Firsts: 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 closed in, shuttered. Shuttered like it might haul me off to where I’d never be heard from again. Swaying back and forth, my bladder micro bursts with each road bump and I launch urine onto the stretcher. The ambulance attendant, a talkative soul, can’t seem to get the oxygen flowing so we put the prongs up my nose and pretend. He wants to ask many questions but Ngima Sherpa, my Nepali guardian angel, begs him to be quiet, suggesting we just get there. I grasp the side rails of the stretcher and pray that I can get back to Everest.

...

Firsts: 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 am in a market of minds
plying wares...

Weekend Reading: 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 as the ice-water compartment jiggled its innards. That’s what we — me at age eight, and my brother, almost six — thought it sounded like then. Gently, I eased the fridge door open, waiting for the seal to release like an octopus relaxing the suction pads on a tentacle fastened to its prey. A satisfying ploop sound followed.

...

Weekend Reading: 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 even able to look me in the eye.

...

Issue 2: Treasures

Welcome to Panorama’s second Quarterly issue. Panorama exists to not only publish extraordinary diverse travel literature and imagery, but to widen the definition of what travel is. This Quarterly explores the idea of ‘treasure’ through travel-themed fiction, memoir, essays, poetry, photography, and illustrations.

...

Treasures: 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 zigzag of broken bones, your ribs forced in all directions, your kneecaps catapulted to the back of your wriggling legs, your head cracked wide open like a pomegranate, its bloody seeds raining through the fissures of your skull onto the ground.

...

Treasures: 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 the guards. His crime — releasing pigeons on May 1, red ribbons tied to their little Bolshevik legs. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Shirley Temple celebrated her fifth birthday by signing her first movie contract, filming of the Bride of Frankenstein started, and the original King Kong movie was screened at Radio City. The board game Monopoly was invented, the choc-chip cookie came into being, the first-ever drive-in movie theatre opened in New Jersey, and construction of the Golden Gate Bridge had just begun in San Francisco. Walt Disney released The Three Little Pigs and the cartoon wolf was born who, three decades later, would lurk under my bed at night, ready to reach out and drag me into its lair. President Roosevelt was busy telling everyone: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

...

Treasures: Cartography: 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 and that had cost already the lives of seventeen men from the Hispaniola. How many it had cost in the amassing, what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell.

...

Open: Walking Budapest

When I think back to my trip to Budapest, I think, first, of her street signs. Hungarian street signs look like puzzles of Latin letters spilled out of a bag and rearranged into mouthfuls of consonants, vowels, and lots of extra dots. Signs with words and phrases like artand hataratkelohely, magyarorszag, eloszallas, and vigyazz gepjarrmu-forgalom narrate the city streets on corners, in roundabouts, at crossroads, and on highways. Among these wordy pieces of advice, however, there is one whose single word I could pronounce, whose letters did make some sense to my English-speaking brain: it reads, simply, lassits, punctuated with a single exclamation mark. The sign is simple—it is rectangle-shaped, framed in a red border, black bold text against a white background.

...

Open: Win

Capable—if unreliable—little motorcycles, a used Honda Win can be had for around US$200. Boasting 110cc engines, endlessly replaced, welded and salvaged clutches, wheels, brakes, handlebars, frames, rims and gearboxes, with not a one having a working odometer, speedometer or gas gauge, and so on, these bikes are, for the traveller possessed of an adventurous heart, the magic key to the dramatic landscapes of northern Vietnam.

...

Issue 4: Seen

Perhaps more than any other time in recent history, how we see places and one another will determine what happens next to our human family.
Panorama: the Journal of Intelligent Travel proudly offers up our latest collection, ‘Seen,’ in the spirit of sequi, to follow. Along...

Seen: Brooklyn, New York

About a year before I was born, my parents and six-year-old sister moved into a house in southern Brooklyn, in a neighbourhood that is often cut off of tourist maps. The semi-attached house has a faded lime green exterior with a red-shingled roof, as if the architect wanted the house to be festive, but not overly so. The house number above the doorway is small and not that easy to spot, and so I have told friends to ring the doorbell of the green house with the red roof. But I’ve had friends who accidentally rang a neighbour’s doorbell thinking that they’d found the right place.

...

Seen: A First Hike

As I picked my way carefully around the rocks on a trail that meandered in and out of a dry streambed I marveled at two of my hiking companions in front—the two who resembled apparitions in burqas gliding over the rough terrain with ease. Clad in burqas or not, the sight of women hiking is far from usual in the mountains of Swat valley in northern Pakistan.

...

Seen: Deep Respect

John Wesley Powell and his crew of battered boatmen spent the morning of 14 August 1869 rowing through one rapid and carrying their boats around two more, after which they climbed back into their waterlogged rafts and continued down the river. “About eleven o’clock we hear a great roar ahead, and approach it very cautiously,” Powell recorded in his memoir, regarding that day’s events. “The sound grows louder and louder as we run, and at last we find ourselves above a long, broken fall, with ledges and pinnacles of rock obstructing the river.”

...

Seen: The Cotswold Way, England

I am standing barefoot on the soft green brow of Cleeve Hill, the highest point in Gloucestershire, holding up a faded cream-cotton parasol against the hot sun. I can see straight across the Vale of Evesham, to the blue swell of the Malvern hills, rising up through the heat haze, and then further still to the dark Welsh mountains on the distant horizon, sprawled like heraldic dragons en dormant.

...

Seen: The Price of Redemption

Guilt is an opinionated dream crusher with better stalking skills than a student loan bill collector. It caught me one January evening as I sat on the park bench in San Miguel de Allende. Smiling, I watched a mariachi band serenade a middle-aged couple groping for a second chance at love.

...

Issue 5: Lost

Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel‘s long awaited LOST, our fifth issue, which we are dedicating to the great traveller, Anthony Bourdain, whose recent passing has affected us all. We offer this issue in celebration of his storytelling. The word lost originates from the Old English losian, meaning to perish. While this collection features many narratives of loss, it also illuminates the journey to being found. We hope Bourdain is finding his way home.

...

Lost: La Parada

Peach-hued clouds slash across the Mexican sky like a rip in a banner of grey-blue fabric as night falls. Hovering in the darkness, the illuminated cross on La Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel burns a bright white. Hollow bells resonate in my stomach, their lonely tones evaporating into the stillness. Dogs bark in a chorus and I want to howl with them, to hear my voice make the sounds I know will scare me, deep belly cries disrupting the solace I’m seeking in San Miguel de Allende.

...

Lost: Going the Way of the Qivittoq

I sat alone in a cosy cabin perched atop a small hill on the banks of Nuuk fjord. Locals called it Ghost City because the sprawling view of the bay is obstructed from the other side of my hill. You’d never know there was something spectacular on the other side until you crossed over it. Dotted with four cabins enough to accommodate about sixteen people in total, the grounds were stark and quiet. I was the only guest.

...

Lost: The Next Cross

I only count when the going is tough and on this, the second day of our 8-day backcountry ski expedition in northern Sweden, the going is more than tough, it’s nearly impossible. The snow blows directly across my face scratching it like a straw broom across a barn floor. I see nothing ahead but white. Then, in a brief lull, a red X on a metal post appears out of the blizzard. It’s one of thousands of way-finding markers on the King’s Route, but the first the group has seen since the storm began.

...
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