Mission

Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature is a British literary journal, with a modern focus on travel literature, art, and photography.

Firsts: 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 to terms with the life you didn’t bargain for. This can be an additional burden, but I can’t help writing to you, plainly because today I had a glimpse of the life we used to dream about. How can I not share it with you, when I felt you next to me every moment my eyes carried slices of new visions directly to my old conscience?

...

Firsts: 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 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.

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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: 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 midday sun, I was looking for a museum, but nobody could give me the right directions. so I kept on wandering through dusty roads and suddenly faced a street sign bearing her name. In the middle of Albania, it was somewhat alien. Who was this lady? I asked my Albanian friends. She was a British traveller, an artist, and an ethnologist, they told me. But how did she get here?

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Sunday Magazine: 30.10.16

Welcome to our fourth edition of our weekly Sunday Magazine. Each week, Panorama aims to widen the conversation in the travel narrative, through poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid works, alongside imagery and illustrations. This edition includes two poems, one by Nigerian poet Chika Onyenezi, and the other by American poet Robbi Nester; a fictional travelogue wrapped around a message, by Kaylen Baker; and our weekly instalment of our series on food blended with travel and place, Eaten, featuring American writer Leslie Hsu Oh with an illustration by Sophia Khan.

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Weekend Reading: 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 of his hand, then used a thin rolling pin to shape round wrappers, thick in the middle, thin on the edge.

...

Weekend Reading: 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,
revealing all we’ve missed, beautiful as bones
beneath the...

Weekend Reading: 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 you know it

...

Weekend Reading: 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 her bedside. She slipped a message to her chambermaid, whispering in the lady’s left ear. The chambermaid turned (tucking it away), and told someone carrying a covered chamber pot, who dumped the news on a sentry man, who passed it along on his rounds to the butcher, who watched the cleaver slip just a bit as he shared more than he ought with the tapestry weaver’s daughter as he gave the child some bones for her cat.

...

Treasures: 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. It started as a lark, a self-assigned challenge to combat boredom. I get antsy sitting around between trips. So I decided to reset my reality, or rather my perception of it, to venture out and rediscover my own city with the eyes, ears and nose of a deliberate stranger.

...

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.

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Open: What You See

I wore my Afrodelik Designs shirt by a Toronto-based designer Dezi Dee. It depicts the profile of a black woman, outlined in white on a black background, nude from the tummy up with a chain around her neck. I figured that this image would be a reminder of what actually happened at the plantation even if my tour guide gave a “prettied up” tour that focused on the colonial architecture of the buildings, the wealth and influence of the family who owned the slaves and property, and the “flora and fauna”.

...

Seen: Improvisation: the London Dervish

I could be a dervish in the streets
Of London town. As if in rags I trod
The desert ways from Baghdad on to Samarkand,
And found a heaven ravelled up in every grain...

Seen: Hanoi

The lady with the good squid
Came to bake it on her clay pot stove
In front of our low plastic chairs at the corner bia hoi
Just past Mao’s Red Lounge
Where the...

Lost: Letter from Panjim

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.

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War & Peace: In Memoriam

Almost accidentally, we pulled into the car park at Stoneyfield Farm, to a path on the headland of Stornoway Harbour. It was a path I’d never trod before, despite being born and bred on this island.
Along the coast is often cold and blustery, as it was that afternoon. Dark waves lapped against the hill. The spring wind was sharp as i...

War & Peace: There’s No Place

Emma says home is where I am, and I say that my home is where she is. Sometimes, we joke that the spot she nuzzles into me, below my right armpit, is a magical place called Inglenook. We got that from the name of a wine we shared the first year we were together: My last name being Engels, which I pronounce as if it is “Ingles”, and nooks being what they are, it fit, as she seems to. Funny thing is we moved to North Carolina this year and the local supermarket here is called Ingles.

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Dawn: Mustard Flower

The instructor is quoting Yeats. Behind him a painting of a
naked woman, her legs lifted so that most of her torso is hidden,
a tiny bit of dark curl peeking between her legs.

time bends
fractures, accordions

At the same time I am the good student. I am writing down the
teach...

Dawn: Dawn at the Edge of the World

It has just gone 11am and I am standing in the pre-dawn light at a fault-line between worlds. Here, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge the continental plates of North America and Eurasia pull apart at the rate of an inch a year, creating, over millions of years, the two-mile wide valley before me – cutting epically across my field of vision and coalescing, in the uncertain distance, into the penumbra where land and sky, night and day, meet.

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