Led by Director and Chief Exec, Matthew Webb, over 120 editors, writers, and other contributors including Troy Onyango, Faith Adiele, Nicolas D. Sampson, Marie Baleo, Anne Louise Avery, Richard Ali, Robin Hemley, make Panorama possible.
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...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 in far western China. The highway, called the KKH, roughly follows one of the ancient Silk Road routes on which silks and spices went west, and religion, gold, and other goods came east. Changes had come since two intrepid travellers, the Chinese Buddhist monk Faxian in the 4th century and Marco Polo in the 13th, trod the same route, but much also remained the same.
...Welcome to Panorama‘s first Quarterly Issue. Our purpose is to shift the perspective of travel literature and imagery towards a more panoramic, modern worldview, and we have chosen the theme of firsts to take you on a revolutionary journey through travel-themed fiction, poetry, imagery, essays, and memoir.
...“While not all of us may spend our lives travelling around the world, and some of us may not even leave the corners of our homes, one thing is certain: we all are moving and seeing things as they are. And this is why I believe travel writing is for all of us. Because the world is for all of us. It is indeed a wonder to move, whether near or far.”
...When the editorial team for Panorama suggested the theme of ‘treasure’ for our second Quarterly, I was immediately intrigued. The idea of treasure is a layered one: it has a certain mystique that appeals not just to lingering childhood fantasies, but also to the very grown up side of ourselves, which longs for what is secret and precious.
...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.”
...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.
...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...
Where I come from, we talk about distance in memories. Remember when your mother tied the suitcase with a chain to the railway berth so the riff-raff couldn’t steal it when you traveled cross-country from Delhi to Kolkata? Do you remember how hot the train ride was? Or the samosas we bought at the bus station—the ones with whole coriander seeds and spicy potatoes? Not the Bengali kind with peanuts but the North Indian kind, the kind that made our tongues swell because of the green chilies but which were so addictive? Distance isn’t kilometers or miles. Distance is how far we have moved away from what was home. Or how far one’s home is now we have moved elsewhere and perhaps made new homes. How far away was that world? How foreign does home feel now? Where is home and where is home now? Where I come from, a country of migrants, a country of immigrants, we talk of distance in memories.
...I awoke in a state of shock on Thursday, March 5, 2015.
Even though I was prepared for the events of that day, the full, daunting significance of what was about to happen only revealed itself to me as I entered waking consciousness that morning.
...The cliché is that the French are obsessed with sex. But I would argue that if the French, and Parisians in particular, are fixated on anything, it is, rather, their digestion. Farfetched as it may, at first, appear, Paris being densely populated and most Parisian habitats consequently being as compact and tightly packed together as the inner organs, stairways and elevators metaphorically recapitulate the function of the organism, stirring in the ascent, digestive in the descent.
...A tropical to subtropical vine, bitter melon (Momordica charantia) is one of the more challenging plants I attempt in our short growing season in northeastern Oregon. Early June storms often threaten as I poke the seeds into the soil. I hope for rain to soak our garden one more time before the dry summer sets in. But mist rolling through the canyons and thunder cracking over nearby ridges could also herald a cold front pushing in from the North. At 3800 feet, that could bring late frost or leaf-shredding hail. Despite the odds for failure, I persist. Amid ponderosa pines and cattle ranches, I wait and watch for the first bitter melon sprouts and think of another home more than 7000 miles and two decades away.
...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.
...It is just past 10pm on a weekday evening when I do something unusual. My son is safely in bed, dreaming of Legos and superheroes. This is usually wind-down time, a precious last few hours to catch up with deadlines, conversations, putting away the dishes, prepping for the next day. But that night, instead of heading to my computer, I put on my sandals, sling my purse across my shoulder and wedge my camera in, along with my wallet and keys. And then I walk out the door.
...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.
...I am thrilled to join the Panorama masthead as Senior Editor for VONATravels, a new section featuring graduates of the VONATravel Workshop. Five years ago, VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts, the USA’s only multi-genre workshop for writers of colour, asked me to design the first writing workshop for travellers of colour in the nation.
...Every 100 Kilometres, A New Country: Bicycling Across India
2 September 2017: Three days before the flight
When I was a child.
As the daughter of Indian immigrant parents.
...Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel’s WAR & PEACE issue. This collection, months in the making, deeply explores the themes of war and peace, with a special emphasis on travel storytelling that combines current events throughout the world with reflections on the past. The word war comes from the late Old English wurre, meaning a large-scale military conflict, the French guerre meaning dispute, and the German verwirren, meaning to bring into confusion. The word peace was first used in the 12th century to define the right of freedom from civil disorder, and it comes from the French pais, meaning reconciliation, silence, permission, and the Latin pacem/pax meaning freedom from war or conflict. These works explore all kinds of war, from military battles to drug wars to enforced participation in violence—and many layers of peace-seeking, from a culture’s recovery after devastation, to making peace with oneself as one observes a world seemingly on fire.
...The first time I left Colombia, I was six. We were on our way to visit Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and our first stop was Miami. My dad had traveled to the U.S. before on business, but the experience was completely new for the rest of us. In the mid-eighties, the drug trading from Colombia was starting to become more prominent in the news, but still had not reached the full-blown proportion of the narcomania of the nineties. We had no idea of the dimensions of the cartels’ intimidation, no one imagined that airplanes would explode in mid-air, shopping malls would be bombed without mercy in major cities, and our society would produce an army of teenage hit men for whom a life was worth the same as a pair of imported American sneakers.
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