Out of Eden Walk: A 12-year walk between oceans

Paul Salopek: It was chaotic. I’d been preparing the logistics for this walk for well over a year from the US. And you’d think everything would have been kind of nailed down and on schedule. But the camels that I thought I’d rented were nowhere to be found. Bags that I thought had been transferred did not arrive. So, we started a bit late. That’s okay, though. This is a very long journey. [It] started with different camels and a roller bag, the kind you roll through the airport, strapped to the back of them because I couldn’t find my canvas bags.

That’s right. So, this project is premised on the idea of following the first anatomically modern Homo sapiens who walked out of Africa back in the middle of the Stone Age. And so, I’m walking to where scientists are telling me it is kind of the last corner of the last nook and cranny of the continents they reached. And that was the tip of South America, a place calledTierra del Fuego, where Argentina and Chile are.

It’s been a slow accumulation of realizations. At the beginning, there was a lot of anxiety about whether I was going to make it even, you know, a fraction of the way. But after all this time, it becomes your life. It actually, sort of, is now my daily existence. And I think that one lesson I take away is that once you adapt to it, it becomes easy. I guess the biggest surprise is how easy it has been.

Yeah, based on the one day, there were questions about whether I’d make it to the next Tuesday. You know, there’s kit falling off the camels, and we’re having to go back and pick it up.

Very early on, I knew that I was going to be walking with people. This is a people project. I can tell you my impressions [of] walking across Ethiopia, China or South Korea, but they would soon become repetitive. So, I walk with local people who add their own voices and insights; therefore, the journey is constantly being refreshed.

You know, I started with paper maps. I sometimes use online navigational apps, but my walking partners, again, are my human mapping experts. They know the terrain. They know where the best shops might be and where to find shelter that doesn’t always appear on things like Google Maps.

How about all the time? There is no stability in this project. People sometimes say, “What do you take away so far? You’re more than a decade in, any kind of epiphany?” One of the big ones is overplanning. So, you have to plan. You have to kind of sort of know where deserts are. You have to know where the next water supply [is]. But this project has rid me of the impulse, whatever I had of it, of overplanning. And I think, you know, overplanning comes with having resources. You know, coming from a wealthy society, my physical identity, kind of being an older white guy, all these privileges that come with the package that my body is. But walking kind of democratizes you, up to a point. More than driving a car or flying a plane. It puts you at boot level with everybody else, who’s on foot, out in this landscape. And so, I have learned to become comfortable with uncertainty.

Huge difference. And I have to remind my readers that I am not in any way replicating the original human discovery of the planet. That’s the kind of conceptual part of it. But our ancestors took more than 50,000 years, after kind of rambling out of Africa, with no destination in mind, right — this is before destinations had been invented — to reach the tip of South America. I might do it in 15 or 16 years. I’m moving pretty steadily in one direction. They were going in circles. They were going backward. They were going sideways because they were looking for resources. They’re hunters and gatherers.

The big difference is that they were traveling in communities, right? Hunter-gatherer bands ranged in size from a dozen to maybe up to a maximum of 40 [people]. That’s about as many human beings as you can feed off the landscape that you’re moving through. So, the people who discovered the planet were not dudes. They were not guides. They weren’t like me. They were communities that included old women. They included children. They included people of every age. And so, one of the things I’ve taken away, through my small kind of experience with walking partners, is it does take a community to have a life with meaning, including if you’re always plodding across a continent. So, my community are my walking partners.

Well, you know, I started as a journalist and am still a journalist. I’m 12 years older. My hair has turned almost white in the course of these years. And, sure, I’m thinking about sort of, you know, I hope I’m going to make it to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. If I do, that’s great. If I don’t, that’s the way it’s going to be, too; just take it day by day.

People do ask me, “So, are you going to hang up your boots at Beagle Channel, at the tip of South America, where Darwin kind of did his original discoveries?” That is my finish line. I really don’t know. I’m not going to turn around and walk back. Probably not. But who knows? I will leave that option open. Probably continue writing, right, in some capacity … and also keep using my body. Keep moving around. But I don’t really have a solid plan yet. My world is consumed, my thoughts are consumed by what I can see in my immediate horizon. What my eyes can see. That’s where my concerns are in my life right now.