Katarina Kroslakova. Photography by Pierre Toussaint. Welcome to our annual travel issue, which explores not just the delights at the end of an overseas flight (though there are plenty of those), but also more personal journeys of the soul.
On page 32, columnist Lance Richardson reveals how the writer Peter Matthiessen’s descriptions of self-imposed isolation in a monastery on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau inspired his own longing to escape to the silence and space of the Himalayas. Richardson made the bucket-list trek to Nepal’s Shey Gompa monastery and was struck by a thought that may or may not be put down to the altitude: “Maybe I should have abandoned my loved ones, my obligations, my whole life, in favour of eternal solitude in the Himalayas.” He didn’t — a fact for which we’re very grateful, especially around deadline time — but returned with a deeper understanding of those literal outliers who choose exile from “civilisation”.
Travel is a two-way street. When we visit a place, it changes us, but we can’t help but change it a little, too, becoming part of its story. On page 34, Madeleine Woon asks what happens when social media amplifies this effect to the point that once-authentic experiences become cartoon versions of themselves. See: Amsterdam’s “TikTok triangle”, as the locals call the Insta-famous Nine Streets area, where phone-toting tourists have pushed locals to the margins. Modern travel, she writes, is a “completely different beast from even a decade ago”, as our tendency to curate every last second of our trip before we set off “leaves little room for something as risky as chance”. Serendipity is the special sauce of travel, after all.
So, has everywhere worth visiting already been packaged up for the ’Gram? Hardly. On page 80, Kate Hennessy finds that in Japan, despite the weak yen fuelling a boom in tourism (nearly 18 million visitors in the first half of 2024 alone), there are still regions that scarcely get a mention. The writer pulls on her walking boots to join the first international group to trek the newly restored section of the Tosa Salt Road, a 400-year-old trading route through the mountains of two of Japan’s most unsung prefectures, Kochi and Chime, on the island of Shikoku. “With destinations such as Kyoto struggling with overtourism, efforts to entice travellers to less beaten paths are needed,” she writes. “Paths such as this.”
In our digital cover story, Victoria Pearson meets the actress Olivia De Jonge as she prepares to journey into the unknown with her theatre debut in Sydney Theatre Company’s production of “Picnic at Hanging Rock”. “I’m running into the fear,” De Jonge says on page 88. “As I’ve got older, I’ve realised the work I want to do will inherently be scary.” Our print issue cover star, the British actor Robert Pattinson, offers the perspective on page 72 that the stage and film set are places an actor must navigate. He says of his early career, “I didn’t realise that you have to make a line between the world of the movie and the world of reality.”
In “The Art of Escape” on page 98, our new arts and culture editor, Viola Raikhel, learns what artists gain from residencies in Italy. She learns how residencies go beyond sightseeing, offering “a rare opportunity for cultural exchange and immersion, not just in bucolic beauty but in a living, breathing dialogue between the past and present”.
I haven’t come across many better definitions of travel.
Katarina Kroslakova — publisher, editor-in-chief
