Paul Salopek marks every 100th mile of his long journey with a photo of the ground beneath his feet, the sky above, and a video of the world around him. At Milestone 47, he tweeted, “Fourth pair of Shoes in 4,600 miles. Same Sky”.

That was over two years ago. He is now on Milestone 63 and has walked more than 6,200 miles. He has almost 15,000 more miles to go.

Salopek’s ‘Out of Eden Walk’ is a 21,000-mile (about 33,800 km) trail, retracing the steps of human race across the world. His journey started in 2013 and is to take him from Ethiopia in North Africa to Patagonia in South America. Often, he has walked through long and lonely stretches with only animals for company; sometime a local walking partner joins him for a while.

The main purpose of the walk is to retrace the footsteps of human beings as they inhabited the Earth. It is also an experiment in slow journalism — reporting the news over time with greater depth and detail. “What I am doing is what we as a collective have been doing for 300,000 years. We’ve been roaming the Earth as nomads. It’s only two heartbeats ago that humans started settling down in cities and working in offices and writing things down and taking pictures,” he says.

The walk had an estimated time frame of seven years and was slated to end in 2020. It now seems that Salopek might need three extra years. Quite like a stroll in a park, the walk has turned into a meandering excursion, speckled with chance encounters. Meticulously reported and documented, it tells riveting stories from the exotic red deserts of Uzbekistan, the sulphur springs of Kazakhstan, from the Wakhan Corridor — a strip of land in Afghanistan that separates Tajikistan from Pakistan — and now from the riverine trails of India. More often than not, these are stories of migration, environmental degradation, climate change, war and human rights.

“The world is not uniform in terms of its storytelling landscape — some areas are rich in narratives, others may have leaner pickings. I have been encountering a lot of different stories along the way and I don’t want to rush through them. Even walking sometimes feels like I’m moving too fast,” Salopek says.

We are in the back room of an old building in Bara Bazaar, Kolkata, where, along with partnering organisation National Geographic Society, he is taking a slight detour from his walking schedule to accommodate three slow journalism workshops in India. Salopek doesn’t know when he is going to reach his destination. “I don’t know when I’m reaching Patagonia. it doesn’t bother me that I’m behind (schedule) because I’m not behind — I’m right where I need to be right now.”

The walk, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist says, has had an impact on the way he had learnt to write and to tell stories. “It has given me the insight that every story is connected to another story is connected to another story — ad nauseam — to the very edges of the world. Unfortunately, that perception is lost by journalists today who are sent out to cover micro assignments,” he says.

Salopek has covered issues ranging from wars to the human genome project. “Let’s say I had been around the block when I took my first step [on the trail]. I was a 50-year-old man who had covered more than 20 wars. I was the Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent. I had covered Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkan wars, every war in Africa. By contrast, setting out on a leisurely stroll across Africa, Middle East, Eurasia, and Americas is a pretty pleasant walk through the park,” he says.

An American passport has opened up doors along the way, but brought down some shutters as well. He was not allowed to set foot in countries such as Yemen, Turkmenistan, Iran and Sudan. At times he encountered hard stares and was called a “terrorist”, owing largely to his identity as an American citizen. “The irony of that is that I don’t belong to any tribe. I don’t feel any belonging to the US culturally or ethically except for maybe some very broad archetypes which were shaped when I left [the US]. I was five-and-a-half years old when my family moved to Mexico. Honestly I am not even Mexican. So where am I from — I’m from nowhere,” he says.

Salopek speaks of challenges on the way, especially while documenting women. “I have walked mostly with women in India, which is fabulous. I get admitted to homes, I get to sit with the women most of the time. But imagine walking through Saudi Arabia or places such as Uzbekistan or Pakistan where getting past the veil or ‘purdah’ is almost impossible,” he stresses. At such times, Salopek looks to his walking partners as guides.

“I have been able to access women’s lives through the women I have been walking with,” he says. And this has helped him break stereotypes about women — while talking to the emancipated Pamiri Shia women of Tajikistan, for instance, or the woman soldier in Israel. His walking partner in Saudi Arabia was a woman who defied the laws of the land to go walking with him. “The two days that she walked along, it was a different Saudi Arabia,” he says.

Among the thousands of encounters that Salopek has had over the course of these years, it is these stories that will remain as a witness to his trail: the journey of humankind from the interwoven stories of a single man.

( http://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.com )

Jennifer Kishan is a writer and photographer based in Kolkata

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