Term: 2016
Explore all pages categorised under the heading 2016 below.
All categories can be seen on the main index page.
Nepal: A Flashback
All those who remember Nepal in the late 80s, early 90s will remember it as an untouched, pristine, fairy tale land – an unspoiled kingdom...
Like Climbing Mt. Everest
Rising like Himalayan peaks, four bamboo poles square the altar and pierce the fog. Between swings a canopy, a red ruffled valley cradling gifts for...
Everest Descent
The curtains flowed rhythmically in and out with the wail of the siren. Different from the wide-open view of the rescue helicopter, the ambulance felt...
The Mysterious Case of Him
Of all the waters we could have chosen to scheme by, it was always Rogers Burn that caught us diving with boys or fishing with...
Poet in the Jungle
Heading for the Amazon, past the great volcano Coto Paxi, muzzle of a giant animal rising 19,000 feet from its base, snow-covered, waiting to pounce,...
Gift Fruit
I can speak Japanese in this poem, and my mind will touch yours so we both understand the custom of gift fruit. Baskets perfumed with...
Pickles
As the sourness subdues my craving, the pickle bites memory into my tongue. When I was 12, I would chase pickles with creamy whole-milk, feel...
The Places
A laundry list is its own ultimate beauty. Licking the core of this breakup. Your sternum’s craft and transcendence. You’ve just enhanced my taste for...
I’le Glut you with Gold — The Strange Ambivalence of the Treasure Map
I beheld great heaps of coin and quadrilaterals built of bars of gold. That was Flint’s treasure that we had come so far to seek...
The Colour of Guanabara Bay
The starting point of my photo series was the image of Rio de Janeiro and one of its most iconic vistas: Guanabara Bay and Sugar...
Emerging Writer: Sometimes the Past Lingers
It is early August. Everything is lush from the wet season. We are encased in mountain peaks that bookend the river valley, infinite. The riding...
How to Plant Roots in the Sand
The thunder and lightning crash so hard around my home it knocks paintings from the wall and tchotchkes to the floor. A wall of rain...
Black Band, Blue Ribbon
I am surrounded by a few thousand strangers, yet they are my family. I adopted myself into this community of black and blue the day...
The Empty Country
In 1933, my father spent his 18th birthday hanging upside down in a cell in Vilna’s infamous Lukiskes gaol, urine poured into his nostrils by...
Earthy Knowledge
It’s 1989, my brother’s fourth birthday. We all huddle together on Towan Beach, our backs against the autumn sea-gusts, and anoint him with headphones and...
Thor Heyerdahl and Kontiki
Our classrooms had earthen floors and windows the size of full moons – a truant’s blessing, but I wasn’t one. We sprinkled water every morning...
Streetview: San Diego
In 2014, I started my life over by returning to San Diego, the Californian city on the Pacific Ocean. It’s a city I have claimed...
The Killing Tree
This is where you could have died when you were four. Your tiny body smashed against the tree trunk, your back bent into an impossible...
New York's Unreal Estate
A traveller by definition is a person far from home, and as such, is receptive to a never-ending stream of impressions roused by the strange....
The Ice Cream Scoop
The frightened moon and stars were hiding. The typhoon howled and dredged the Philippine Sea in search of living things. In a stolen outrigger with...
The Ship Breakers
The Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh devours her children. I’ve worked in the delta’s sludge for five years, and already she has consumed the big...
The Hair
Abdul didn’t hear her say those words. But that’s what he imagined she would be saying to the men in front of her. She made...
Treasure as Transformation
When the editorial team for Panorama suggested the theme of ‘treasure’ for our second issue, I was immediately intrigued. The idea of treasure is a...
Issue 2: Treasures
Welcome to Panorama’s second issue. Panorama exists not only to publish extraordinary, diverse travel literature and imagery, but to widen the definition of what travel...
Building the Great Wall
There are bodies, selves we cast aside to build the Great Wall. Our home crumbled; we shored up our stake. Tiles, dirt, glass, sticks, the...
The Moon
Last night the moon was a bow. I thought if only I could place my arrow in it I could kill all that lurked in...
Knowing my place
The plane coming down, and sheer headiness is in me. I will now be on Canadian soil! The noise is overwhelming… we’re about to land...
When the Cock Crows
“You shouldn’t have done it,” whispered the willowy brunette standing across from me. She was staring at the book she held in her hands, not...
Breakfast for Alligators
From Tipped Hat Press comes a staggering explosion of travel through the Americas, a collection of 32 information-packed essays by traveller, essayist, and blogger, Darrin...
C'est Grande Monde
Madagascar was pulling out of Africa, clumps of calcified ground ferried on water, following the windward trail that produces another year, row upon row of...
Kansas to Colorado
We wake to a mist that clouds the river road, hovers over a field of soft-spun spiders’ nests. Blackbirds beat and skirt the trees, streak...
The Taste of Healing
At the age of 28, in 1992, I was told I had HIV and maybe “a good five years” to live. By the time the...
Indian Head Massage
After I have travelled your scalp for twenty-two and a half minutes dissolving the knots smoothing the cramped furrows of pain you ask me what...
Trekking in the Pamir and Zarafshan Mountains
They say that to be from Tajikistan is to know Tajikistan. But while I thought I knew my country well, it was not until I...
Navajo
She was a child, not much older than I, facing the sheep she was herding across this dirt road. Outdoor work crusted on her shoulders....
Burrata in Chinatown
From my seat at the kitchen table, I watched my mother pick up a bright red pepper from her baking sheet, its skin shrivelled and...
Nyamata Genocide Memorial
Piled on the pews—a hideous laundry stacked and stained (the twenty-two years of blood rust unbreathable), their bodies vanished. But not their clothes—bloodied shirts, graying...
Nude Ascending the Welkin
Candle flame on cold pillar tallow. Wick bent to dip of our wings, Lighting up naught over naught of our lift. Stretched days direct most...
Mystery at Jackass Gulch
He’d been silent, the other man at the bar, gazing into his glass of whiskey before growing animated at the mention of Mark Twain. “I...
Right of Way
I look at the traffic, coming in droves from all sides: mopeds, taxis, pick-up trucks, and bicycles. The mopeds are the most impressive; some solely...
Never Say Never
Over 1,200 years ago, disgruntled Norse Viking sailed northward and started a new society, complete with a parliament, on an island they called Snæland, “land...
The Rumour
Once upon a time, the Princess circulated a rumour. It began on her island at the top of her tower, in her round room, at...
The Painting
All these for my lover: A rocket science; Telescopes; A map of Jupiter; And a lantern — Burning from the lips. I love you and...
The Artist as Diplomat
When the ordinary has become too safe, too stale, we are advised to make it strange, to look again, and magnify until the edges blur,...
Cool Enough
Roll. Pinch. Smash. Roll. All in one swift smooth motion, a chef rolled dough into cylinders, pinched off equally-sized chunks, smashed each with the palm...
Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle
It was in the town of Shkodra, in northern Albania, that I first picked up the name Edith Durham. Strolling the streets in the dry...
Byron and Hobhouse in the Bernese Oberland
Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse were university chums. Hobby had been best man at Byron’s unlikely and short-lived wedding to Annabella Milbanke in 1815,...
Jesus, Uno, Kimchi Pizza
It was the start of a three-day Memorial Day weekend. I stood there leaning on the counter, watching my folks’ forest green Lincoln Continental pull...
Festa de São João
They tell me the banked fires on every street corner tonight reveal in smoke and tears the face of the one you are meant to...
Water-Gazers*
On the pier in the harbour of Guinea-Bissau on the coast of West Africa, where cashews are shipped, and cocaine arrives daily, they wait through...
Weekend Reading
Read all articles, essays, poems, and stories published on Panorama on the weekends in between issues.
Taal Lake and the Lagunzad Trail
Dan Lagunzad was a botanist: he was built slim and thrumming, like a low, springy tree that was just a little bit taller than I...
Book Review: An unreliable guide to London
Lord Kitchener, the late Trinidadian calypsonian, arrived in England on the Empire Windrush in 1948, with several songs in his back pocket. Kitchener, a then...
Anastasia maps
Each night my handiwork charts Calypso’s serenade, the arrival of things that can only be made from scratch, a second language learned by the precisionist...
Food for the inner child
My first meaningful encounter with food took place on the French Riviera in the summer of 1991. I don’t remember it, but the story has...
Mapping Firenze
The day I learned to travel was the first time I ever was truly lost. It was 1979 and I was nine years old. Surely,...
Blue Cheese Blues
My brother and I waited until we knew we were alone, and darted into the little pantry. The old fridge hummed and hissed and gurgled...
Other Skins
I love the snake that stifles my breath I have built him bit by bit all these years fleshed him with fear so he moves...
Moreton Bay
When it’s stinking hot at twelve o’clock, earthy aromas rise and vent. Something’s conjured in a gutbucket and tossed bloodily in a wok to quarrel...
Issue 1: Firsts
Welcome to Panorama‘s first issue. Our purpose is to shift the perspective of travel literature and imagery towards a more panoramic, modern worldview, and we...
An American Revolutionary in Cuba
If anything has shaken me fully free from childhood desires to see the world as a concrete-mould, comprehensible place, a planet where all questions have...
Dots of Lineage Lines
The night is a long gulp it does not quench a thirst but it lingers dripping down a place where panic sets up shop I...
A Blessing, A Question
Today a poet makes a blessing on the poets, the mountains, temple bells, the aspen ringing. Athletic White people carry coffee cups or sports gear....
Who Am I?
Born in Kabul behind mountain walls. I didn’t know that one day I pack the world under my skin. I will find my shadow in...
Rain
Rain drops roll down my face, freedom is so close, when rain encourages you to live, the whole universe is your building plot. Frontiers of...
May 1st, Dinas Dinlle
Moon chasing cats, chasing shadows, chasing tail ends of dreams into satin-slippered cottongrass. Raindrops, chasing teardrops, chasing yellow eyes and field mice round the corners...
Slideshow: Intimacy
I first noticed this whenever I talk to someone who is taller than me or is physically standing or sitting in a position where they...
When I Saw My Mother
Sometimes the people you need to meet are the ones you bring with you. When I saw her. Hidden, in plain view. My mother, the...
Travelling Home
I’ve moved back to Belfast, Northern Ireland. I left the family home for good when I was 19, left my city then too and eventually...
Everything but the Ranch
There’s a light that is particular to Chihuahuan desert of West Texas, to which the town of Marfa belongs, that has less to do with...
A Horror Writer in Transylvania
Horror isn’t always what you think it is—it comes in many shapes and colours, and often when we least expect it. I hopped on a...
Dodging the Dragons
Not long after it opened in the late 1980s, I journeyed the Karakoram Highway, through a region encased in amber, from northern Pakistan to Kashgar...
Triptych: Everest
The curtains flowed rhythmically in and out with the wail of the siren. Different from the wide-open view of the rescue helicopter, the ambulance felt...
Streetview: Mumbai
The gypsies had been there ever since I can remember. There were men, women, and children. The men were dark, surly, and unwashed, often bearded....
James Baldwin: Flaneur de Couleur
I went to Santo Domingo, a sweltering, smoggy metropolis on the edge of a half-island in the Caribbean, as part of my undergraduate university’s study...
Letter from Home: Farasan Island
I can imagine you trying to open the envelope that contains this letter, as weariness conquers you. I know you are still trying to come...
Pearl of Iran
When I was 10, my father was hospitalised due to kidney disease in a hospital in Urmia. At home, in Tabriz city, my mother, my...
Our Own Archipelago
Two days since midsummer passed. We partied all night on summer cottage decking and drank strong beer with a bear’s face snarling at us from...
Cherry Picking
At twilight, Johnny roams the narrow streets. He passes the central square, the old church and the launderette. He walks on searching for something. When...
Mutola
Chivambo loved to tell stories, but this one was his favourite. He told it as often as he could. Some heard it when he was...
What we Leave Behind
First, I remember leaving behind my best friend. Throughout my childhood, my immigrant Korean-American family moved a lot. That story of serial displacement is shared...
Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
I got into travel writing accidentally: it’s not something I intended to do, but a series of circumstances happened which made me into a travel...