It means ‘a land of distant views’ in Icelandic. Whether you look across sandurs, the vast sandy plains formed by glacier meltwater, or lagoons choked with broken icebergs, that is the impression that you get in Iceland: a land of distant views.

The photographs in this gallery were taken while co-running an outdoor photography workshop in southern Iceland for Wild Photography Holidays. Southern Iceland has some of the most spectacular and easily accessible ice and glacial phenomena in Europe and awesome mountain scenery. Highlights include Skaftafell National Park, black beaches festooned with sparkling sea washed ice sculptures, Jokulsárlon glacier lagoon and magnificent views of Iceland’s highest mountain Hvannadalshnúkur from the Svínafellsjokull glacier.

The old adage ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’ doesn’t quite apply to Burkina Faso. In a country whose GDP is 6 times smaller than the annual turnover of a well-known UK supermarket chain, money does grow on trees. They are the only available source of energy for much of the population. And it is that energy that makes money for many Burkinabés. Trees feed the low-efficiency adobe bread ovens in which the ubiquitous small French baguettes are baked twice daily, then sold for 7p per loaf. Once healthy ‘karite’ trees burn uncontrollably under massive marmites holding a millet-based alcoolic concoction called the ‘dolo’. At a price of 250 CFA per litre the ‘biere de Burkina’, as locals call it, helps many families make a living.

Trees are worth their weight in gold, literally. They stabilise the deep vertical tunnels that gold seekers dig in search of their dream ‘Sanili’ – the Chinese motorbike they’ll be able to buy if luck strikes.

So next time someone tells you that money doesn’t grow on trees, just think about Burkina Faso.

It was long due. At last I had the chance to join the ‘trashumantes’ on their northbound journey. Temperatures of 40C, broken terrain, ticks that do not discern between animal and man, angry farmers, and the sun, that Spanish mid-summer sun that falls on you like a lead weight. These photographs reflect a journey which is both fascinating and, to an extent, absurd. The hardships of the route, those 10-hours on your feet whatever the weather (hot and dusty one day, cold and wet the next day) deplete your mental and physical energy. As a result the images in this gallery are often oblique, contradictory and ambiguous. They came from the same deep gutural place where my will to survive the journey came from.

What you see in this gallery is a reflection of the embodied experience of walking the drovers road in mid-June. Because if you want to understand the ‘trashumantes’ and their lifestyle there is only one way to do it: walking along with them.

Every November a small group of Spanish semi-nomadic shepherds from Teruel set off on a 3-week long journey and walk with flock of 5,000 sheep across 250-miles of Spanish landscapes. They leave behind the exhausted summer pastures of their native Serrania de Albarracín and head for greener, winter hillsides in Andalucía. They are the ‘trashumantes’, the very last ones who still practise a 1000-year-old tradition at such large scale.

During the journey I felt the pervading sense of camaraderie amongst them and witnessed how the activity completely defines who they are. They are trashumantes and could not, would not, be otherwise. I don’t know how long they will keep doing it, but I hope that the young shepherds who came with us eventually take over the responsibility from the core of mature trashumantes who drove the expedition. It would be a great loss if the drovers’ tracks eventually faded in the landscape if  ’trashumantes’ didn’t walk on them anymore.

There must be few places left in the UK where the direction from which the wind is blowing still matters, but North Uist is surely one of them. Here, watching the 6 o’clock news weather forecast becomes an almost mystical experience. This is especially true during the winter months, when the weather forecast brings a natural conclusion to a crofter’s working day. You watch and pay attention to what the weather presenter has to tell you, for it will determine what you do the next day. You pay particular attention to the wind, how strong it is and where it blows from. The  mighty Hebridean wind can call off school,  prevent you from buying your essentials from the nearest grocery shop and even force to call off the burial of a recently deceased islander.

So you watch, devotely and without the slightest cynicism, to what they have to tell you in the weather forecast, for if you’re a crofter the wind will be one of the many natural events which keeps reminding you of your strong connection with the land.

‘You see, they are leaving their children a desert’ – said Melegue pointing at black expanses of burnt land and badly cut down trees, irreversibly damaged, near Saboussire in northern Mali. Saboussire is the typical Sahelian village: isolated, self-sufficient, fully dependent on a good year’s harvest of millet and threatened by an encroaching desert – the Sahara – which is believed to creep southwards at the alarming rate of at least 1km per year. Gradually, for the last week and for the 300 km that separate Saboussire from Bamako, the capital, I had been witnessing from my bicycle saddle a deteriorating environment; balder, yellower and dustier, the more I approached the Mauritanian border. I kept asking myself why would anybody bother making an effort to live here. Was the Sahel was always meant to be part of the desert and thus the Sahara was now reclaiming it?

Never figured out exactly why I wanted to go to Estii. Not sure why that had to happen in the middle of the winter either. Estii, Estonia, a country forever cursed with a name not dissimilar to that of its close neighbours. Is it Estonia or Lithuania? Or ist Latvia? One of the Baltic estates, anyway. A well-known low-cost airline started running a new route between Stansted and Tallin, in Estonia, not long ago. For less than the price of a return coach ticket from London to Edinburgh we can now have a break in a country which most of us would struggle to accurately locate on a map.

I didn’t have an agenda, or a focus, or an itinerary. I became a flaneur in Tallin for a while and then I came with the idea of travelling to Obinitsa, in the far north of the country and the closest place to the Russian border. I looked for a sense of place that would allow me to say that I had been to Estonia, and not just to one of the Baltic Estates. What I found was a country precariously straddling between its fresh EU member status and the omni-present legacy of the Soviet era. I found a welcoming country, with welcoming and proud people, who had that edge of naivety that you know will not last for long.

’1/2″ chicken wire. Gold glitter decorating spray. 1960”s kitchen cabinet hinges. Potatoes. Tea. Fluorescent tube. Rat poison. Cigarettes. Smokeless coal. Brussels sprouts. Golden syrup. Sand paper. 3/4″ roofing nails. This is a list of some of the items that customers bought in the shop during the time I was there taking photographs. Chances are, you”ll come to the shop as a last resort and ask for what you need without much hope of their actually having it. Pensively, one of the veteran shop owners will go ferret in the warren at the back of the shop and, sooner or later, will come back with exactly what you were looking for.

Think ”tardis”. That they remember where everything is in the shop is extraordinary. There”s an order in the mayhem of paraphernalia in the shop, although it might not be a conventional one. There”s method too. Items are individually priced and stored in precise locations within this old double-fronted shop. No matter how unusual the item you need may be; Norman or Royston  will reassuringly go and hunt for it. In the unlikely event that they do not have it they”ll be far more disappointed than you. There”s not only order and method here; there”s also pride, masses of it.

Coming to this shop is an act of subversion against the ubiquitous, inhumane and car-dependent shopping mall. The shop won”t be there forever; all the regulars know that Norman and Royston will soon put their feet up.

And when that happens something good will have been lost.

The photographs on this site are an attempt to translate my experience of being out  there and convey that sense of excitement and awe that we feel when we travel in unfamiliar and wild places.