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.
...We aim to redefine who travels and what travel looks like, as well as to reshape the kinds of journeys–whether real or imagined–that can be narrated through words and images. To us, “travel” is not uniquely a set of experiences and encounters taking place far from home, but also emerges from being attentive to the extraordinary potential of the everyday. In the 21st century, we are all nomads of one kind or another. Panorama exists in order to reflect upon and strengthen that commonality.
...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 preaching in the Presbyterian Church at Chamanculo, back in the 1960s. His colleagues listened to it in the dormitory of the mission college. And others still heard it as they lugged their weapons on their shoulders, on the march to liberation.
...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...
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.
...A few weeks after giving birth to our second, I stood on top of a mountain. Denali, the highest peak in North America, hid behind a wrath of clouds. In contrast, now, a bright sun turns the rivers and creeks into braids, twisting across the Nenana River Valley, through forests of spruce, cottonwood, and birch, until they turned from silver to gray and faded into the Alaska Range.
...When I was a girl, I didn’t think much of road trips. For one thing, we just didn’t take them. The only real one we ever took as a family was when we moved to Georgia from Pennsylvania when I was five years old. I remember the tops of trees passing by as we drove down the East coast; I remember gas stations off highway exits, the sweet candy sticks sold at the counter at Cracker Barrel restaurants, the boredom that set in as we made the fourteen-hour trek from one city to another, new city. We wouldn’t take another epic road trip like that until ten years later, when my grandfather, passed away.
...I’m slowly making my way south. Today I watched goats, grape vines and sunflowers from the train to Sicily. The sunflowers were enormous—elephant stalks, brown centers, yellow petals frantic for sun. Their keening was so palpable I turned away. The wizened old couple sitting across from me mistook my response for thirst and offered me their flask of ice water. I took it and bowed my head thank you. The man had a face lined with furrows, the kind made by a team of oxen laboring over a field. The woman’s cheeks were smooth but the rest of her face was a cobweb of lines. Their eyes rested on my nose ring and slid away unhurried, unapologetic. I let them. I am allowing everything.
...I had just stepped into Malaysia. Thailand was behind me.
The customs officer beamed and nodded, recognising immediately that I was a fellow Malaysian. “Hello, dari mana?” he asked. Where had I come from?
“Thailand, from Bangkok.”
“You’ve been carrying quite a load from Bangkok,” he said, motioning for me to open my bag.
...In the late 1990s, my husband and I moved to Guadalajara, Mexico as he was attending the local medical school. In our early twenties, California-raised children of Iraqi immigrants, we were both curious and delighted when we heard about a Tacos Arabes stand that had opened a short drive from our apartment.
...A gaggle of wise-eyed Blackface Sheep watch my husband and me bustle into neon yellow boiler coats and black, knee-high wellies. The boiler coat is surprisingly comfortable; the thick material and tent-like shape cut the jarring edge of the North Sea wind. I feel at home in it and oddly invisible, as if the jacket transforms me from the American alien that I am into a natural feature of the Hebridean coast.
...Seagulls fly overhead, adding to the mystique of Porto, the second city of Portugal. From my balcony in Rua do Almada, a side street in the center of Porto equally occupied by visitors and locals, where I often watch an older man in the apartment across the street who also follows the comings and goings, I ponder on the sights below. I see women walking alone at all hours of the day. The sight of a solo woman maneuvering a suitcase with a smart phone set to a navigation app becomes a familiar sight. Purposeful, assured, and independent they pass.
...The first week of my freshman year of college I found myself stumped by a question I had never been asked before. ‘Where are you from?’
The girl who asked me lived in my dorm and had just that weekend made the two hour drive up from Long Island, where she had spent...
“The most powerful travel writing is not so much the art of empirical description as that of the translation of the individual experience into the universal.”
...Good day
Beautiful day
Simple
Mysterious
You flare up
So vital — a blossom
In abundant
Light
To the luminous memory
of Georgia’s great writer,
Otar Chkheidze,
who gave us,
along with other masterpieces,
the translation of The Waste Land by T.S.Eliot.
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.
...My migratory path to the Nakdong River began on a peninsula well over five thousand miles to the east roughly hewn to the same latitude. Commercial jetliners departing from San Francisco head north on the Pacific Americas Flyway, approach the Aleutian Islands, then bank south following the East Asia/Australasia route, touching down twelve hours later in Incheon. After a short layover and an even shorter flight, I’d arrive at my destination — Busan.
...