Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’s DAWN issue. This bright, awakening, and challenging composition comprises a multitude of world views, places, and experiences. We explore new beginnings, transitions, dawnings, and realisations. New landscapes are explored. New places ventured. New experiences, in familiar environs, are retold. New is often seen as positive, yet change is often more complex, and we look at this too. With our return comes an expanded scope. Whilst retaining a core travel emphasis, we have added ‘place’ and ‘nature.’ Essays in Panorama have always been place-based but this increased focus on the natural world opens up new avenues to explore. With this in mind, we have added a new Ecology & Conservation Editor, Julia Knights, who uses this first issue to speak with world-leading botanist Ghillean Prance. The result is an enlightening and frightening conversation about the Amazon rainforest.
...Like a dead cat, I lay in bed. Facing the broken air-conditioning on the other side of the room. The temperature here, in Saudi, plummets to nine degrees Celsius every winter, from December until February. He stroked my cheek. In his palm, the cold of three o’clock in the morning. I glanced his way only when he handed me a lit joint.
...Tonight, we would not cross the King Fahad causeway. Despite dreadfully wanting to see the film in a movie house, I knew Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac would never be released in Bahrain. So we streamed it instead. For more than four hours, in the five chapters of volume 1 and three of volume 2, you fixed your gaze at me while your fingers clutched on your misbahah. Was it because the movie was not subtitled in Arabic? Or because of the heroine’s mouth-watering orgasm?
...In my hands, Alice Munro’s short story collection Dear Life. Saudia’s flight to Dammam from Riyadh is delayed. We sit next to each other. You sport a pair of white Lacoste shoes. For a little while now, I’ve been staring at your wristwatch. I’m not interested in the brand. What I’m intrigued about is why you’re always sneaking a look at it.
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