One of the beauties of traveling to a foreign place is that at some point you will fall asleep. Then, some hours later, you will wake up.  And when you do, whether jet lagged or well adjusted, you will at some point look out your window or door and see a sliver of Earth you normally don't see.  It might be a clan of langur monkeys swinging through trees (and perhaps mating on your patio). It might be a rockslide in the Himalayas, or fish leaping from a crater lake.  It might be a gargantuan pile of stinking refuse (King David hotel in Delhi) or fog lifting off the Tigris River (Hasankeyf, Turkey).  Whatever it is, it is part of our world, and it greets you as a new day begins.

What follows are several pictures taken from my room in recent years.

The Aya Sofia, or Hagia Sofia, was once the most spectacular church in Christendom.  Constructed in the sixth century in what was then known as Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), it became a mosque after the Ottoman conquest in 1453 and today is a museum.  This was the view one chilly morning when I woke in a hostel bunk bed.

It's hard to get more tough and rugged-looking than the Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan.  It is in mountains like these that much of Greg Mortenson's book Three Cups of Tea is set. On this morning, I crawled out of bed to open the door and then retreated back into the warmth of multiple blankets, listening to Johnny Cash on my CD player while taking in northern Pakistan's grandeur.  

From my room in Berstagi, Sumatra, I had a view of satellite dishes and a smoking volcano.  Waking up here in the morning, one is inclined to think about fragility, uncertainty, and awesome power.  Later this day I hiked into the crater and sat next to a hissing steam vent, nearly mesmerized at the force (and sound) with which the sulfuric steam left the earth.

Here I awoke to begin a day of bike riding, which first began with stepping onto the porch for a self-portrait.  This was in the town of Yangshuo, China.

Here I woke but didn't really go anywhere during the day (except to the lobby for a cup of Starbucks and to use the internet).  This is the view at dawn from Bangkok's Bumrungrad Hospital, eight hours after a surgeon finished removing part of a herniated disc in my lower back.  While the view was not the same as the volcano in Sumatra, it too made me think about frailty and the forces we do not really control.

The view of Bogota, Colombia. The city was once (in the mid-nineteenth century) one of the most difficult capitals in the world to reach.  Now, if you like, you can have breakfast in Miami and lunch in Bogota (thanks to the airplane, of course).  If you do that, however, you'll also be having breakfast at sea level and lunch at 8661 feet (or so), so prepare for breathing challenges.

Sometimes the morning view comes after spending the night in a chair rather than lying in a bed. This generally has the effect of making it harder to "come to" since you didn't sleep so well.  Once the eyes get in focus, however, the moving view from a train is worth it.  Here a Vietnamese train traveling from Hanoi to Sapa runs along the Red River, where one's thoughts might stumble upon this: How is it that a country so ravaged by war when you were born now carries you gently beside a river? 

To be continued.

Joel Carillet, the firstr chief editor of WanderingEducators.com, is a freelance writer and photographer based in Tennessee. He is the author of 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia. To learn more about him, follow his weekly photoblog, or purchase prints, visit www.joelcarillet.com.