History,  Landscape,  Lens-Artists,  Nature and wildlife,  Themed galleries,  Travel in general

Gallery: stuff your eyes with wonder

June 14, 2026 / 32 Comments

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

Ray Bradbury

From the well-known (think Grand Canyon or Great Pyramid of Giza) to the less lauded (an ancient artefact, a beautiful stained-glass window, a snow-capped mountain, a colourful bird, a surprise encounter with wildlife) … the world is full of wonders.

I would normally prefer to find my own quotes to introduce a post, but there is no better one than this, which Sofia uses in setting this week’s challenge. She is looking back at the very first Lens Artists challenge, set by Patti nearly eight years ago! My first ‘wonder’ is at the longevity of this particular blogging challenge. It demonstrates what a great job our hosts do each week in stimulating our creative juices!

But I want to concentrate on the wonders that await us when we travel: the moments when we stop in our tracks and exclaim, ‘Wow’. Yes, I know that travel is a privilege as much as it is a pleasure. And wonders can be found close to home: among the flowers in our gardens, in a sunrise or sunset, in a tree blossoming again in spring … The list is endless. But I am fortunate to be able to travel and to appreciate the wonders I am able to discover far from home. So they are my focus today.

A number of these shots you may have seen in earlier posts, but I hope quite a few will be new. And of those shared previously, several have been freshly edited.

These then are just some of my personal ‘Wonders of the World’, every one of which elicited a ‘Wow’. And yes, I know there are far too many, but once I started searching these out, I couldn’t stop! Believe me, many more were omitted than were included 😏 But please feel free to skim.

My feature photo is perhaps an obvious choice: Angkor Wat soon after sunrise

NATURAL WONDERS

Rainbow in the spray, from a helicopter flight over Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

Iguaçu Falls, Brazil

(scanned from an old slide)

The Grand Canyon in a snow storm, seen from the North Rim

(also scanned from an old slide)

View from the Mirador de Kari, Atacama Desert, Chile

View from Sharaf al Alamayn, Oman

The perfect cone of Mount Fuji, Japan

Sunrise over the Himalayas, from Sarangkot near Pokhara, Nepal

Okavango Delta sunset, Botswana

The vibrant colours of the Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

And the blues of Glacier Grey, Torres del Paine National Park, Chile

Polar bear on the sea ice, Svalbard

Walking with elephants at MandaLao, Laos

A rare single-horned Asiatic Rhino in Chitwan National Park, Nepal

Little green bee eater, Wilpattu National Park, Sri Lanka

A group of guanacos posing beautifully in front of the Torres del Paine, Chile

MAN-MADE WONDERS 

The Treasury, Petra, Jordan

(another scan from an old slide)

The Sainte Chapelle, Paris

And I had to include my favourite view in Paris, the Île de la Cité from the Pont des Arts

The Salon de Embajadores (Hall of the Ambassadors), Real Alcazar, Seville

The Registan, Samarkand, Uzbekistan

The Taj Mahal, Agra

(edited to remove scaffolding that marred one of the minarets when we visited)

Ranu Raruku, the ‘birthplace’ of the moai, Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

A Pre-Columbian gold mask, Museo del Oro, Bogotá, Colombia

32 Comments

  • wetanddustyroads

    June 16, 2026 at 08:50 Reply

    I could literally say ‘wow’ at every photo of you in this post 😁. The sunrise in Nepal is stunning, as well as the sunset in Botswana … I seem to have a ‘thing’ for sunrises and sunsets.

  • Image Earth Travel

    June 15, 2026 at 12:29 Reply

    All the wonders are wonderful, Sarah, and it’s very hard to choose a favourite in this series.
    Read your comment on the places you still want to visit, and you reminded me of me! 😀 My saying is, so many places to see and only a lifetime to do it all in…
    You were lucky to see Mt Fuji as it was invisible on the grey rainy day of my visit.
    I’ve picked a favourite, the sunrise over the Himalayas, it’s serene and beautiful.

    • Sarah Wilkie

      June 15, 2026 at 13:55 Reply

      Thank you very much Nilla 😊 You’re so right about the number of places to see! I’m glad you like the Himalayan sunrise but if you’d been there with me you wouldn’t have described it as serene! That’s a very popular spot from which to observe it and the platforms were full of people jostling for the best positions 😆

  • Vicki

    June 15, 2026 at 00:27 Reply

    Those landscape are absolutly stunning, Sarah. I could look at those all day. Several times.

    Thanks for sharing and taking the time to upload all these examples. It makes me wish I had travelled more in my youth.

    • Sarah Wilkie

      June 15, 2026 at 08:40 Reply

      Very many thanks Vicki 😊 We’ve always travelled as much as we can but I would like to have done more when younger if it had been feasible. The next best thing is doing it now, while we still can!

  • Tina Schell

    June 14, 2026 at 21:50 Reply

    My husband and I have been very fortunate to have traveled the world Sarah but you have been places we never even considered! Our rule was always one major trip each year lasting several weeks to somewhere we both wanted to see (we broke our guideline with Aus/NZ/Tahiti and did 2 months but there was a lot of ground to cover LOL). The next-best thing to being there is to see excellent images created by excellent photographers so thank you for providing both! Beautifully done in every case.

    • Sarah Wilkie

      June 15, 2026 at 08:37 Reply

      Thanks so much Tina 😊 We used to stick to just one long haul trip a year, constrained by work and budget, but these days we aim for two, plus several short European breaks in between. We usually limit each trip to around three weeks, but we’re thinking of NZ next year so like you would make that longer and include some other distant places!

  • Bob Ramsak

    June 14, 2026 at 21:03 Reply

    Great selection – the Grand Canyon snow storm is fabulous.

    I haven’t scanned slides for at least a decade. Have any new apps been able to speed up the process at all?

    • Sarah Wilkie

      June 15, 2026 at 08:34 Reply

      Thank you very much Bob 🙂 I don’t use any apps. I have a rather clunky scanner that only takes a few at a time – we should invest in a fancier one if only I were prepared to commit more time to the exercise. But I do find photo editing software has improved since I first scanned some years ago, and I now use Topaz AI to sharpen them up, and Photoshop Elements to do the rest. Removing all the dust and scratches is the most tedious task – it can take 30 minutes per slide I reckon to get an acceptable result! And we have 1,000s 😂

  • Heyjude

    June 14, 2026 at 20:56 Reply

    You’ve seen some magnificent sights and hopefully you’ll see many more. Is there anywhere specifically that you want to see that you haven’t yet?

    • Sarah Wilkie

      June 15, 2026 at 08:31 Reply

      Thank you Jude 😊 Oh yes, plenty more on my wish-list though some are inaccessible at present (Ethiopia for instance) and some possibly beyond me now. But I still definitely want to get to New Zealand some time, see more of South America (Bolivia, Argentina), go to some other parts of the States, though perhaps not at present (Alaska, New Orleans, Montana …), the far north of India, other parts of Africa, Türkiye … Oh, I could go on quite a while! I’m resigned to the fact I won’t make all of those, and I also have to deal with the issue of adding more all the time, but at least it means we’re never short if ideas 😆

  • Sofia Alves

    June 14, 2026 at 17:54 Reply

    You get all the wows from me, Sarah the Globetrotter 🙂 Not many at all, it felt like a wonderful breeze. There’s something so special about old slides, they are my favourites.

    • Sarah Wilkie

      June 14, 2026 at 18:50 Reply

      Thanks so much Sofia 😊 I had a great time reliving these wonders! I’m pleased you like the old slides. I really should get around to scanning more of them but it’s such a slow process.

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