Explorer halfway through journey to walk around the world

Geoff Bennett:

Lots of people track how many steps they take every day, but it's a safe bet they're not close about to Paul Salopek, who's walking across the world.

He's halfway through his years-long journey and is now trekking across China on his way to his eventual endpoint, at the very southern tip of South America.

Stephanie Sy recently spoke with him about his progress.

Stephanie Sy:

National Geographic explorer Paul Salopek is trekking the globe on foot for a project dubbed the Out of Eden Walk. We have checked in with Paul along the way, from Georgia, Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan.

But it's been some time since we caught up with him.

And Paul joins us now from Shaanxi province in China.

My first question to you, Paul, is what it was like doing this journey in the midst of the pandemic and the lockdowns. I know it wasn't the peak at that point. But I'm curious how that affected your plans.

Paul Salopek, Fellow, National Geographic:

I had to adapt my route to move around parts of mostly rural China, because I'm walking through the countryside for the most part, that were locked down.

And so my walking route through Western China looks a little bit erratic. There are no maybe mountains in the way, but there are these invisible boundaries of hot COVID zones that I had to skirt around.

Stephanie Sy:

I read one of your dispatches that you spent some time with a poet that believes he's an incarnation or reincarnation of an ancient Chinese poet. That was really interesting.

What other stories and anecdotes and people have really stood out for you while you have been in China?

Paul Salopek:

This is my first time in China. And so I had to some degree in my mind built up this stereotype, this kind of cartoon image of China, that we get in international media of the factory of the world, a country of mega-cities, of tens of thousands of people, of robotic ports, of massive traffic, and highways and bullet trains.

All of that exists. But what startled me a bit about coming from Southwestern China is that I'm coming through a frontier province of Yunnan that's one of these last enclaves of rural, pastoral economies in China.

So it was very much an amazement to me to walk over mountain ranges and into valleys where people were still doing tinker, tailor, candlestick maker kind of economies, people doing things with their hands, meeting people like horse traders who are still moving cargo by horseback over mountains through Yunnan Province, people doing subsistence farming, people who were doing artisanal crafts, working very much by muscle power and not robotics.

Stephanie Sy:

It's so interesting, because, speaking about that narrative, so much of what we hear in the U.S. media these days is about U.S. competition with China.

What should viewers understand about the China that you have encountered?

Paul Salopek:

It sort of comes with the territory of crossing the world on foot, is that you can't really skim over a country or culture or society.

It really forces me to slow down my observations and to absorb the China that I'm seeing at a very slow, immersive, nuanced level. At the very beginning of my walk through the province of Yunnan, I was walking through more than 25 different minority communities that each had their own language. They had sometimes their own cosmologies.

I was walking through landscapes that varied from tropical rain forests, to the Eastern Himalayas, snowfields up around 14,000 plus feet, walking through Taoist communities, through Buddhist communities. This project is about the micro level stories of the world.

Yes, we're extraordinarily, kaleidoscopically different. But, at the same time, when you have conversations with people, if you just spend enough time, you will also find points of connection, where the things that we talk about are like 90 percent the same.

Stephanie Sy:

Have you become a weary traveler, or do you still have a lot of gas in the tank?

Paul Salopek:

Stephanie, I'm talking to you from 10 years in, 12,000 miles in. All along the way, people are helping me, strangers, strangers. They have no reason to, but they reach out their hand and say, hey, do you need anything from directions to the next village or across this river valley to, do you need a glass of water?

That is affirming. Every single time I am privileged to hear somebody's story that they're, that they're willing to share it with me, gives me positive energy to take the next steps to keep going.

Stephanie Sy:

Well, of course, it is also a privilege to be able to choose to live this sort of nomadic lifestyle.

And I know you have also written about the tens of millions of people around the world that do not have a choice, they feel, but to leave their homeland. You have written about that and had some profound insight.

Paul Salopek:

We live in an age of migration. It could be mass violence, like war. It could be economic hardships.

And, increasingly, climate change, climate crises are pushing a whole new wave of people out of their homes. I have no illusions about romanticizing the difficulties of migration. But, at the same time, Homo sapiens have been rambling around this Earth for about 300,000 years.

And until only about 10,000 or 12000 years ago, we were doing it constantly, moving the way true nomads do, from encampment to encampment, from landscape to landscape, following wild animals, following resources. Human movement is the oldest tool of coping and survival that we have in our toolkit.

And I don't see it as a problem, per se, at kind of a big level. It's a solution. And, boy, we had better start getting used to it, because I'm not sure of any society or any polity in the world through time that has ever succeeded building walls. Just ask the Chinese.

Stephanie Sy:

What a unique and profound view you have gained of the world in the last 10 years.

National Geographic explorer Paul Salopek, thank you so much for joining us, and good luck on the rest of your journey.

Paul Salopek:

Thank you very much. It's pleasure to join you today.