Out of Eden Walk

Out of Eden Walk Paul Salopek's Out of Eden Walk is a multi-year global journey in the path of early humans.

Nonprofit organization | Connecting humanity | Walking 38,000-km from Africa to South America | Led by NatGeo Explorer & Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek 👣🌍🌏🌎 https://www.outofedenwalk.org
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Situational awareness in a tight space. Salopek photographs himself in a closet-size overnight room in a cybercafe in Ja...
07/14/2025

Situational awareness in a tight space. Salopek photographs himself in a closet-size overnight room in a cybercafe in Japan.

🔗 Visit www.outofedenwalk.org to read the full text of “Micro-solitude,” Paul’s latest dispatch from the trail.

📷 Photo by Paul Salopek.

📍 Hofu, Japan
34°3′20″N 131°33′39″E

✍️ “While hiking 1,500 kilometers or more across Japan, my walking partners and I prefer staying at ryokans, traditional...
07/09/2025

✍️ “While hiking 1,500 kilometers or more across Japan, my walking partners and I prefer staying at ryokans, traditional inns with their communal, family-run charms. But after tough spells of marching on asphalt, we doss down in cybercafes too. Their exteriors are typically brutalist cubes. Inside, they’re often dim and hushed and male. They carry a whiff of impersonal order—and sometimes loneliness. But all this is human too. I am following the pathways of the Stone Age ancestors across continents. The Kaikatsu Club and Media Café POPEYE cybercafes are simply another cave en route with shadows on the wall.”

— Paul Salopek, “Micro-solitude”

🔗 Read the full text of “Micro-solitude,” Paul’s latest dispatch from the trail: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/micro-solitude

Pictured: All the world’s within reach in a private room in a Japanese cybercafe. The tiny sleeping spaces can be rented by the half hour.

📷 Photo by Paul Salopek.

📍 Hofu, Japan
34°3′20″N 131°33′39″E

Image description in comments.

✍️ “Little was expected to survive the 4,000-degree Celsius flash near the bomb’s hypocenter. Ultimately, between 70,000...
07/05/2025

✍️ “Little was expected to survive the 4,000-degree Celsius flash near the bomb’s hypocenter. Ultimately, between 70,000 and 140,000 people didn’t. But a few trees within the blast radius miraculously lived. Splintered and scorched, reduced to charred stumps, they sprouted shoots after ‘black rains’ fell from the mushroom cloud. Japanese call these botanical miracles hibakujumoku, or ‘A-bombed trees.’ Exactly 159 remain in the city.

‘They are camphor trees, black locusts, Chinaberries,’ said Chikara Horiguchi, 80, an arborist who has catalogued and cared for the survivor trees of Hiroshima for more than three decades. Horiguchi stood under a gnarled eucalyptus next to the Hiroshima Castle, just 750 meters from ground zero. ‘This one’s seeds give no seedlings. It seems it may have been sterilized by radiation.’

A bespectacled man who shaded his weathered face beneath a dapper palm hat, Horiguchi referred to the survivor trees with the fond intimacy of a longtime family doctor. Underground, he noted, the trees’ roots even today grew directionally, away from the bomb’s detonation site. He treated one ailing war-veteran willow by stuffing its hollow trunk with wet moss. He worried about tourists stomping on the A-bombed trees’ knobbly exposed roots. He wasn’t altogether happy about people touching their bark. Yet he understood the necessity.

‘They are witnesses,’ he said of his silent charges. ‘They carry a message we need to hear today.’

Horiguchi smiled and nodded when I placed my palm on one scarred and crooked eucalyptus. I tried to feel something.”

—Paul Salopek, “Trees of Life”

Read the full text of “Trees of Life,” Paul Salopek’s latest dispatch from the Out of Eden Walk trail: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/trees-of-life

📍 Hiroshima, Japan
34°24′0″N 132°27′33″E

Photos by Paul Salopek.

Out of Eden Walk is a 38,000-kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors.

Image descriptions in comments.

“The trees are old. They stand like weary sentinels in downtown city parks, their limbs bent by age, some with huge stee...
07/02/2025

“The trees are old. They stand like weary sentinels in downtown city parks, their limbs bent by age, some with huge steel beams crutching their sagging branches. Thick woody calluses warp their trunks, particularly on the sides facing the Aioi Bridge, the original target of the American B-29 that dropped the first nuclear weapon deployed in war 80 years ago on Hiroshima. The bombardier, a farm boy from North Carolina, missed the bridge by 260 meters, and the uranium went critical 600 meters above the Shima Hospital, a spot today occupied by a clinic parking lot. Little was expected to survive the 4,000-degree Celsius flash near the bomb’s hypocenter. Ultimately, between 70,000 and 140,000 people didn’t. But a few trees within the blast radius miraculously lived. Splintered and scorched, reduced to charred stumps, they sprouted shoots after ‘black rains’ fell from the mushroom cloud. Japanese call these botanical miracles hibakujumoku, or ‘A-bombed trees.’ Exactly 159 remain in the city.”

—Paul Salopek, “Trees of Life”

🔗 Read Paul’s latest dispatch from the trail: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/trees-of-life/

Pictured: Peace activist Kuniko Watanabe holds a 1945 photo of the destruction of Hiroshima by the U.S. atomic bomb against its modern backdrop—including a gnarled eucalyptus tree that survived the blast. Japan honors 159 such survivors as national monuments.

Photo by Paul Salopek.

📍Hiroshima, Japan
34°24′0″N 132°27′33″E

Out of Eden Walk is a 38,000-kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors.

🎙️ Marco Werman, host of The World: Walking across continents for years and years, Paul, I mean, you meet people as you ...
06/23/2025

🎙️ Marco Werman, host of The World: Walking across continents for years and years, Paul, I mean, you meet people as you go. I mean, as you say, that’s kind of what fuels the journalism and those connections with them. But being the only one on that journey is you, I wonder what you have learned about being alone with yourself, which for a lot of people is not a comfortable space.

🔈 Paul Salopek: This is something, of course, that I get asked a lot, and what I do have to remind my readers, Marco, is that I’m almost never alone. I’m almost always walking with a local person. I call them my walking partners. This alleviates loneliness, of course, but it also makes the journey much more rewarding and enriching because a journey shared is much, much, much more affirming than just taking a solo walk, at least for me. So yes, you do have to have a bit of fortitude if you’re gonna try to set out walking across continents. You have to be a bit self-reliant. You have to have … resources to get through scrapes. But always having somebody who you can rely on and they rely on you, really makes this journey worthwhile. So, it is really not that lonely of a journey, except lately in Japan, where, again, I was always walking with Soichi or another walking partner. But still, even my Japanese walking partners are kind of scratching their heads and saying, “You know what? Even we didn’t know it was this desolate.”

🔗 Listen to the full conversation between Marco Werman and Paul Salopek on The World at the link: https://theworld.org/stories/2025/05/23/out-of-eden-walk-an-eerie-walk-through-japanese-ghost-towns

This story is part of an ongoing series of stories about the Walk produced by The World in collaboration with the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization and National Geographic Society 📻

📷 Pictured: Many empty houses line the country lanes in southern Honshu, the main island of Japan.

Photo by Soichiro Koriyama.

Yoshiko Yamana, 84, runs Migita ryokan, or guesthouse, along with a handful of helpers who, like the plates and teacups,...
06/22/2025

Yoshiko Yamana, 84, runs Migita ryokan, or guesthouse, along with a handful of helpers who, like the plates and teacups, have rendered service for decades.

🔗 Read Paul’s latest dispatch from the trail, “Yoshiko’s Place,” here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/yoshikos-place/

📍 Shunan, Japan
34°3′5″N 131°48′38″E

📷 Photo by Soichiro Koriyama

🥾 Out of Eden Walk is a 38,000-kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors. Join the journey at www.outofedenwalk.org and learn more at www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org

🔈 Paul Salopek: When we first met, my walking partner is a documentary photographer, a very accomplished one named Soich...
06/18/2025

🔈 Paul Salopek: When we first met, my walking partner is a documentary photographer, a very accomplished one named Soichiro Koriyama. I noticed that he was starting to take pictures of everybody we met. And I said, “Soichi, what are you doing? You’re just taking portraits of people we’re passing, passersby.” And he said, “Yes, I must take a picture of everybody we pass.” And I say, “This is going to be too difficult. You’re going to have an archive swamped by thousands of portraits.” As it turns out, it’s the opposite problem. We see very few people. In some cases, only two or three a day.

🎙️ Marco Werman: What was it like to see these towns as you’re walking alongside them? How did that change your perspective?

🔈 Paul Salopek: Along this global walk, I’ve been walking for more than a decade, I’ve passed through wildernesses. I’ve passed through big deserts in Saudi Arabia. I passed through big steppes, you know, grasslands in Central Asia, which is where you expect not to see people, right? So, you sort of plan for, kind of, wilderness trekking, kind of expeditionary stuff. You think about carrying food, a tent. You think about where’s the next shelter, where’s the next food supply. Marco, I’m having to think that way here in one of the most developed countries in the world, one of the biggest economies in the world, a post-industrial country, where I have to kind of think like a backpacker, because there are no shops very often. We have to walk 40 kilometers, like 25 miles. That’s a long way on foot to find even a convenience store. So, it’s been surreal.

📻 Paul recently spoke with Marco Werman, host of public radio program The World about the Walk’s journey through rural Japan.

🔗 Listen to the full conversation, “An eerie walk through Japanese ghost towns,” at this link: https://theworld.org/stories/2025/05/23/out-of-eden-walk-an-eerie-walk-through-japanese-ghost-towns

📷 Pictured: Vending machines are among the last artifacts of economic activity in some parts of the depopulated Japanese countryside.

Photo by Soichiro Koriyama.

Image description in comments.

✍️ “Yamana is a village girl. She grew up in a hamlet in Toyoura district, more than a hundred kilometers from Shunan. S...
06/14/2025

✍️ “Yamana is a village girl. She grew up in a hamlet in Toyoura district, more than a hundred kilometers from Shunan. She recalls watching B-29s arrow in formation over the rice paddies, en route from China to bombing runs over Tokyo. Her father reappeared four years after the war, a man with a gingery step, lately released from a POW camp in Manchuria. He tried reopening the family sake brewery but metabolized the profits. Yamana escaped to the big city.

‘Business was very good,’ she says. ‘My place was popular. I had 10 workers.’

Today, Migita guesthouse is far quieter. The COVID pandemic shuttered her for a year. Trade never recovered. When we stay, there are only two other guests, a postman and a traveling construction worker. Yamana passes her days in the kitchen. Two middle-aged staff help prepare dinners amid shelves stacked with hundreds of tin, wood, and porcelain cooking implements. (‘They have been with me their whole lives,’ Yamana says, speaking of both helpers and the tools.)” —Paul Salopek

🔗 Read the full text of Paul’s latest dispatch from the trail, “Yoshiko’s Place” here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/yoshikos-place

📍 Shunan, Japan
34°3′5″N 131°48′38″E

Photo 1: Yoshiko Yamana shopping for food. Photo 2: Yoshiko Yamana confirming a reservation. Photo 3: Yoshiko Yamana preparing dinner for guests.

📷 Photos by Soichiro Koriyama.

🥾 Out of Eden Walk is a 38,000-kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors.

Read more at www.outofedenwalk.org and sign up for our newsletter at www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org 🗞️

Image descriptions in comments.

06/13/2025

How brief is this life!
Faint footprints on the sands
of Yui-ga-hama.

— Yosa Buson, 18th century

Walking into Gifu prefecture, Japan.

✍️ “Migita guesthouse is all but invisible on the internet. It advertises, if you can call it that, by word of mouth. It...
06/12/2025

✍️ “Migita guesthouse is all but invisible on the internet. It advertises, if you can call it that, by word of mouth. It accepts only cash. This is why my friend Soichiro Koriyama and I could lodge there. We are walking across Japan. Outside the country’s big cities and throbbing tourist zones, accommodation is astonishingly tight. Koriyama swiped through all the usual hotel apps. Not one vacancy appeared in Shunan, population 140,000. Undaunted, he began cold-calling local businesses. This turfed up a phone number. ‘It’s an old lady,’ he hissed excitedly, holding a palm over his iPhone the way actors do with rotary phones in black-and-white Kurosawa films. ‘She can take us for a night. Even two!’

The Migita ryokan is one of those wormholes into an alternate universe that you occasionally stumble across in unlikely geographies across the continents. Like the defunct pension in downtown Khartoum out of which the owners, three Greek brothers, once ran logistics, going back to the ’50s, for every major archaeological, humanitarian, and secret diplomatic mission in turbulent Sudan. (Needed emergency cash? Ask manager Thanasis Pagoulatos, and if he liked your story, he might yank open the heavy door of the family safe in the back room.) Or the basement dive in blacked-out Osijek, in wartime Croatia, behind whose door with its speakeasy spyhole lay a secret geometry of candles, wine bottles, and bowls of goulash, all strategically arrayed on long tables to accommodate the muddy, stomping combat boots of drunk tabletop dancers of both sexes. Or Madame Heba’s place on Zamalek island in the muddy Nile of Cairo. The Paleolithic lift had a caged door, and the Anglo-Egyptian lobby—her living room, really—had a metal detector against concealed pistols. But Heba’s mint tabouleh disarmed everyone.

Migita ryokan is such a looking-glass portal.

Its 30 simple rooms are arrayed organically, asymmetrically, one might even say evasively, like chambers in an ant’s nest. To reach them you must crouch through a maze of dark and crooked corridors with squeaking floorboards that defeat both sleep and skulking ninjas. The futon pillows are stuffed with rice husks. The room doors slide open and closed with a tired shhhhhh. Walls of rice paper oblige you to whisper in any case. Huge and gnarled tree trunks harvested from a vanished cherry orchard prop up a tiled roof. Tatami mats comprise the furniture.

‘Young Japanese don’t come here,’ huffs Yamana. ‘They don’t like sharing toilets.’

She gestures out a window to an alleyway. What she is really pointing to is how the view is warped and whorled through handmade glass.“

— Paul Salopek

🔗 Read the full text of “Yoshiko’s Place” here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/yoshikos-place/

📍 Shunan, Japan
34°3′5″N 131°48′38″E

Photo 1: Yoshiko Yamana’s Migita ryokan was built more than a century ago. Photo 2: Yoshiko Yamana bought the derelict Migita ryokan, which housed navy officers during World War II, in 1965. Photo 3: Yoshiko Yamama prepares dinner for guests.

📷 Photos by Soichiro Koriyama.

🥾 Out of Eden Walk is a 38,000-kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors.

06/11/2025

With the year’s first dream
I told no one my secret,
But smiled to myself.
— Shō Hō, 17th century

Whirligigs made from old pastic bottles to scare off birds.

📍 Tottori prefecture, Japan

✍️ “Yoshiko Yamana sits cross-legged in her century-old guesthouse. She wears a fuchsia t-shirt and baggy tobi trousers....
06/11/2025

✍️ “Yoshiko Yamana sits cross-legged in her century-old guesthouse. She wears a fuchsia t-shirt and baggy tobi trousers. Her frizzed hair is dyed so indomitably black the highlights shine blue under the bare lightbulb. She is telling her life story. This clearly amuses her. Whenever she hits a speed bump in her biography, she claps her hands and throws back her head to guffaw. She does this describing her marriage.

‘I was 26 years old when I first came here,’ Yamana says. ‘I had just divorced. I was married for six months.’

Clap. Laugh.

Energetic and still single at 84, Yamana’s face settles into a Zen smile that invites few follow-up questions.

Migita guesthouse is a ryokan, a traditional traveler’s inn, the claimant of a fading legacy of hospitality that stretches back 13 centuries to pilgrims’ roadhouses in Japan. The sprawling building occupies a corner of a low-slung and nondescript neighborhood in the city of Shunan, near the southern tip of the main island of Honshu. Like Yamana herself, Shunan has seen both worse and better days. Once a busy oil and petrochemical port, it was bombed to ash by the Americans in World War II. The guesthouse somehow survived that inferno. Yamana bought the structure in 1965, when it was already derelict, locked up, its windows dark as the eye sockets in a skull. She borrowed the money.

‘Every month for 30 years I paid down my loan from the agricultural bank,’ says Yamana. ‘I knew I could earn. I could be independent. I had my freedom.’

Migita guesthouse is all but invisible on the internet. It advertises, if you can call it that, by word of mouth. It accepts only cash. This is why my friend Soichiro Koriyama and I could lodge there. We are walking across Japan.”

—Paul Salopek

🔗 Read the full text of Paul’s latest story from the trail, “Yoshiko’s Place,” in which time lodges in a traditional guesthouse in Japan: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/yoshikos-place/

📍 Shunan, Japan
34°3′5″N 131°48′38″E

Pictured: Yoshiko Yamana, 84, runs Migita ryokan, or guesthouse, with her son and a part-time employee.

Photo by Soichiro Koriyama. 📷

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Join the Journey

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek is retracing our ancestors’ ancient migration on foot out of Africa and across the globe. His 21,000-mile, multiyear odyssey began in Ethiopia—our evolutionary “Eden”—in January 2013 and will end at the tip of South America. Join the Journey: www.outofedenwalk.org

Photo Credit: John Stanmeyer