The Economist tries “slow journalism” with Paul Salopek
Mr Salopek has trekked across deserts and mountains, river plains and cloud forests, along pilgrim paths and ancient trade routes, in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Mao Zedong. He has been shot at in the West Bank, held up by Kurdish gunmen, detained for two days and deported from Pakistan, and stopped by police so often that he logs these encounters on a “freedom of movement” map. He has led camels and mules and pack horses across the Arabian sands and Central Asia’s endless steppe. He buried caches of water at 25km intervals to traverse the Kyzyl-Kum desert in Uzbekistan, got caught in a snowstorm in the Pamir mountains and helped a man who had severed his leg in a rockslide. “The man was so cheerful, he was making jokes as we tied a tourniquet.”In 2013 Paul Salopek, an American journalist, began a trek around the planet. His aim was to follow Homo sapiens’ first migration, out of Africa, across the Middle East and Asia, by boat to Alaska, then down to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of the Americas, the place humans arrived last, around 8000BC. He called it the “Out of Eden” walk. He guessed it would take seven years. Eleven years later, he is still walking.
Mr Salopek has trekked across deserts and mountains, river plains and cloud forests, along pilgrim paths and ancient trade routes, in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Mao Zedong. He has been shot at in the West Bank, held up by Kurdish gunmen, detained for two days and deported from Pakistan, and stopped by police so often that he logs these encounters on a “freedom of movement” map. He has led camels and mules and pack horses across the Arabian sands and Central Asia’s endless steppe. He buried caches of water at 25km intervals to traverse the Kyzyl-Kum desert in Uzbekistan, got caught in a snowstorm in the Pamir mountains and helped a man who had severed his leg in a rockslide. “The man was so cheerful, he was making jokes as we tied a tourniquet.”
Mr Salopek halts often to write and explore. He waited eight months in Georgia for an Iranian visa that never came and ended up falling in love and marrying a documentary-maker. He was marooned for over a year in Myanmar by covid rules and then had to leave when the besieged junta became too threatening.
The Out of Eden walk is backed, in large part, by National Geographic, which oversees the project’s website, where Mr Salopek posts dispatches. Now 62, tall and rangy (“My hair turned white in China”), he says his walk “is not an expedition”, but a way of slowing down to collect stories, “like beads on a string”. He has written several hundred thousand words so far, about archaeological digs and vanished civilisations, about industry and craftsmen, pollution and conservation. He has done what many journalists would envy: invented his perfect job. He calls it slow journalism. The Economist joined him in Japan.