The Future Of Travel

The world may be shrinking, but we’ll never tire of leaving home

- Pico Iyer

I PEERED AGAIN at the group of sixty travellers, mostly women, leaning in to hear their English-language guide as their hijabs kept slipping toward their shoulders. Every one of these visitors to Iran’s desert city of Yazd in the fall of 2013 hailed from China. I could barely recall how, when first I touched down in Beijing, in 1985, almost the only glimpse of foreignness that Chinese citizens could get was at a bowling alley that had just opened up in the capital. Eleven months after my trip to Iran, I found myself chatting with the others in my tour group to North Korea: I remember a physician from Tehran, a Googler from Germany, and two spirited executives from Silicon Valley on a long sabbatical from Apple. The last time I’d visited Pyongyang, I’d been in a group of one.