National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek is on a yearslong mission to travel on foot from Ethiopia all the way to the southernmost tip of South America. And he’s documenting it all in Out of Eden Walk.
One thing that comes with the journey, though, is frequent run-ins with local law enforcement. Salopek has been picked up enough times by police, self-deputized gangs and immigration officials that he’s created a map of all these encounters.
Salopek recently spoke to Host Carolyn Beeler who wondered how many times he’s actually been stopped.
“120 times,” he said.
Carolyn Beeler: One hundred and twenty, wow. And how many times have you actually been detained?
Paul Salopek: Um, those, I think it’s a minority. I think it’s 16 or 17, maybe times. The bulk of them, about 70 or 80 of those 120, are kind of in what I call “investigative stops.” Where, you know, an officer or a soldier comes up and demands papers, maybe wants to rummage around my backpack. And then about the balance … say another 20 or so stops are kind of friendly stops, saying, “Hey, do you need some water? Are you okay?” Which also involved [them] quietly checking me out, too, right?
And you can tell me this with this amount of specificity, because you were actually logging all of this on a map online that I was checking out earlier. Why are you keeping such a good track of this?
Originally, Carolyn, it was good for two kinds of reasons. One was just kind of using these anecdotal stops as maybe one measurement of freedom of movement in different societies. And the other was to kind of poke fun at the car-driven world, right? Because in motorized, especially affluent motorized societies, pedestrians are rarer and rarer, and often suspect. You know, you get approached by police if you’re out on foot somewhere in the middle of nowhere, as opposed to if you were driving through in a car.
Some of your stops, though, have been a little more targeted, I guess. You’ve kind of stumbled on sensitive areas in certain places. Looking at your map, there is a particularly dense cluster from when you were walking through Uzbekistan. When were you there, and what was the security situation like?
Yeah, I mean, I can laugh at it now. Again, it’s kind of cool for me to look back on it on this map, but it was actually very stressful. I walked about 2,000 kilometers across Uzbekistan back in 2016. At the time, Uzbekistan was governed by an old-style Stalinist dictator, Islam Karimov. There were billboards I walked by with big eyes on them, saying, you know, ‘Be aware, be careful, look for strange characters.’ And so I fit those descriptions. I was stopped constantly by secret police, by uniformed police. The police would call my walking partner. I had an Uzbek walking partner, and he got so fed up with it, Carolyn, that he basically started hanging up on them. And then they would show up a few hours later in a car, right? So yeah, it was tough. When I finally crossed the border into a neighboring Central Asian country, Kyrgyzstan, I literally got down on the ground and kissed the dust. It was just such a huge relief.
Did you ever feel like you were in serious danger during any of these stops?
You know, this is the thing about my experience, even before the walk, as a foreign correspondent in some dodgy environments, covering wars and whatnot, revolutions, tense elections, what have you, is that as a journalist, you kind of get a hard shell about police attention. You know, you have to, or you just can’t do the job. But it does wear you down emotionally. It makes you paranoid, even after leaving that country, I was looking over my shoulder, “Are police still following me in cars, etc., etc.?” Yeah.
You were there for much longer than you were as a foreign correspondent, but you still did leave, whereas people who lived there, of course, did not and lived with that level of surveillance all the time. Did you reflect on what that must be like?
Absolutely. Absolutely. To begin with, I’m privileged as a foreigner. The best-case scenario, even in a police state, I am sort of a neutral entity, right? I’m an outsider. I’m not involved in politics. I am walking through on this crazy project. But the communities I was walking through had to live with this day in and day out. It’s complicated, though. And I can’t speak for Uzbeks — I wouldn’t even dare — but imagine being born and growing up multigenerationally, and to some degree, it’s kind of driven into you from kindergarten: that you have to keep an eye on your neighbor, [and] that becomes normalized. People don’t realize that. So often, paradoxically, the people who were alerting the secret police on me were the very farmers I was trying to talk to. After I left, they would call the police.
There are also chunks of your map that I think are highlighted in orange, where you were monitored continuously. That was in and around Uzbekistan, in Saudi Arabia and in China. What does that mean, continuous monitoring? And what did that feel like?
Well, you know, one of the flaws of this fun map, the thing that it misses is two things: high-tech surveillance and then really low tech, which is, you know, the police don’t actually make contact with you. They don’t come up and kind of grab you by the wrist and say, “Hey, stop!” But they’re two blocks away. They’re falling in a car. It’s like no license plates, smoked windows. It’s got all these antennas coming out. And that’s what those orange kind of long lines are. That’s continuous 24/7 monitoring.
Was that by people, like you said, in the cars or was it sometimes, I don’t know, drones or something else?
It was both. It was even my phone. I can’t be 100% certain that my phone is being tapped, but I’ve just got to make assumptions based on the journalists who are there, both Indigenous and visiting. And in the case of China, for a period of 10 weeks, I had up to eight secret police, men and women, following me in two or three vehicles for hundreds and hundreds of kilometers. And how did I know this [was] happening? It’s pretty easy … because they were checking into the guest house rooms next to me. Every single night. So, it was 24/7.
Wow, yeah, it must be quite draining to live under a microscope like that for such long stretches.
Yeah, yeah, it does. It gets mighty lonely, if you will.
So, Paul, you are back in the US now. I’m sure you’re seeing lots of news from Minneapolis and elsewhere with ICE agents carrying out violent operations and clashing with protesters. I’m curious about your perspective, given the interactions you’ve had with law enforcement around the world in recent years.
Yeah, I mean, you can imagine. So, I leave Eurasia, and I take a ship across the Pacific and land in Alaska, and now I’m making my way south. And when I left Asia, I thought, okay, sort of the most serious practices, the most concerning practices of police [is] that they’re anonymous, right? They cover their faces. They can come to you and basically ask for ID without any compunction; there’s no Fourth Amendment, and they can grab you and take you away … was behind me, right? And I know that the ICE agents are focusing on immigrants, but apparently, they’ve taken American citizens as well by accident or whatnot. So it’s quite sobering for me. It’s a little bit of trepidation. It’ll take me about 9 months to walk through the continental US from the Canadian border to the Mexican border, and I’ll be keeping this map going, so we might see a whole plethora of new police stops. What is the irony of that? I wasn’t expecting that, having been out of the US for 13 years.
Parts of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.
Writer and National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has embarked on a 24,000-mile storytelling trek across the world called the “Out of Eden Walk.” The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonders of our world, has funded Salopek and the project since 2013. Explore the project here. Follow the journey on X at @PaulSalopek, @outofedenwalk.
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