Travel is personal. Whether embarking alone, with your family or as part of a group tour, you have your own reasons for hitting the road. You may be determined to tame a particularly tough golf course or conquer a legendary summit. Your goal might be as mercantile as finding the perfect sari, robe or kimono, or as modest as seeking the ideal beach on which to chill out and leave civilization behind.
For us at TIME Asia, producing this special issue also involved a quest: to step beyond the well-trodden path of resort reviews or cruise ship ratings so we could accurately reflect what an eclectic exercise travel has become. In virtually every story (some of which are reprinted and updated from our weekly TIME TRAVELER columns), we endeavor to tell you something fresh and insightful about a destination. Sometimes we even redefine what the popular idea of a travel tale is. "In a way, this is more than just a travel magazine," says associate editor Aryn Baker, who runs our travel coverage and along with senior editor Zoher Abdoolcarim planned this issue. "Through many of the pieces here, you learn about a country's history, politics and social changes."
Baker herself opted for a lesson in culture. She made her way to Japan's remote Naoshima Island after she spied a photograph of one of its many intriguing landmarks: a giant sculpture of a pumpkin. It led Baker to Benesse House, a unique museum-hotel that allows you to literally live among its artworks—yet which, despite the celebrated Japanese and Western artists it showcases, is little publicized outside the country.
In the same spirit of exploration, we match strides with adventurous backpackers in China, clock in with the newly liberated East Timorese travel circuit, retrace George Orwell's days in British colonial Burma, and demystify the Japanese stagecraft of Noh in a poetic black-and-white picture essay by distinguished Tokyo-based photographer James Whitlow Delano. The rewarding task of editing his work fell to Barbara Herrmann, Asia picture editor for the German magazine Stern, whom we seconded to choose all the images for this issue. "I didn't get to travel anywhere, but I didn't have to," says Herrmann. "Just through the striking pictures as well as stories, I was discovering and rediscovering Asia." We hope you are moved the same way.
