Paul Salopek is on a foot journey across the world. He provides an extraordinary record of humanity at a new millennium

Journalist and National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has been walking across the planet at the pace of his footsteps. Setting out from Ethiopia, with his finish line in South America’s Tierra del Fuego, he is entering year 13 of retracing Homo sapiens’ first migration out of Africa around 60,000 years ago in a slow listening, storytelling project — The Out of Eden Walk — which stories the human experience by people who seldom grace the pages of history.

More than halfway through a 24,000-mile (38,000-kilometer) odyssey, he’s spent over a decade assembling a “global mosaic” of stories in a blend of journalistic and poetic prose.

At the pace of 3mph (5km/h) the Out of Eden Walk isn’t an expedition or an assignment. Salopek’s trek and storytelling, during what he calls “the golden age of information and movement,” has so far taken 12 years. “It’s turned into my life.” 

From Africa’s oldest fossil site, Herto Bouri, Salopek traversed the desert plains of the Arabian Peninsula, and followed the Central Asian Silk Road trade route to summit 15,000-foot peaks across the Himalayas. He crossed the Pamir Mountains on the trail of Marco Polo with the first generation of Muslim women trekking guides. He’s covered and chronicled 100-mile-stretches, for which he pauses to interview the nearest person and document the scene as content called Milestones, more than 100 times over, and mapped the dozens of times so far that he’s been stopped by police. 

In 2020 he flew (for the only time) out of Myanmar, strained by the compounded shock of a military coup and COVID-19. He picked up the walk in China, where he spent an unanticipated two-and-a-half years in a series of COVID lockdowns, between modern highways and rural provinces. 

Right now, Salopek and his local guide, translator and photographer Soichiro Koriyama are bordering Japan’s northwestern coastline, across the massive sand dunes at Tottori Prefecture, an unlikely desert landscape at the border of the city’s center. The air is mildly cool, but not a typical nippy November. As visitors accompanying Salopek for three days, Society staff members Kirsten Weymouth, Emily Kelly, and I had packed too warm: this year is the longest Mount Fuji has waited for snow in its 130-year recorded history. No iconic snowcaps visible from the superspeed train journey to meet Salopek on the trail. We abandoned extra layers in train station lockers to shrink our packs down to Salopek’s recommended 15-pound (or 6-kilogram) maximum, and avoid unnecessary heat.

Climate change. Humanitarian crises. Political divisions and upswellings of pain. Technological breakthroughs and pitfalls. Love and terror. The Out of Eden Walk is a commentary on all of these things, as Salopek bears witness to life at “boot level,” as he often says. “The Out of Eden Walk becomes one humble pathway to explore these issues.”

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We step out of time with train commuters and road traffic and into Salopek’s bipedal pace, though he graciously slows his roll to newcomer momentum. “We’ll take it easy,” he soothes us.

The distance to our sleeping quarters for the evening, a Japanese guesthouse, or ryokan, is seven to 10 miles (15 to 17 kilometers) from our starting point—25 minutes by vehicle. On foot, this is a full day of travel. We pass mostly cars parked in driveways of sleepy neighborhoods, a vending machine every few miles, and not a human in sight. 

In Japan, 7-Eleven’s and Lawson’s convenience stores act both as guideposts and rest stops. Over two days of walking, we experience unanticipated hot sunshine and horizontal rain. Wind flattening the hair on dogs’ backs, and sand whirling over the Tottori dunes. Our umbrellas would be flipped inside out by a sudden gust, and our rain-proof gear tested. Over two days on the trail, we wouldn’t encounter any other humans on foot.

Since arriving on Japan’s western shores by ferry, via South Korea, Salopek reveals his storytelling opportunities have been sparse. Spotting another person has been so rare that Koriyama snaps a photo on the off chance they encounter someone. In his 40 years of reporting, and 12 years walking the globe, he says he hasn’t seen anything like it. “It’s a ghost landscape. And that becomes the story. But it’s only one story.”

The Out of Eden Walk lives and breathes on people — their generosity, kindness, vulnerability — and their stories. Salopek’s disarming and empathetic way of moving about the planet (self-described as “just a skinny guy walking around the world”), emerges in the tapestry of stories he’s weaving together and the company he keeps: He’s been received into the homes of mystic healers in remote Kazakhstan and shared the makeshift living quarters of Syrian war refugees in Jordan. He’s asked a 100-year-old World War II veteran about his “backbreaking contribution” to the ancient Burma Road, and probed a Chinese archaeology professor about the utility of walls, while walking through a maze of them in Shanxi province. 

“I feel the complex questions are the ones that deserve my life. Not to become a guru, because I don’t have answers. I just have questions.” 

A life long nomad

While trudging somewhere between pavement and Tottori’s sandy coast, Salopek says his earliest storytelling memories go as far back as grade school in Mexico. When he was six, his father, an ardent Kennedy supporter disillusioned by the former president’s and Martin Luther King’s assassinations, packed his family into their van in Barstow, California, and headed for the nearest border. 

At his new school, in a foreign country, story was Salopek’s cultural currency. He bought relationships and saved himself punches with it. “If you don’t want people to beat you up you make them laugh.” 

Lore became professional journalism after he graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in biology and dabbled in different trades, from farm work to commercial fishing. He began writing as a police reporter for a local newspaper in New Mexico, then went on to travel for his stories on peace and wars across Latin America, Central Asia, the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East. He was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes for his profiles on the Human Genome Diversity Project and his coverage of the civil war in Congo, before he conceived of story on foot with only a backpack.

The decision to walk across the world wasn’t as much a conscious departure from a normal life as it was a natural next step for a career nomad. In this sense, Salopek calls the Out of Eden Walk “an arrival.” 

Being constantly on the move since kindergarten imbued him with a resilience honed by the unexpected, the unsettling, the uncomfortable. It meant forgoing traditional creature comforts and conventional definitions of home, at the least. 

But now, he has the luxury of time. Salopek is meandering, not bee-lining. He regularly lives with the people in his stories. If he can, he labors with them. “Often you might mess things up more than you’re helping, but it breaks the ice,” he says.

“Imagine having a job where for 11 years all you had to do was think and feel. Not just about what’s happening around you, but yourself and your role in the landscape and what you’re moving through. Those are the things I try to share in writing.” Salopek’s digital stories, his Dispatches from the field, as well as features he contributes to National Geographic magazine and other major media outlets, “are swollen with time, gorged on time, marinating for days, weeks,” he says.

In a blip of two days on the trail, slowing down — or getting reacquainted with the natural rhythm of things — means moving with more intention. It manifests in superficial ways, like dodging plastic debris carpeting the beach: washed up buoys, laundry baskets, portable gasoline cans and lost slippers. It’s a chance to marvel at the most symmetrical sand dollars and impressive driftwood art, to notice the turtle in a front porch aquarium and count the tanuki bears sculptures grinning from people’s lawns.

Coastal wind in the face and the fleeting sight of neighborhood cats scurrying under a bridge, the ghostly corner barbershop and stubborn sand grains stuck in the shoes are all a whipping mirage, if clocked at all, on modern transit. The motorized life, by contrast, with its frenetic speed, resembles a rapidly unfolding film, paused fleetingly for glimpses of a reality that rushes past. 

On a deeper level, the unhurriedness of walking has altered how Salopek thinks about time. The ephemeral nature of it all comes alive, reinforcing the belief in the only constant of change. “So you’d better be flexible.” 

As we pace through a stretch of rain drizzled fields, Salopek reveals the walk is as much the story as it is his writing process. “When I’m walking I’m thinking about writing. I’m thinking about a problem. About a paragraph or how something doesn’t work in a story.”

At the end of his day’s trek, somewhere around 15 miles (22 kilometers), though that could be considered mild for Salopek, who has, for example, put in a 25-mile-day slog in the Hejaz of Saudi Arabia, searching for water, he writes. “Strangely,” he says, after hiking from sunrise to sundown, he’s the most productive he’s been in his life.

Producing articles on the move is straightforward. A cushy desk and chair are not necessary for the writing to get done. His true workspace lies within his thoughts. “The work is the work,” he says. “The studio is between your ears, the four chambers of your heart. That’s the only space that matters. Everything else is negotiable.”

Salopek has no deep attachment to possessions. He is walking the Earth with only a rucksack, a coffee mug and umbrella strapped to either side. No insatiable hunger for personal space to complete his mission, no ideal of home beyond his own skin.

Sitting for too long might actually petrify his flow.

“What do you do when you have to have a tough conversation? You say ‘let’s take a walk.’ What do you do when you need to blow off steam, or think about anything? You take a walk.” 

Before setting out in Ethiopia in 2012, he gave a presentation at Harvard in which he demonstrated, pacing the stage, the vitality of movement for humans. Two hunter gatherer tribes, separated by thousands of miles between Tanzania and the Amazon, both average 10 miles on foot per day, he said. “So when people say ‘Paul, what you’re doing is extreme, what you’re doing is extraordinary,’ what I come back with is the number: For 95 percent of our species’ history, we walked an average of 3,200, 3,500 miles a year. And that is what is normal.” 

For early humans, restlessness was survival, Salopek wrote in his 2013 Dispatch, The Glorious Boneyward: A Report from Our Starting Line:

Droughts had parched the African savannas of our species’ infancy. Starvation wiped out more than 90 percent of humankind. It was a near extinction event. A classic bottleneck. Survivors burst out of the continent when the climate shifted again and greened the Middle East, allowing people to migrate into a lush haven of savannas and lakes located in what are today the gravel wastes of central Arabia. From there, the continents fell to us like dominoes. 

And with the scientific measuring tools of today, studies qualify the natural act of roaming as therapeutic: Walking can help boost memory by revitalizing white matter in the brain, and if the trail is through nature, it can contribute significantly to happiness too.

As night falls, it’s obvious what Salopek and science mean. At the end of walking sun up to sun down, after socializing over a convivial dinner prepared by our hosts, and lively table-side discussion about the dark underbelly of internet cafes and the universal fascination with K-pop, Salopek is awake. The rest of us turn in, and Salopek is clacking away in the hall outside the paper-thin walls of the sleeping quarters. He’s writing a story into the night, preparing for a workshop he’ll host (one of many he has already in the past) with walking partner Koriyama, and gearing up for the opening of the latest Out of Eden Walk art and storytelling exhibition in South Korea, which coincided with a moment of unanticipated political turmoil in the country.

He’s already put in morning writing hours and is chatting with the hosts before breakfast; a generous home-prepared spread of poached eggs, seaweed, fresh fruits and rice. Salopek washes it down with a coffee, and it's time to move again.

Inquiry and connection

People ask him if it gets boring. “You show me anything more interesting than this and I’ll happily stop walking and switch.” 

Our trail today will involve a coastal detour, through Iwami’s cliffside nature park. It’s more scenic, if only a few more steps up wooden stairs and down precipitous declines for the rewarding panorama of a pine-studded, misty coastline. 

Salopek has taken literally millions of steps, across years, borders, languages, cultures. He’s uncertain how much his writing style and its evolution are attributable to his long walk, “or just getting old.”

Reflecting on his early writings, he grins sheepishly. “It makes my teeth ache.” He says he couldn’t let stories marinade long enough in the deadline-driven news cycle of foreign correspondence — and expresses admiration for his fellow quick-turnaround journalists who must work within these constraints. 

Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk stories, and regular contributions by walking partners, are assembled like chapters in a book. They hyperlink between each other and “break down the tidy boundaries” of traditional journalism. “If you read the dispatches in sequence, you realize they allude to one another in some way. It’s part of a larger story.”

In this way, the Out of Eden Walk becomes an ongoing “five-kilometer-an-hour conversation in which universal concerns are looked at.” In a sense, Salopek is passing himself from human to human, weaving a tapestry of stories that connect us all. His work thrives on these fluid boundaries, rooted in neighborly reliance. He reflects that the communal aspect of his life and work is as intrinsic as the act of walking itself.

“For 300,000 years our brains evolved to interact socially with other human beings intimately, to resolve our problems and dilemmas and emotions.” 

One of the biggest opportunities for humans in times of uncertainty and hardship is the revival of community and connection through curiosity and wonder. 

“The great thing about the walk is if someone knows you’re really listening, they’re overly eager to share. It’s a real privilege and it’s constant education.” He adds: “Anybody can do what I’m doing.”

We inch toward one of a handful of Lawson’s convenience stores we’ve passed in our spurt of time on the trail. “Some people would think it’s a banal, corporate, inauthentic artifact of suburban globalized life,” Salopek comments. But to us, it’s refuel and refresh heaven: portable egg sandwiches, pickled plum rice rolls, to-go coffees and a clean restroom. 

“That is also authentically human,” says Salopek.

The ‘itinerant stories trader’ walks on

On the final day of our three-day streak, we make a detour to a nearby seafood port market. Our ryokan host drives us there. He is also a fisherman, and he’s taken us to work. 

The port is a wholesale market where vendors place their bids, mostly on dungeness crabs and massive tuna. It will be the subject of a story for Salopek.

Men crowd the crustaceans, belly up on the floor, and start the bidding. “How much will someone pay for this?,” Salopek asks, through Koriyama, his interpreter. The biggest crabs could go for $300. Their huge legs dangle from styrofoam boxes packed by tiny elderly women. Most of the catch are males, but a warming planet means smaller bounties, and the industry has started harvesting females, too. Benignly, Salopek observes, converses, documents.

He makes sure to locate the manager of the operation to thank him and discovers there’s a commercial market to visit just up the road. This is the nature of the walk: one link in this story chain leads to another, along a thread Salopek weaves into his global narrative.

The skies are moody, maybe too moody for Salopek to join the fisherman on the water, but he’ll try. We say our goodbyes and begin the route back to Kyoto. The train delivers us 130 miles and three hours later. 

Soon, Salopek will steam from Japan to Alaska across the Pacific Ocean via cargo ship and pick up his stride again in North American territory. He’ll ramble southbound through the Western hemisphere to the Tierra del Fuego’s archipelago gathering new encounters and stories all along the way.

“The walk is like the itinerant trader who shows up with guacamaya feathers from Mesoamerica walking into what is today the American Southwest trading these feathers for jade or gold objects,” Salopek illustrates. “Only the things that the walk trades in are ideas, innovations, life stories that can act as maybe guideposts, and what a privilege to be able to be the feather trader who’s walking between villages.”

The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, has funded Explorer Paul Salopek and the Out of Eden Walk project since 2013. Explore the project here.

ABOUT THE WRITER
For the National Geographic Society: Natalie Hutchison is a Digital Content Producer for the Society. She believes authentic storytelling wields power to connect people over the shared human experience. In her free time she turns to her paintbrush to create visual snapshots she hopes will inspire hope and empathy.