Usually I come up with some strange-sounding divergent headline when there’s a new issue of Perceptive Travel out, but this time all three stories ended up touching on a core question: what is paradise?
Often we travel to find paradise, sometimes we love a place so much we move there. Other times we discover we love where we live right now the best.
Of course one person’s paradise is another’s tacky tourist town. In Gillian Kendall’s story about Waikiki, Oahu , she’s conflicted because she loves and hates the place every time she returns. When Michael Shapiro travels to a little corner of Ireland that the “Celtic tiger” of rapid development has not touched, it feels downright magical, especially when some of his most-admired writers are there as well. Luke Armstrong meets a fishing family on a remote bay in Columbia and ponders what it would be like to chuck it all and live a simple life of sand and shore.
And of course we can always explore the world through books and music. Susan Griffith returns to review a batch of interesting travel books , while I spin a varied batch of world music . See it all here: new Perceptive Travel issue .
