PHOTO ESSAY: Dubai

As part of an ongoing series of photo esays, Jan, collaborating with photographer Dave G. Houser, publishes another colorful spread in Porthole cruise magazine. This time, the port of call is cutting-edge Dubai.

Think you can't take home great vacation photos from a cruise-ship excursion? Think again. Every one of these images were made on a 7-hour layover during our Middle East voyage with Peter Deilmann Cruises. In über-stylized Dubai, fabulous photo ops lurk around every corner.

PHOTO ESSAY: MELANESIA

Jan, together with photographer Dave G. Houser, was invited by Porthole, nation’s leading cruise magazine, to contribute photo essays, like the one below, featuring various ports of call and off-beat cruise itineraries.

As you can see, a 16-day voyage of Melanesia aboard the 5-star expedition cruiser, Orion, served up one photo op after another. 

Next up for Porthole...Dubai!

JUST BACK FROM: Greenland

 Home from a splendid two-week voyage along the northwest coast of Greenland – focusing on the ice-choked fjords of Disko Bay and north to Thule. Traveled even farther north of that fabled Arctic outpost, in fact, to a point beyond Cape Alexander in Smith Sound where the expedition vessel MS FRAM ground to a halt in the ice…at 78-degrees-49 minutes-North.

Taking advantage of near-perfect weather throughout the voyage, returned with a truly colorful and comprehensive collection of images from Greenland – which is at the center of an amazing barrage of international media coverage directed at the dramatic meltdown of the Arctic icecap. Greenland is the very focal point of the Global Warming story and the Houser’s photos nicely document summer activities and settings in remote Inuit settlements in the far north and bustling towns such as Ilulissat, Upernavik, Sisimiut, Qeqertarsuaq, Uummannaq, Siorapaluk and Qaanaaq.

A particularly beautiful day in the icefjord created by the glacier Sermeq Kujalleq (or Jacobshavn Glacier as the Danish named it) led to some amazing iceberg shots. This is the world’s fastest moving glacier and it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004. It certainly produces the world’s most dazzling display of ice!

JUST BACK FROM: Mongolia

Add Mongolia to the list of exotic locales! A 17-day trip coincided with the annual Naadam Festival -- something of a Nomad Olympics and the biggest and most colorful celebration of the year in that Central Asian country. It was thrilling to be on hand for festive opening ceremonies plus wrestling, archery and horseracing events. Mongols love to be photographed, especially in their traditional ethnic dress, so there are portraits aplenty of these proud and profoundly photogenic people.

Staying in ger (yurt) camps, we also visited remote and pristine Lake Hovsgol, hard by the border with Siberian Russia, and the great Gobi Desert which is home to the world's northernmost sand dunes.

Among the first photographers to have fixed our lenses on the new Three Camel Lodge, a 5-star Gobi Desert ger camp that has been internationally heralded as a model eco-resort. The remote camp operates exclusively and quite luxuriously on wind and solar power.