrants as a proportion of their population.

Satellite image of Syrian asylum seeker encampment, Rukban, Jordan. Image taken on 12/5/2015.

Al-Hajjarah, Yemen: In Yemen's Haraz Mountains, situated west of the city of Manakhah, Al-Hajjarah was built into the mountains with quarried stone from the mountainside nearby in the 12th century.

Wadi Dawan, Yemen: Wadi Dawan is a town and desert valley in central Yemen. Located in the Hadhramaut Governorate, it is known for its mud-brick buildings.

Sümela, or the Monastery of the Virgin Mary, in Trabzon, Turkey, has had some sort of Christian structure on its grounds from nearly the moment the religion came to what is now northeastern Turkey. The basic outline of the Byzantine monastery that can be seen today dates from the 4th century, though even that’s been destroyed and rebuilt at various times throughout the ages.
 

Al-Hajjarah, Yemen: In Yemen's Haraz Mountains, situated west of the city of Manakhah, Al-Hajjarah was built into the mountains with quarried stone from the mountainside nearby in the 12th century.

Salt caravans pass each other in the Sahara. The caravan in the foreground is on its way out of the desert, each camel loaded with 440 pounds of salt, while the one in the background is on its way to Fachi, with loads of fodder and foodstuffs for the return trip.

Tight clusters of traditional mud-brick-and-palm houses have stood for centuries in Ghadames, Libya, a pre-Roman oasis town in the Sahara. Rooftop walkways allow women to move freely, concealed from men’s view.

Socotra Island, Yemen: This island is teeming with more than 700 extremely rare species of plants and animals, a full 1/3 of which are found nowhere else on Earth ... for example, the Dragon Blood trees shown here.

ancient city of Damascus, Syria

Iraqi tank graveyard in the desert near Al Jahrah, Kuwait: This graveyard of tanks will bear witness for many years to the damage that war causes both to the environment and to human health. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, a million depleted uranium shells were fired at Iraqi forces, spreading toxic, radioactive dust for miles around. Such dust is known to have lasting effects on the environment and to cause various forms of cancer and other serious illnesses among humans.

 

Road interrupted by a sand dune, Nile Valley, Egypt: Dunes cover nearly one-third of the Sahara, and the highest, in linear form, can attain a height of almost 1,000 feet. Barchans are mobile, crescent-shaped dunes that move in the direction of the prevailing wind at rates as high as 33 feet per year, sometimes even covering infrastructures such as this road in the Nile Valley.

An explosion rocks the Syrian city of Kobani on October 20, 2015 during a reported suicide car bomb attack by ISIS.

The region of Cappadocia in Turkey is home to more than 200 underground cities. The city of Derinkuyu, first built in the 7th century BCE, is the largest of them. With its 13 levels and a depth of 279 feet, it has the capacity to shelter at least 20,000 people.

Two elderly men enjoy a jovial conversation in a mosque courtyard in Turkey.

Sky-colored alleyways, vibrantly-painted buildings and cobblestone streets make up the old city in Chefchaouen, Morocco, which was originally built to represent God and heaven.

Smoke billowed from the former rebel-held district of Bustan al-Qasr in Aleppo during a December 2016 operation by Syrian government forces to retake the embattled city. The crucial battle for Aleppo entered its final phase after Syrian rebels retreated into a small pocket of their former bastion in the face of new army advances. The retreat left opposition fighters confined to just a handful of neighborhoods in southeast Aleppo, the largest of them Sukkari and Mashhad.

 

Cappadocia, Turkey: This region is known for its history and interesting geography such as the rock formations called fairy chimneys.

Iran

Iraqi Kurdistan

Libya

The Baatara Gorge Waterfall is a sinkhole located in the village of Balaa, Lebanon. It drops 837 feet into a spectacular cave.

Beirut, Lebanon

 

Gaza City (Palestine) beach at sunset

Emirati men walk with their camels across the Liwa desert, some 155 miles west of the Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi.

Kurdish men march to the top of Kele Mountain above the city of Akre, Kurdistan Regional Government (Iraq), as part of the Newroz festival. March 21st every year, Kurdish people around the globe celebrate Newroz, the first day of the Kurdish calendar. Newroz is also the vernal equinox and the first day of spring. In Iraqi Kurdistan the celebrations begin the evening of the 20th.

Akre, Kurdistan Regional Government (Iraq), has been climbing its mountainside since it was first settled near some mineral springs around 700 BCE.

Damascus, Syria 2009, photo by Marcus Lyon

Legzira Beach, Morocco

 

The Dead Sea - between Israel, Jordan and Palestine - is so dense with salt and other minerals, humans can float on its surface. But, the sea is shrinking and sinkholes are cropping up along its coast due to poor management of water resources in the area.

Old City of Sana’a, Yemen: distinctive multi-story buildings decorated with geometric patterns, a history dating back thousands of years, significance in Islam

Tripoli, Libya

Tripoli’s Citadel of Raymond de Saint-Gilles

Old Town of Ghadamès, Libya: The Berber town, which stands in an oasis, is one of the world’s oldest pre-Saharan cities.

Antakya (Antioch), Turkey

 

Beirut, Lebanon

Phoenician city of Baalbek, Lebanon: sprawling Roman ruins, with its impressive complex of temples and well-preserved architecture

Sinai, Egypt’s St Catherine’s Monastery: Founded in the 6th century, the monastery is located at the foot of Mount Horeb where, according to the Old Testament, Moses received the Ten Commandments.

Syria’s capital Damascus is one of the oldest cities in the Middle East, and one of the oldest continually-inhabited cities in the world, Damascus has 125 monuments from different historical periods. Pictured is the 8th-century Great Mosque of the Umayyads.

The Dubai skyline - home to some of the world's tallest buildings - can disappear under blankets of fog and clouds.

Benghazi, Libya, January 2020: After years of conflict, Libyan factions edged briefly toward a cease-fire, but this street in Benghazi best told the story of life in the exhausted country.

 

Beirut, Lebanon, August 2020: Two explosions, one very powerful, killed over 190 people and injured more than 6,000. No one had taken action to secure 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in a hangar in the city’s port.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Last updated:   02/15/2021   1800

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