In 2013, Paul Salopek took his first steps out of Ethiopia on an epic 24,000 mile walk following man’s migration out of Africa to populate the world. Paul is currently in China. He is one of the few outsiders in the Middle Kingdom, trudging up mountains, across ancient trade routes and through rural villages where he shocks local populations who’ve never seen a white man.

In the process, Salopek has been the first Westerner to walk through portions of Saudi Arabia since Lawrence of Arabia. He’s closing in on 13,000 miles of walking though Jordan, the West Bank, Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

He’s got about 11,000 miles to go until he reaches Tiera del Fuego at the tip of South America. When will he get there? I don’t know. He just turned 60, and I’ll bet he makes it.

I decided to focus this piece on Paul and the Out of Eden Walk for two reasons. One: It’s a fascinating story of resolve, endurance and dedication by a man who believes deeply in his mission. But the Walk also shows how a strong-willed journalist can preserve editorial values while blazing a new trail across a troubled media landscape.

Salopek gives readers something journalism writ large should emulate, not necessarily on the same scale but surely in the same spirit. He capitalizes on technology, geography, and great storytelling to give readers insights into corners of the globe normally seen only by the most intrepid travelers.

Paul’s ability to tell a good story amazes me as much as the Out of Eden Walk itself, named after its African origin in the putative Garden of Eden. He set out to demonstrate the value of “slow journalism” in a world where information flows at warp speeds and attention spans grow narrow as a crevice. The website he created for the non-profit Walk explains the concept:

“Moving at the beat of footsteps, Paul is walking the pathways of the first humans who … made the Earth ours. Along the way Paul is covering the major stories of our time — from climate change to technological innovation, from mass migration to cultural survival — by giving voice to the people. Paul’s words, as well as photographs, video, and audio, create a global record of human life at the start of a new millennium as told by villagers, nomads, traders, farmers, soldiers, and artists who rarely make the news. In this way, if we choose to slow down and observe carefully, we also can rediscover our world.”

*Paul Salopek (left) with traveling companion near Muli*

In many respects, Paul is an itinerant educator. He shares his experiences in virtual workshops that connect students around the world to the Walk. But the real value of the Walk is the storytelling he provides to the young and old; it is as much poetry as journalism.

In the China leg of his journey, Paul embarked on a search for Muli, “an obscure waypoint on the Silk Roads that once unspooled like chalky strings across the river chasms and wind strapped passes of Sichuan in far southwestern China.”

Accompanied by a Chinese book editor, a photographer and an ethnic Tibetan mountaineer, Paul clawed his way up the 13,100 feet Wachang Pass in the mountains that tower over Muli:

“My lungs heave” he writes. “They clutch at frozen air. I squint past ice-frosted prayer flags clapping in razored winds. At ranks of sunlit peaks stretching to infinity. At a cosmos of nitrogen-blue sky. A world of rhododendron forests. Of log cabins and saddle leather. Of Sichuan pepper orchards. Another China. Raw and half-wild. Invisible to most outsiders. Unrecognizable even to many Chinese. I feel the Hengduan Mountains opening up as landscapes sometimes do, only once, when you first step into them.”

True to his mission, Paul blends his extraordinary narratives with stories about the people who make history by simply being there.

In Muli, he stopped to talk with Da Xi Jia Cuo, an 81-year-old retired Tibetan monk who told Paul about his memories regarding Joseph Rock, an enigmatic and cantankerous Western explorer that Paul profiled in “Looking for Muli,” a chapter of his Chinese adventure. But he also seasons his narratives with idiosyncratic moments. On the road near Maidilong, another Sichuan village, Paul spotted Zhang Ye Hua, one of a dying breed of itinerant movie projectionists.

For the past quarter century, Paul tells us. Zhang has lugged his bulky, old reel-to-reel projector by foot and horseback to villages near and far, playing hundreds of films to thousands of cinematically bereft villages where the nearest indoor theater is hours away.

“Courtly and weather-beaten at 56,” Paul reports, “he is among the last of a fabled breed of showmen in rural China: a member of a fading guild of state-trained cineastes who travel though isolated communities, illuminating outdoor screens with moves for free at nighttime public squares.”

Zhang’s story shows that change stamps its imprint on the valleys of Silicon and Sichuan. A new machine that projects digital imagery has altered Zhang’s craft just as it has revolutionized the world over. He now travels nearly impassable roads by car to diminishing audiences. He’s not thrilled about the new media world where he competes for attention with everything from television and smartphones to TikTok.

“With the old projectors, you had to stand next to them during the whole film. You had to keep adjusting the focus,” he says, like a proud Vaudeville campaigner. “On this new device, you just pop in the memory card, and it starts on its own. You can even leave to have tea or go to the toilet.”

I love stories of people like Zhang. At his best, Paul focuses on people overlooked by a celebrity obsessed media – simple human beings struggling with the issues of our times. He submerges readers in a history that bares its soul before our eyes.

I’m fortunate enough to be one of Paul’s many colleagues. We worked together at the Chicago Tribune. I’m also privileged to be on the board of the Out of Eden Walk, a non-profit supported by generous individuals and the National Geographic Society, a big source of funding for the Walk.

The best part of my ties to the Walk, though, is the bit part I play in the history being made by Paul. One day he will reach Tiera del Fuego. It will be the end of his journey but the beginning of a legend about the man who walked across the world. You can be part that history, too, right here.

—James O’Shea

A Journalist Walks the World