Out of Eden Walk

10/07/2025

✍️ “At 50, I wanted to explore a new world and a fresh passion. I’d experienced Western extreme sports and adventure subcultures—skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing, and taking photographs—learning about the world through physical activities and expressing myself visually. So meeting Paul Salopek felt like winning a million-dollar lottery. A stroke of incredible luck.

Paul’s invitation to ‘walk through Japan together’ offered experiences that were the opposite of my previous endeavors—going slowly where previously speed was rewarded, engaging with the people along the way where previously I was self-absorbed, drawing out their stories, and igniting my curiosity to the fullest. It would be a journey of thought and heart through the almost ‘primitive’ act of walking. Paul is first and foremost a writer, and he motivated me to shift toward articulating my thoughts through words.

My destination was my childhood home in the buzzing Azabu district of Tokyo. I began walking with Paul but ultimately finished on my own. After an incredible trek of nearly 1,100 kilometers over 70 days from the southern city of Yamaguchi, I entered Tokyo chatting with a friend in the USA via FaceTime. He eagerly asked, ‘How does it feel to reach the finish line today?’”

— Tomonori Tanaka, “Landscapes of Uniqueness, Inner and Outer, on a Walk Through Japan”

🔗 Read this story, written by Walking Partner Tomonori Tanaka, who joined Paul on the trail in Japan: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/landscapes-of-uniqueness-inner-and-outer-on-a-walk-through-japan/

🥾 Tomonori Tanaka was born in Tokyo in 1974. A well-known skateboarder, snowboarder, surfer, and freelance photographer, his work and lifestyle emphasize a deep connection with nature.

Pictured: The tranquil view from top of Mt. Misen, the highest peak on Miyajima Island, invites reflection and connection with nature.

📷 Photo by Tomonori Tanaka

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

Image description in comments.

09/30/2025

🎙️ “When people say, ‘Where do you come from?’ I sometimes say just the last village or maybe the last town. And that’s kind of extraordinary enough. Walking any distance these days is kind of unusual. And that will create a certain, ‘Oh, wow, that’s far.’ And, ‘Where are you going?’ … ‘I’m going to the next village up ahead.’

I don’t often say, ‘From Ethiopia. I just walked here,’ because you can imagine that kind of question that would then open up, right? As storytellers, if I sense a story is unfolding with the people I’m meeting, then I will share, ‘Hey, I just walked here from Ethiopia.’ And that sparks a sense of wonder and curiosity that leads to, again, the kind of conversations that we can have a back and forth about their lives, too.

As I’ve gotten older as a reporter — and this is maybe not something that mainstream journalists do much — but I feel that if I’m going to be asking somebody about their story, they deserve to know something about my story. So, it becomes much more equal and not just this kind of harvesting other people’s stories. So, I answer as honestly as possible everything people ask of me.”

— Paul Salopek

🔗🎧 At the link, listen to or read along with “Small talk on the Eden Walk,” a conversation between Paul Salopek and host Carolyn Beeler on public radio program The World: https://theworld.org/stories/2025/08/22/small-talk-on-the-eden-walk

This conversation 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 the National Geographic Society.

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

Image description in comments.

09/28/2025

🎙🎧 Listen to the conversation between the Insight Myanmar podcast and Paul Salopek here: https://insightmyanmar.org/complete-shows/2025/2/2/where-the-streets-have-no-name

Paul Salopek has been walking the world for over a decade, tracing the pathways of ancient human migration across 27,000 kilometers. His journey is slow journalism — an attempt to understand the world not by rushing to breaking news, but by living alongside the people who inhabit its stories.

Listen: https://insightmyanmar.org/complete-shows/2025/2/2/where-the-streets-have-no-name

In early 2020, his trail brought him into Myanmar. He crossed in from northeastern India expecting another leg of his long expedition, not the political earthquake about to unfold. Quarantined in Yangon as COVID restrictions took hold, he listened as the internet suddenly shut down. Then came the rumble of protests, the crack of gunfire, and the streets filling with resistance. He had walked straight into the country’s coup without warning, as told in "Where The Streets Have No Name."

For Salopek, the experience crystallized what his walking has always been about: history doesn’t arrive neatly packaged or anticipated. It erupts, often when you are standing still, and its impact is clearest not in headlines but in the voices of those forced to live it.

His encounter with Myanmar’s collapse wasn’t planned, but it became part of a much larger narrative of displacement, resilience, and defiance that he has been documenting around the globe. By traveling on foot, he captures not just events but their aftershocks in ordinary lives — farmers, students, monks, migrants, all navigating upheaval.

🚶 Walking into Myanmar’s coup was an accident. Witnessing it through the eyes of its people became a responsibility.

09/20/2025

✍️ “Japan I found steeped in yearning. Yearning, to be sure, might be the universal human condition: inescapable, without any particular geography. You experience it everywhere and often while walking through the world. The stranger on foot, provided that she or he moves slowly, and seems empathetic, or at least forbearing, becomes a fleeting vessel of buried hopes and cracked dreams. Like the woman who stood alone, her dress flapping in the wind-raked steppes of Kazakhstan, awaiting us purposefully, impatiently, far beyond earshot of her village, to decant her bitterness at being enslaved by her in-laws. Her story spilled out between heaving sobs. Or the young man who joined our trail in Anatolia seemingly on a whim, only to spend kilometers walking far beyond his home valley, recounting in razored Shakespearian detail the recent wedding, to a rival, of the woman he loved. Or even the bearded militiaman in those same rumpled hills, who shouldered his Kalashnikov to apologize for an hour not just for a mistaken ambush but to confess in self-loathing how much he detested fighting his own people in Turkey’s horrible war against the Kurds. Longing. Nostalgia. Wanting. Aching. Thirst. A walker who comes from far away becomes a safe receptacle for such inconvenient emotions. We listen without judgment. We carry your secrets away. . . .

No. Not a single Japanese passerby wept openly before us along our 1,505-kilometer GPS track from Fukuoka to Yokohama. Yet this dam of human self-containment only made the penned emotions that seeped through even more striking, more moving, more pronounced, like springs on a granite scarp.”

— Paul Salopek, “Goodbye to Japan”

🔗 Read Paul’s latest dispatch from the trail, “Goodbye to Japan,” about walking 1,500 kilometers through a landscape of desire: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/goodbye-to-japan

Pictured: Walking Partner Tomonori Tanaka asks for directions in rural Hiroshima prefecture, Japan.

📷 Photo 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.

09/18/2025

✍️ “Japan I found steeped in yearning. Yearning, to be sure, might be the universal human condition: inescapable, without any particular geography. You experience it everywhere and often while walking through the world. The stranger on foot, provided that she or he moves slowly, and seems empathetic, or at least forbearing, becomes a fleeting vessel of buried hopes and cracked dreams. Like the woman who stood alone, her dress flapping in the wind-raked steppes of Kazakhstan, awaiting us purposefully, impatiently, far beyond earshot of her village, to decant her bitterness at being enslaved by her in-laws. Her story spilled out between heaving sobs. Or the young man who joined our trail in Anatolia seemingly on a whim, only to spend kilometers walking far beyond his home valley, recounting in razored Shakespearian detail the recent wedding, to a rival, of the woman he loved. Or even the bearded militiaman in those same rumpled hills, who shouldered his Kalashnikov to apologize for an hour not just for a mistaken ambush but to confess in self-loathing how much he detested fighting his own people in Turkey’s horrible war against the Kurds. Longing. Nostalgia. Wanting. Aching. Thirst. A walker who comes from far away becomes a safe receptacle for such inconvenient emotions. We listen without judgment. We carry your secrets away.”

— Paul Salopek, “Goodbye to Japan”

🔗 Read Paul’s latest dispatch from the trail, “Goodbye to Japan,” about 1,500 kilometers through a landscape of desire: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/goodbye-to-japan

Pictured: A rainbow graces Lake Biwa after a rainstorm.

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

📷 Photo by Paul Salopek.

Image description in comments.

09/18/2025

✍️ “There was the frustrated newspaperwoman from Kyushu who, after walking along for only a few hours, announced later via anodyne phone message that she’d quit her dead-end job. An acquaintance-become-friend who judo-flipped his way through Tokyo’s corporate jungle wrote compulsively from his glass-walled office, asking again and again for details from the open road. Oldies holding out in Japan’s abandoned villages seemed to inhabit ghostly, parallel landscapes of desire all their own. When we spoke with them, they conjured, leaning on canes among their impeccable furrows of leeks, vistas of teeming roads, busy neighborhood shops, and squealing children, all invisible. This drift in time happens with elderly everywhere. But never have I experienced, in all my walking trails, such a disconnect between the perceived and real as is manifested in Japan. Between loneliness and kinesis. Between the curated tourist façade and the equally curated isolation of daily life. It was a dizzying testament to the human ability to see and unsee. A vibrant global culture had been constructed from that tension. The sheer virtuosity of this balancing act, pitting interior withholding against exterior giving, both dazzled and jarred.”

— Paul Salopek

🔗 Read Paul’s latest dispatch from the trail, “Goodbye to Japan,” about 1,500 kilometers through a landscape of desire: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/goodbye-to-japan

Pictured: Walking Partner Tomonori Tanaka (left) cooks for an elderly hostess at a guesthouse in Tottori Prefecture.

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

📷 Photo by Paul Salopek.

Image description in comments.

09/14/2025

“Japan was coming to an end. We’d been walking inland on the main island of Honshu for weeks, hu***ng over the forested alps, breathing dust and pollen, and now suddenly we were back in the flats, where we began noticing hints of the sea: rusty metal, roadside stacks of shipping containers, boats drydocked in weedy village lots. Soon I would be leaving Asia—Africa, Eurasia, all of it—after 12 years of walking. Soon a massive cargo vessel would carry me across the Pacific to a continent once called ‘new.’ Soon I would be pivoting from east to south. How did it feel, standing there at an anonymous street corner in an industrial suburb of Yokohama? At the end of 27,000 kilometers of trail? I can’t really say. I can’t even tell you that my boots actually touched the ground. I was just waiting for the light to turn green.”

—Paul Salopek, Milestone 108: End of the Trail in Asia

📍Near Yokohama, Japan

Day: 4,521. Mile: 10,950. Elevation: 289 feet.

Join the journey: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestone-108-asia-ending

09/13/2025

🎧🎙️ Did you know that you can listen to audio versions of Out of Eden Walk’s global storytelling? With support from the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization and National Geographic Society and recorded by Lucie McNeil, this endeavor makes it possible for listeners to enjoy hearing stories published since the Walk began in Ethiopia in 2013—hundreds of stories documented on foot.

🥾 Many new stories lie ahead on the horizon of this 38,000-kilometer journey. Of course, these stories include the contributions of Out of Eden Walk’s founder and National Geographic Explorer, Paul Salopek, but they also include a multitude of voices of local Walking Partners who have joined Paul on the trail and documented their own experiences.

🗣️ Enjoy a guest dispatch by narrator Lucie McNeil here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/2023-05-painting-picture-through-voice-new-out-eden-walk-audio-narrative/

🔗 Click here to listen to the dispatches chronologically on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/out-of-eden-walk-audio/sets

🔉 Or follow along with the written dispatches and embedded audio on our storytelling site here: https://www.outofedenwalk.org

✨ Note: We update audio quarterly so listeners can keep up as closely as possible to our real time publishing schedule.

Thank you for walking along, and happy listening!

📷 Photo by Paul Salopek.

Image description in comments.

09/11/2025

🎙🔈 Paul Salopek on public radio program The World: When people say, “Where do you come from?” I sometimes say just the last village or maybe the last town. And that’s kind of extraordinary enough. Walking any distance these days is kind of unusual. And that will create a certain, “Oh, wow, that’s far.” And, “Where are you going?” … “I’m going to the next village up ahead.”

I don’t often say “from Ethiopia.” I just walked here … because you can imagine that kind of question that would then open up, right? As storytellers, if I sense a story is unfolding with the people I’m meeting, then I will share, “Hey, I just walked here from Ethiopia.” And that sparks a sense of wonder and curiosity that leads to, again, the kind of conversations that we can have a back and forth about their lives, too.

As I’ve gotten older as a reporter — and this is maybe not something that mainstream journalists do much — but I feel that if I’m going to be asking somebody about their story, they deserve to know something about my story. So, it becomes much more equal and not just this kind of harvesting other people’s stories. So, I answer as honestly as possible everything people ask of me.

//

🔗🎧 At the link below, listen to or read along with the full conversation on The World between Paul Salopek and Carolyn Beeler, “Small talk on the Eden Walk.”

This conversation 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.

🌐 From The World: “For more than a year and a half, The World has been checking in with National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek about his global trek along early human migration routes.

Salopek’s multi-year Out of Eden Walk project has taken him to many corners of the world, mostly on foot.

‘People are my destination,’ Salopek told The World.

That project is built on the conversations that Salopek has with the people he meets along the way. The World was curious about the conversations he doesn’t write about, the small talk and what the people he meets want to know about him.

Salopek joined The World’s Host Carolyn Beeler to share more.”

National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek is walking from Ethiopia to Chile on the Out of Eden Walk. But as he tells The World, "people are my destination." The story of the walk unfolds through conversations he has with the people he meets along the way. He speaks to Host Carolyn Beeler about the e...

09/10/2025

🥾 On day 4,521 of the Out of Eden Walk, at mile 10,950, Paul Salopek recorded Milestone 108 near Yokohama, Japan.

Every hundred miles, Paul pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind. Milestones reflect straight-line distances, but his walked distances are generally much longer.

At Milestone 108, Paul met Kioko Yoshida, a convenience store clerk in her 30s.

Paul Salopek: Who are you?

Kioko Yoshida: I work at a Mini-Stop nearby.

Paul Salopek: Where are you going?

Kioko Yoshida: I’m going on shift soon. But first I’m taking the dog for a walk. I’m going wherever it leads. Its name is Maron (Sweet Chestnut.) It’s three years old.

Paul Salopek: Where do you come from?

Kioko Yoshida: I’m coming from home.

🔗 To read more about these waypoints and to explore Milestone 108: End of the Trail in Asia, click here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestone-108-asia-ending

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

📷 Photos by Paul Salopek.

Image descriptions in comments.

09/08/2025

Entering Yokohama, trail’s end in Japan. At water’s edge: a cargo ship to the Americas.

Video by Paul Salopek.

Video description in comments.

09/08/2025

✍️ “Japan was coming to an end. We’d been walking inland on the main island of Honshu for weeks, hu***ng over the forested alps, breathing dust and pollen, and now suddenly we were back in the flats, where we began noticing hints of the sea: rusty metal, roadside stacks of shipping containers, boats drydocked in weedy village lots. Soon I would be leaving Asia—Africa, Eurasia, all of it—after 12 years of walking. Soon a massive cargo vessel would carry me across the Pacific to a continent once called ‘new.’ Soon I would be pivoting from east to south. How did it feel, standing there at an anonymous street corner in an industrial suburb of Yokohama? At the end of 27,000 kilometers of trail? I can’t really say. I can’t even tell you that my boots actually touched the ground. I was just waiting for the light to turn green.”

—Paul Salopek, Milestone 108

With Soichiro Koriyama, Arima Ichimari, Hisako (Toby) Iizuka, Ana Jegnaradze, Marita Tevzadze, and John Stanmeyer.

👣 Every hundred miles, Paul pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind. Milestones reflect straight-line distances, but his walked distances are generally much longer.

🥾 On day 4,521 of the Walk, at mile 10,950, Paul recorded Milestone 108 near Yokohama, Japan.

🔗 To read more about these waypoints and to explore Milestone 108: End of the Trail in Asia, visit this link: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestone-108-asia-ending/

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

📷 Photo by Paul Salopek.

Image description in comments.