| TRAVEL & DISPLEASURE |

 

 A Debut

[W]e are innate storytellers.  The Travel & Displeasure Magazine is a travel portal with highly informative, upbeat and inspirational articles for people who love to travel.  If parachute cultural tourism was once the travel trend, experiential travel seems to have become the follow-up in 2016 and 2017.  Rather than just visiting far-flung locations, vacationers were looking for ways to tap into native cultures, meaningfully interact with locals, and feel like far more than a tourist. 

So where does a thoughtful traveler go from there?  What’s next? In 2018 and 2019, “transformational travel” is reported to be the latest evolution.  Some aspects of experiential travel remain, but the experienced are being pushed to take on the next step further.  This new kind of travel means venturing into unknown places and immersion in the fuller mysteries. The ultimate intent might perhaps be to gather wisdom and fresh insights.

Upon returning home, travelers feel a sense of afterglobe.  And they act upon that empowering feeling in the aftermath of bring on the road.  A shift in professional perspective could be in order for those who have been overworked and underwhelmed in their own lives.  They might to begin to appreciate how nuanced many issues are when seen from very different perspectives.

[S]elf-reflection through travel has been known, of course, to lead to personal developments and sometimes spiritual growth.  (Unless you are like Dame Judi Dench, the Hollywood actor who discovered the lushness of love by twice staying in the best marigold hotels in India.)  Often a deeper communion with nature and foreign culture could ultimately change people’s lives and the lives of others around them.

Welcome to this debut issue of The Travel & Displeasure Magazine.  Through in-depth features and lavish photography, it delves into four fascinating travels in Finland, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Morocco.  The coverage peers into destinations both major and under-the-radar

The Venice Biennial rounds out this first edition.  Why?  Part of the reason is that this closely watched pageant of contemporary art that has been running—with a few interruptions—since 1895.  The more significant reason, however, is that for tourists the Biennial presents us a natural platform.  Every two years, as a result,  gives us a crash-course tour through the 20th- and 21st-century ideologies of countries which are represented at least 30 permanent pavilions in the Venice Giardini where they jostle to install prime venues. 

What high-cultured, global gathering of nations would be complete without the artful (or otherwise) exercise of soft power?
 
 

 

 

Summer 2019, Issue No. 1