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.
...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.
...In 2009, after completing my medical residency at a county hospital in Los Angeles I signed up to split my time between San Francisco and some of the most economically destitute parts of the planet. It was a simple calculation about where to best use my skills. In an academic medical center in San Francisco, there could be 50 doctors on one floor. If I disappeared hardly anyone would notice. In rural Burundi, there were often fewer than one doctor per 100,000 people. So, I went there.
...How exciting to see the new dawning of a new day at Panorama in a moment when travel and travel writing are undergoing a long-overdue reckoning. When it launched, Panorama journal was ahead of its time. The magazine was truly global and not just in its destinations. It wasn’t interested in rehashing the usual travel tropes from the usual travel writing suspects. It dared to suggest that travel writers could and should be people of the global majority and that we could write not only about our own corners of the world but also look back at the USA, Australia and Europe, the very centers that had dominated travel writing and publishing and thereby defined the “foreign”.
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