Surprising places on the Out of Eden Walk

Paul Salopek: Dalifagi is a pastoralist kind of resupply center. The local people around there were camel and goat shepherds, and I was going there basically for the water, because I knew it had a well. I had in my mind that this would be a fairly rustic outpost, maybe with a little shop [where] I could buy some noodles and whatnot. But what I found out is that it was crammed with pastoral nomads. And the reason was [that] it wasn’t just offering water; it was offering electricity for them to recharge their mobile phones.

It was pretty remarkable, because what I was expecting was kind of a well with camels around it, guys bucketing out water using, you know, skin buckets. There was that. But what I saw instead were shops that had these rows and rows of wires with chargers on them. And these nomads were coming in, giving the shop owner their phone. He was plugging them in for several hours. The shepherds sat by and had tea [while] waiting for their phones to charge. I met one guy ​​— and these pastoralists, they’re dressed traditionally, they’re wearing a sarong-like wrap [and] have a big knife stuck in their belt —  [and he] had his wrap filled with dozens of mobile phones that he’d gathered from his neighbors to walk into this electronic oasis to recharge.

For them, having a mobile phone — even if you’re pushing camels around the Rift Valley in Africa — is mighty handy. Because before you had communications, and we’re talking maybe just, you know, a generation ago, fairly recently, you were at the mercy of middlemen who were going to buy your animals at whatever price they determined. The mobile phone has given these pastoralists — called the Afar, this group — an amazing, powerful tool to actually find other bidders. So, it’s given them great economic power.

Well, what some people don’t know — I mean, Georgia used to be under the Soviet Union, of course — is that one of the great dictators, one of the big strongmen of the Soviet Union, one of the guys who killed a lot of people, right, was [Joseph] Stalin. He was Georgian. So, to my astonishment, I found that there was this house near the Mtkvari (Kura) river in the city of Tbilisi that had a supposed relic of his printing press where he was involved as a young revolutionary … Printing out anti-imperial tracts, leaflets, what have you. So, at the bottom of this tunnel, this vertical hole was a century-old printing press.

Well, you know, Stalin comes from a very poor family, a shoemaker. He wanted to join the priesthood. He wanted to be a poet. Those frustrations, plus the revolutionary fervor bubbling up in the Caucasus at the time, got him immersed in, basically, Bolshevik radical activity. And part of that process, he became a criminal. He was a bank robber. He started knocking off banks, and he went in and out of prison. He was very good at escaping from prison. He’d be put in jail, and a few weeks later, he escaped … out to rob another bank to fund his revolution.

Yeah, old Soso [Gagoshvili], I mean, here was kind of a middle-aged Georgian guy — and, keep in mind, when I walked through Georgia, they were about 20 years or so out of being under the Iron Curtain. Everybody was very happy to be independent, to be kind of, you know, European-looking … having their freedom. But Soso was kind of a throwback, what Georgians would call Homo Sovieticus; somebody who looked back with nostalgia on the Soviet period because he had been sidelined economically with the advent of pro-Western democracy, capitalism. He was basically living, Marco, at the museum. The museum was kind of his house. And he claimed to be a former KGB agent. Proudly. When he discovered that I was American, he showed me a KGB card, which was a bit suspicious because it was printed in English.

Not just one farmhouse, but Marco, an entire village. So, yes, the whole village had this bizarre cosmic motif, which was very mysterious.

I interviewed three people saying, “What’s going on? Why is this kind of like the Smithsonian Institute’s spaceflight wing in rural Yunnan, except on farmers’ houses?” They said, you know, some guy showed up in a van one day and said, “Can I paint some stuff on your houses for free,” and they said, “Sure, why not?” They could use a coat of paint. And they painted these astronauts floating on tethers, out in orbit, the rings of Saturn, in vibrant, vivid color. And as it turns out, apparently a businessman from an eastern city in China had come to this place. He was an amateur astronomer. He noticed how dark the sky was in this part of rural Yunnan, and decided to buy a local school building that was abandoned because, you know, people are leaving the countryside in China and moving to the cities. He bought it for cheap, converted it into a guest house, and tried to start a business of a kind of touristic astronomy. Inviting amateur astronomers to look at the sky over this town called Gaomeigu. And that was his dream. So, he basically implanted his dream on this entire village. Which, by the way, its main product was potatoes.

Yeah, well, it’s a recurring theme in my life, and in my writing … surprise and serendipity are crucial to this project. Very little is planned. All these places that we just marveled over were accidents. This is an accidental story project where we find stories along the trail, not expecting what’s happening next in the next day.