Beijing Letter: ‘There is no story not connected to another story and walking connects them’

It was supposed to take seven years but after a decade on the road, Paul Salopek was still just over halfway through an extraordinary journey when he stopped off in Beijing this week. In his Out of Eden Walk, he has followed the footsteps of some of the first humans who left Africa tens of thousands of years ago.

He has walked from Ethiopia through the Middle East, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Myanmar and China. After a short break in Beijing, he will walk up towards the Russian border, crossing to Alaska before travelling down the Pacific coast of the Americas to Tierra del Fuego.

Throughout the journey Salopek, who is 61, has reported for the National Geographic on everything from migration, wars, coups to climate change and the coronavirus pandemic. A former Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent, he won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting before he started in 2013 on this project, which he describes as slow journalism.

“You are moving slowly enough at 5km an hour through the big stories of our time, to spend enough time with people who inhabit those headlines, those stories, to actually get an individualised understanding of how those headlines are all connected together,” he said.

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“One of the great discoveries as a storyteller about the walk is it broke down all these barriers in my head between an environmental story and an economic story and a war story and a political story. All those barriers are, when you think about it, so artificial. They’re made to fit on to a computer screen and match the computer screen in our minds. But there is no story that’s not connected to another story and walking connects them. So you’re moving slowly enough to get immersive into the stories of our time, but at the same time, you’re not stopped.”

The journey is continuous, so Salopek never goes home for a break, but he always walks with local companions whom he recruits along the way. Blessed with a pair of feet that have given him little trouble over – he has taken the physical challenges in his stride.

The most formidable barriers to his progress have been national borders and visa regimes, so he had to take an unplanned detour through the Caucasus when he was stopped at the Iranian border.

“I had to kind of look at a map and see which countries are there. And it was extraordinary. I would even say it was one of these places that was transformative. And that’s where I met my wife,” he said.

Salopek speaks eloquently about how human activity has made much of the world uninhabitable and “not just built by our machines for us, it’s built by our machines for other machines”. When he started walking 10 years ago, only the farmers he met were talking about the climate but now it is on everyone’s lips.

“At foot level, it’s unavoidable. Everything from legacy crops that are feeding the Middle East no longer working, and the scramble to find alternatives. It’s also happening in northern India, where people are saying, do we have to go back to millet, drought-resistant crops?” he said.

“I’ve seen so little wildlife on my walk. I’ve been walking for 3,700 days and nights and I’ve seen big megafauna on maybe 20 of those days – 20. The nature documentaries are not giving you the real picture.”

Salopek was in Myanmar when the coronavirus pandemic broke out and a coup erupted, so he paused his walk there for 16 months while he waited for a visa to enter China. When it arrived, he took a flight to Shanghai but immediately flew back on an internal flight to southwestern Yunnan, just inside the border, to resume his journey on foot.

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He rhapsodises about the exquisite harmony between humans and nature in Yunnan, the very opposite of the stereotype of China as the hyper-modern factory of the world.

“I’m saying, wow, this is a China apart, where the houses are made by hand, not by machine tools. The tools themselves that make the houses are often made by hand. The dimensions of human infrastructure are geared to the human body,” he said.

Salopek, who spent part of his childhood in a Mexican village, feels most comfortable in rural settings but he is unsentimental about life in the countryside and appreciates the benefits of urban life.

“I try not to beat up on cities. When I write my stories about walking across the world, I look forward to cities for all the reasons that everybody does,” he said.

“It’s fantastic to be here in Beijing, it’s wonderful. And I’ll be very excited to leave Beijing to start moving through the northeast, just for different reasons, different joys.”

You can follow the Out of Eden Walk in real-time online. outofedenwalk.org