Walking around the world takes a village

Paul Salopek: You know, the old-fashioned way, the pre-digital way, it’s word of mouth. If I’m walking through Uzbekistan and the next country is Kyrgyzstan, I ask my Uzbek friends and walking partners, “Hey, do you know anybody over the border? Any friends? Any relatives?” And, so, I’m being passed kind of hand-to-hand. It’s kind of nice. 

Yeah, it’s this combination of body and mind, right? I’m not a super athlete. This project isn’t a reality show about survivalism, but you do need basic fitness. So, I ask that people make sure they have no medical conditions and that they’ve got a base level of physical shape. And then, on the other side, they have to be, like a journalist, to be curious. They can’t be too shy. And they can’t [harbor] biases or grudges that would limit them to talking only to certain people in their communities. You know, they have to be able to talk to everybody, just like you and I do.

This is slow journalism, Marco. So, I give them at least a week. The first day is kind of just like whatever happens, happens. It’s an easy one. But yeah, give them five, six days to see how their knees are treating them, how the personalities are working, if they’re enjoying themselves. Yeah, it takes a little time.

Gosh. I mean, one that stands out — that was very short — was a Turkish waiter who saw that my quote-unquote “official walking partner” was kind of out of commission. He had too many blisters on his feet. He needed a break. So, this young guy who was wearing the Turkish waiter outfit, a white shirt, you know, black pants and black street shoes with a little white towel over his arm said, “Hey, I’ll walk with you today.” I mean, he did. He crossed the mountain with me wearing his uniform. It goes from that, like just kind of picking up one day, half a day, to walking partners who walked with me for thousands of kilometers. My Kurdish walking partner in Anatolia asked me to join for about three or four days. He ended up walking for seven months.

Yeah, that does happen, and it’s kind of cool. I mean, those kinds of pickup walking partners, if you will, are at a deep layer of richness because they’re from that place. They know it well … could be a valley somewhere … and they’ll walk with me. I might still be walking with another [partner], you know, like if I’m walking in China, I might have a walking partner that’s been with me for weeks. But then, some farmer says, “Hey, you know it’s great what you guys are doing. Let me take you down this river valley. I’ll show you where I grew up. I’ll show you where my grandparents’ houses are.” It’s this great collective, communal kind of active discovery.

You know, it started out at the beginning, just like, you’ve been around the block, Marco, you go to a country to cover a breaking news story, [and] often you liaise with a local colleague, right? That’s the way I sort of conceptualize this, except they would be walking instead of in a Rent-A-Car at the airport. But it has evolved over the years because we spend so much time together; walking does something to your head and heart that creates these really tight connections in a short period of time. They literally become like dear friends and sometimes even as close as family, brothers and sisters. So, they don’t just provide logistical support or translation; it’s a co-discovery journey. And as I’ve sort of found to my delight is that for them it’s even more special in many cases than for me. Because I’m primed for wonder the way a journalist is, the way a storyteller is. I’m ready to be surprised every day I wake up. But people who are showing you through their home landscapes, for them, they’re shocked because they say, “You know, Paul, I never knew this was happening in my backyard. I’m kind of seeing my home new again.” So the wonder is even bigger for them.

That’s an interesting point. I never heard that. But it absolutely is in my case. I think I can prove it over the last 13 years: There’s something about matching strides. Something this ancient iambic beat, it’s kind of like the beat of a heartbeat that gets, you know, not just your bodies, but also your minds and your psyches in sync. There’s a natural, organic ebb and flow of conversation. You can sense when somebody’s body is walking near yours, kind of where they are, how tired they are, where their energy levels are. It’s a deep connection that I think would be hard to match if you’re sitting across the table from somebody, for example.

Yes, of course. And these are situations where you might have your radar on, but you still have blind spots, right? Everybody does. And having somebody local who knows, kind of, the nuances and the subtleties of local allegiances, right, Marco, you’ve been through these situations yourself. I’ve got a funny story exactly to that point.

I was walking through Anatolia years ago with Murat Yazar, who’s a fantastic documentarian. This is in Turkey. This was down near the Syrian border. We got sort of ambushed by a group of villagers, men carrying Kalashnikovs (an AK rifle), because we had a cargo donkey near the Syrian border. It was back when Kobani was under siege by ISIS. There were a lot of refugees kind of spilling over the border. And these Kurdish people from eastern Turkey thought that we were ISIS. We had our hands up, and they were speaking in Kurdish to us, yelling at us. If Murat hadn’t been there to translate, I might have made some misstep that could have gotten us hurt. The funny part of this is that Murat is a philosophical type. He’s kind of an urbanite, a cosmopolitan. And he was yelling stuff back at these guys in Kurdish. And they started arguing. And I elbowed him, I said, “What are you doing? Don’t argue with these guys.” And he said, “Paul, they’re accusing us of being ISIS. And I told them, ‘How can I be ISIS? I’m an atheist. I don’t even believe in the higher being.’” I turned to Murat, and he said, “Thank you. You just made it worse.”

So anyway, your walking partners, you rely on them for everything from your survival to kind of just picking up your mood.

All the time, all the time. I keep social media platforms like WhatsApp, and also in China, WeChat. The most walking partners I’ve walked with in any one country has been China, more than 20. And we keep in constant touch. I don’t think two days go by without some update from everybody. And it is like a large extended family, a global family. I’ve seen them grow up. We’ve grown up together. It’s been 13 years. I’ve seen them get married, get jobs, lose jobs, publish books. I’ve seen the birth of their babies, it’s just this wonderful collective global walking family.

As a matter of fact, I have a great plan, and it’s going to take a few years to set up. I’ve got about three years of walking still ahead of me. As you know, the destination of the Out of Eden Walk is the tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego. My hope is to fly all of my walking partners, going from Ethiopia through the Middle East through the Caucasus through Central Asia to the Far East to the Americas … fly everybody in,  it could be a couple hundred people by the end, to Tierra de Fuego, so that we can walk together to the Antarctic Sea. That’s the plan.