LOST magazine in our January Secret Mag Club

There are many ways to travel and there are many ways to tell a journey. There are those who rely on guides, in flesh and blood or paper, those who prefer resorts and organized trips to never really leave their comfort zone, those who plan everything down to the smallest detail that time is short and things to do and see so many, there are those who know how to relax and those who run.
I belong to the category of people who need to start their journey weeks before leaving. I generally do this by reading guides, novels, doing research online. So I decide everything I want to see, but I plan little, I prefer to decide what to do and where to go day by day, considering the variables, the unexpected, the new knowledge and the new discoveries. Even if there was a period in my life when I thought that "my" way of traveling was the right one, the one that really makes you know the culture of a place, I realized that, as with anything else, there is a better way to travel, there is only the best way for each of us.

A good lesson in this sense came to me from Lost, the travel magazine founded in 2015 by Nelson Ng, one of those magazines that one cannot but love and which, precisely for this reason, we have chosen as the first magazine to be sent to subscribers to our Secret Mag Club in 2022.
Starting the year with a travel magazine seemed a good omen, then starting it with a magazine that lives it and tells it in an intimate way as Lost, it also seemed a good way to understand how, two years after the pandemic, the very notion of travel was changing. But let's proceed step by step. 

Lost comes from China and amazes even before being browsed. In two languages, English and Mandarin, it is compact and fascinating, with its 300 pages held together by an exposed thread binding (I love!), The unused paper of the interiors which contrasts with the heavy cardboard of the double cover and a layout that is somewhat reminiscent of a travel diary and which perfectly introduces the theme of the magazine.

Lost is not in fact a guide, it is not even a magazine that tells us about trendy cities and places not to be missed (we leave that to instagram and self-styled travel influencers). Lost is the idea of travel in its purest essence, the one that considers it as a state of mind and a way to really know yourself, is a magazine for the traveler who wants to get away from the beaten path and who is ready to venture into unusual, uncomfortable journeys, the ones that make us a little uncomfortable and even make us cry in despair because, after all, at the end of a journey, what we have left is not so much what we see, but who we meet and how we get out of strange situations.
The eighth issue of Lost takes us to 10 destinations, all told in the first person, but one thing must be said immediately: among these pages you will not find long descriptions of places to visit with travel tips trendy, but moods, personal stories and photos, wonderful and bizarre, and believe me, you couldn't ask for better!

Alex Gray opens the issue by telling us about the months in which he was stuck, due to the lockdown, in the house where he grew up in Suffolk, a place that he says is among the most boring in England, but which in the chaos of what surrounds him, Alex learns to love and rediscover. As the pandemic advances and the world stands still, he notices the treasures that his "boring" land hides: unspoiled nature and forests, disused factories and cathedrals, a beach eroded by water and a village that will soon disappear among those same waters. . But above all, he discovers the luxury of having a place to return to and to be able to call home, no matter where you are.

Cheney Chu takes us to a "strange but familiar" Tokyo because she is only known through the pages of manga, telling us about the difficulties of her first solo trip: the subway that is too large and dispersed in which even simply buying a ticket for a ride becomes a difficult task, the hotel host mistaken for a thug (too many horror films Cheney?), and the wonderful panorama imagined dozens of times finally make its way before his eyes, from the 53rd floor of a building in the Roppongi Station area. 

Nicolas Farade's trip to Taipei becomes intended to reflect on our sense of not being or never doing enough, of the FOMO that assails us and that forces us to feel guilty when we decide to take a break, the fear of not fulfilling ourselves and continuing eternally to ask ourselves which is the best way for us.

Surreal and at times ironic, the issue closes with Phoebe Wu's journey of hope in Mongolia that ends with stolen wallets and documents, desperate tears, vodka hangovers and an irreverent collection of photos of one of Phobe's fellow adventurers, Chris, while he pees, each time with a different background in the void of the Gobi desert.

As you may have guessed, Lost is really different. More like a novel than a magazine (but we swear that all the journeys contained within it really happened), reading it will be like setting out on a strange journey in a strange time.
When we think of a well-made magazine, flawless from every point of view, with design and contents that dialogue perfectly and, above all, of those we can't wait for a new issue to come out, here is Lost is the perfect example. .

Seeing is believing. Lost you find it WHO