Winter 2022
Read articles from this print issue of Afar Magazine.
As I write this letter, I’ve just returned home from a whirlwind week of travel. I flew to Washington, D.C., to moderate two panels on sustainability at a conference organized by the U.S. Travel Association. I also visited the newly reopened Hirshhorn Museum, where I wandered through the sweeping and deeply moving retrospective of performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson’s work (open through July).
Then I returned to San Francisco and drove to Yosemite National Park with my family for a long weekend of exploration and relaxation. Crowds were sparse, and the rivers and waterfalls were rushing, a welcome sight to this wildfire-weary Californian.
For me, travel is back after a long pause. My elder daughter received her first COVID-19 vaccination this week, and I’ve already begun plotting out our next 12 months of trips. Perhaps you’re doing the same. Or maybe you’re still just fantasizing about travel, unsure about where you’ll go next and when.
In this special issue, we aim to inspire all your travel hopes and dreams, wherever you fall on that spectrum. We’ve collected 39 love letters to various places, written by the people who know them best: locals. How did we decide what to reover? We focused on the lesser-known sides of a destination (Abu Dhabi and Taiwan); spots where your visit could really count (Turkanam, Kenya, and Ten Thousand Islands, Florida); and those cities that could use a little love on the heels of 2020 and 2021 (Chicago and Copenhagen). As always, we tell these stories through the lens of travel as a force for good.
Travel well,
Editor in Chief
