19,000 kilometres and counting: why this man is walking from Ethiopia to Argentina

“Walking over the Hindu Kush, from Afghanistan into Pakistan … there is no border, simply a wild mountain pass and snowy peaks stretching so far as the attention could see, under metallic light. A primordial vista. You can recall your thoughts at such moments, but you can’t really have them again,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Fellow, Paul Salopek, who's documenting the world, using his feet, in his Out of Eden Walk.

Starting in January 2013, he has been walking from Africa along the ancient path of human migration, which started about 60,000 years back. Starting at Herto Bouri, Ethiopia - the oldest dated Homo sapien site on the globe - his walk was supposed to take seven years and cover a lot more than 33,000 kilometres. He has so far walked about 19,000km, and happens to be stuck in Myanmar as borders have closed due to the pandemic.

This intrepid experiment in slow and immersive journalism will extend from Ethiopia to Argentina, passing through west Asia, the Silk Road, India, China, Siberia, and the west coast of North and SOUTH USA, ending at Tierra del Fuego.

Salopek was created in California and spent his childhood in Mexico. With a degree in environmental biology, he has already established a peripatetic life - from focusing on a shrimp boat in Western Australia and a cattle ranch in Texas, to being truly a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and living in Africa for 11 years. His walk is backed by National Geographic, the journalism non-profit Knight Foundation and the Pulitzer Centre.

Salopek believes that humans are hard-wired to walk long distances. In the end, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers who covered considerable distances within a day. “There is absolutely no possible way to teach for walking around the world. You merely do it,” he says.

The walk can be an experiment in slowing the storytelling narrative down to a human level, and seeing connections others miss, because they’re moving too fast

Paul Salopek

So what inspired this ambitious journey? “The paradox of the info Revolution is that oftentimes, the general public isn’t better informed,” he says. “Media pours out of our devices at a speed that nobody can absorb. What passes for news is often shallow. The walk is an experiment in slowing the storytelling narrative right down to a human level, and seeing connections others miss, because they’re moving too fast.

The walk is more about meaning than information. The stories of the persons Salopek meets and the places he visits appear as weekly dispatches on National Geographic’s Out of Eden Walk site. From the story of a pizza maker in Bihar, India, who worked in a Pizza Hut on a US military base in Afghanistan, to a mystic healer in Kazakhstan, the narratives are fascinating.

Salopek treads lightly, only carrying the various tools of his trade - a notebook plus some electronics. He sleeps wherever sundown catches him. Atlanta divorce attorneys country he goes to, he has co-walkers - locals, from journalists to environmental activists, who might help him navigate the native language and draw his attention to local issues.

In India, where Salopek spent 1 . 5 years walking along the country’s great rivers, including the Ganges and Brahmaputra, he was accompanied by Rotary Peace Fellow and journalist Priyanka Borpujari, environmental photographer Arati Kumar Rao and Indian river expert Siddharth Agarwal, among others. From their walk in India, the group has drawn focus on issues like the country’s dire water crisis.

“The walk wouldn’t be possible, or at minimum it might be much diminished, without the people who walk along with me,” Salopek says. “My walking partners rediscover their homes by walking. And for the reason that sense, I get to experience their amplified sense of wonderment, and I’m just along for the ride.”

Borpujari, who covers human rights issues, walked 1,200km in two segments with Salopek, and was interested most by the human geography of the knowledge. Her Instagram feed is filled with images from the walk - of women carrying bricks on the heads, boat crossings and rest breaks in little tea shops.

“Walking is a multilayered experience and even though older Indians we met on the way understood our walk, younger Indians were baffled as to the reasons someone would walk so much,” Borpujari says. “It had been a learning experience in many ways, from staying at all types of places, including a temple and a mosque, and an old animal shed, sharing the homes and food of strangers, and completely moving into the moment.”

Salopek has had to cope with the physical strain of his journey. He has fallen sick several times, developing pneumonia in Palestine and dysentery in Pakistan.

“But a fringe benefit for walking is that it keeps you healthy, physically and mentally. So I’m probably healthier now than if I’d led a sedentary life,” he quips.

The walk is essentially about people and the problems they face. In Ethiopia, Salopek saw pastoral groups involved with a resource war over grass and watering holes, that have been vanishing partly because of repeated droughts. In the valleys of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, farmers were enjoying a bonanza of fresh water - more river and creek run-off than they’d ever seen. Nonetheless it was a terminal gift, via rapidly melting glaciers. “Many people are talking and fretting about the changing climate,” Salopek says.

And, of course, there were occasions of danger. Salopek stumbled into violence in the West Bank, and mingled with Syrian refugees along the Turkish border. “Being by walking was an edge in both cases because, in dangerous situations, being by walking could be less threatening,” he says.

Regardless, the walk is a essential exercise in countering stereotypes, he says. “When you relate with people individually rather than by national stereotypes, as you must, when you meet citizens by walking and spend time with them, you learn that stereotypes of any sort are of limited use,” he says.

I ask Salopek what he ultimately hopes to accomplish. “To become a better writer. EASILY can inspire readers to slow down a bit themselves, and perhaps get out and explore their worlds by walking, all of the better,” he says. “The vast majority of the world is a relaxing place. We give attention to wars because they are dramatic.”

At the current rate, it may be six or seven more years before Salopek reaches Tierra del Fuego. And what employs that? He smiles. “I don’t know. One world at the same time.”