Out of Eden Walk

12/07/2025

✍️ “Meet Ricardo Pascual. He clocks life with an egg timer. Born poor in Cabanatuan City, the Philippines, Pascual, 49, has logged more than 20 years as a cook at sea. His father hawked fish balls and salted squash seeds on barrio street corners. Seafaring has buoyed Pascual into the middle class.

‘Look, it’s not simple,’ he explains in the galley, where the Bee Gees are jive talkin’ on an actual boombox and a rolling pin trundles back and forth atop a counter, marking time with the 19-second periods between three-meter waves. ‘You cater to different tastes. The Indians don’t eat beef, so you add fish. No pork for Muslims. You have to know how to mix spices and herbs, especially for Indians and Europeans. We have one guy who’s a vegetarian.’

Crowned with a chef’s toque, Pascual holds the second-most important position aboard ship after the captain: the morale officer. Food is a refuge, the great mollifier, at sea. He improvises new meals constantly to fight routine. (As he says this, he pours a can of condensed milk into a simmering vat of pineapple chunks and chicken breasts, preparing a batch of pininyahang manok.) Pascual wears the guarded expression of a man professionally hardened against faint praise. He leaves salad and cake out as leftovers. In the mornings, the cake is gone.

The sea never changes.”

— Paul Salopek, “Blue Highway” 🌊

🔗 Read Paul’s dispatch about crossing the North Pacific aboard a container ship: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/blue-highway

✨ And please consider supporting Out of Eden Walk’s slow journalism during our nonprofit organization’s crowdfunder.

✨ Our Board of Directors is matching every donation at a 1:1 ratio up to $45,000, so every dollar is doubled for twice the impact.

✨ Our community’s support is crucial for keeping the Walk moving forward.

✨ Please give at the link in bio and at www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

🙏 Thank you for being a part of the journey!

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

Pictured: Cook Ricardo Pascual in his domain—the ship’s galley.

📷 Photos by Paul Salopek

Image descriptions in comments.

12/07/2025

🥾 In 2013, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Paul Salopek set out from the Rift Valley of Ethiopia—one of cradles of humankind—to retrace, on foot, the dawn voyage of the earliest Homo sapiens who first walked out of Africa during the Stone Age.

👣 For 13 years, Paul has paced off 17,000 miles of those ancestral trails, calipering Arabian deserts, empty Central Asian steppes, icy Himalayan peaks, Burmese war zones, and the vastness of mainland China.

Out of Eden Walk is a continuous storytelling journey: Paul has never left his walking trail to return to the United States.

Hence, Paul’s recent landfall in Alaska, after crossing the Pacific Ocean from Japan on a container ship, marks a threshold in this voyage of slow journalism: The beginning of the final phase of a 24,000-mile odyssey in the wake of our roving ancestors.

In 2026, Paul will need your help in documenting a changing Americas on his ramble south to reach our species’ original “land’s end” in Tierra del Fuego.

✍️ The Walk is not just a feat of physical endurance. Its core mission is more meaningful: To chronicle the insights of people met en route, from Djiboutian camel shepherds to Kazakh geophysicists, from Chinese poets to Iñupiat artisans, building a nuanced record of human life in the early 21st century and touching on pressing dilemmas of our day—war, mass migration, spiritual isolation, sustainability, cultural adaptation, and more—as seen from boot level, with a creative output that so far approaches a million words and tens of thousands of images.

🗞️ Independent journalism requires public support.

✨ Please join the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization’s annual crowdfunder today.

100% of funds raised go toward our mission to connect people across borders through the power of slow storytelling.

✨ And great news: Our Board of Directors is generously matching every donation at a 1:1 ratio up to $45,000, so donations are doubled for twice the impact.

✨ To give with double the impact, visit this link: www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

🙏Your donations are crucial for keeping the Walk moving forward. Thank you for your support!

Pictured: Paul Salopek, Walking Partners, and people and animals with whom Paul has spent time along the global trail.

12/06/2025

✍️ “The inaugural story of the Out of Eden Walk was logged before I took my first step out of Africa: On a hot, muzzy day in January 2013, I stood atop a large mound of goat dung in the village of Herto Bouri, in Ethiopia, and proceeded to snap a 360-degree panorama photo of the surrounding landscape, shoot a minute of video, tape a minute of ambient sound, and query the nearest human being—in this case, an ethnic Afar camel pastoralist named Idoli Mohamed—with three stock questions: Who are you? Where do you come from? Where are you going? (Idoli’s answer to the third question, back in those innocent times: ‘Maybe, after we become educated we can all go . . . Anyplace. All over the world. America.’)

In my nearly 13 years of vagabonding since, I’ve paused every hundred direct-line miles along my global trail to replicate this exact same exercise. I call these narrative waypoints ‘Milestones’ and, so far, I’ve accumulated more than 160 of them.

The walk’s Milestones will eventually form a systematic gallery of faces and landscapes across the foot-spanned planet. They are by far the hardest part of my reporting job. My ‘slow journalism’ approach typically involves spending time with people before I break out the notebook. Buttonholing random passersby while slogging past them with a backpack can elicit some challenging reactions. Asking women to participate has sometimes been impossible in the Muslim world and in conservative rural communities generally. (A testament to the power of gender iniquity in public spaces.)

One elderly woman in the Tibetan highlands of Sichuan, China, sicced her mastiff on me. At a Milestone on a lonesome highway in Pakistan, the nearest human being turned out to be a cop who drove up to detain me. (His answer to Where are you going: ‘I’m going back to Chelas’—a police post—‘with you.’)

And then there’s the conundrum of what to do when I hit a sea or ocean.”

— Paul Salopek, “Milestones at Sea” 🌊

🔗 Read Paul’s new dispatch, a story about how we recorded our global journey’s hundred-mile waypoints across the Pacific: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestones-at-sea

✨ And in case you missed it: There’s still time to support the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization during our annual crowdfunder!

✨ Our Board of Directors is generously matching every donation at a 1:1 ratio up to $45,000, so donations are doubled for twice the impact.

🔗 To learn more about our slow journalism and to donate with double the impact, visit this link: www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

🙏 Thank you! Your donations are crucial for keeping the Walk moving forward.

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

Pictured: Duct tape: The universal tool of robotics everywhere. The camera mount for recording Milestones on the bridge of the Maersk San Vicente container ship.

Photo by Paul Salopek.

Image description in comments.

12/03/2025

✍️🥾Out of Eden Walk is a 38,000 km walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors. We are a nonprofit organization, and this , we hope you’ll support this global slow journalism journey by donating to our annual crowdfunder. ✨ The Out of Eden Walk nonprofit Board of Directors is matching donations at a 1:1 ratio up to $45,000, doubling every dollar donated for twice the impact.

🌱🌱 Learn about our independent journalism and support our efforts here: https://outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign 🔗

With your support, Out of Eden Walk has:

🥾 Traversed 21 countries and 17,000+ miles on foot from the Rift Valley in Ethiopia to arrive in North America this year. The final two continents on the global route lie ahead.

🗞️ Trained 100+ journalists in long-form, place-based reportage, generating stories that reached 25 million readers in India alone and many more in countries including Japan, China, and Myanmar.

📖 Collaborated on educational programs that reach 70,000+ students in 70 countries.

🗺️ Provided training to 1,100+ university faculty in media literacy, geography, anthropology, and history.

✍️ Published 500+ dispatches and 100+ guest dispatches translated into 34 languages.

✍️ Released 13 National Geographic Magazine feature stories, with another forthcoming in 2026.

🌐 Partnered with The World on an ongoing interview series exploring global issues through the Walk.

🗣️ Updated the HomeStories map in partnership with Esri to better serve a global community of 2,000+ lifelong learners and storytellers.

🎨 Co-curated the “Walking Korea: Cut Pieces” exhibition that explored the act of walking as a form of artistic and historical intervention, interpreting migration, displacement, and temporality through the works of six contemporary artists in Seoul, Korea.

✍️ Reached an audience of 45+ million readers worldwide.

Thank you to this community for making the journey possible. We’re grateful for everyone who has donated so far to support the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization. 🙏

📷 Pictured: Paul Salopek, local Walking Partners, and people encountered along the global trail.

12/02/2025

✍️ “Meet Sagar Pandey. For a decade, Pandey filmed commercials and TV series in Mumbai. Then COVID throttled videography gigs. His father was a mariner. So at age 25, Pandey tacked back into the family business. The accordion of his forehead wails a song of frustration recalling this.

I follow Pandey on his shift. He is a deckhand: intense, lean, and jokey, with a showman’s patter. On the back of his coveralls he has inked his name with a $ instead of an S.

The immense ship is a labyrinth of solitude.
Its superstructure—six decks of hallways lined by cabin doors, a galley, officers’ meeting rooms, a laundry, a rudimentary ‘slop-chest’ store selling discount sodas and chips—gives way to empty industrial passageways snakey with steam pipes and electrical cabling. The ceilings above the closed cargo holds are so high they disappear into darkness. Anchor chains with links the length of my body coil inside lockers that could easily accommodate a two-story building. Everything is painted fun-house shades: fire-engine red, lime green, snowy white. The crew’s overalls are deep sky-blue. Their plastic helmets are phosphorescent yellow. It is like wandering through an elemental Mondrian painting that rocks subtly underfoot.”

— Paul Salopek, “Blue Highway” 🌊

🔗 Read Paul’s dispatch about crossing the North Pacific aboard a container ship: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/blue-highway/

✍️ Learn about the journey and support Out of Eden Walk’s slow journalism during our nonprofit organization’s annual crowdfunder at this link: https://outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

✨ The Out of Eden Walk nonprofit Board of Directors is matching every donation at a 1:1 ratio up to $45,000, Every dollar is doubled for twice the impact.

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

👣 Thank you to everyone who has donated so far to support this global journey. We’re grateful for your generosity and this community.

Pictured: Sagar Pandey, deckhands lay out heavy docking lines, and the Maersk San Vicente.

📷 Photos by Paul Salopek

Image descriptions in comments.

12/01/2025

🥾 In 2013, alongside walking partners, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Paul Salopek set out from the Rift Valley of Ethiopia—one of cradles of humankind—to retrace, on foot, the dawn voyage of the earliest Homo sapiens who first walked out of Africa during the Stone Age.

For 13 years, Paul has paced off 17,000 miles of those ancestral trails, calipering Arabian deserts, empty Central Asian steppes, icy Himalayan peaks, Burmese war zones, and the vastness of mainland China.

✍️ Out of Eden Walk is a continuous storytelling journey: Paul has never left his walking trail to return to the United States.

Hence, Paul’s recent landfall in Alaska, after crossing the Pacific Ocean from Japan on a container ship, marks a threshold in this voyage of slow journalism: The beginning of the final phase of a 38,000-kilometer odyssey in the wake of our roving ancestors.

In 2026, Paul will need your help in documenting a changing Americas on his ramble south to reach our species’ original “land’s end” in Tierra del Fuego.

The Walk is not just a feat of physical endurance. Its core mission is more meaningful: To chronicle the insights of people met en route, from Djiboutian camel shepherds to Kazakh geophysicists, from Chinese poets to Iñupiat artisans, building a nuanced record of human life in the early 21st century and touching on pressing dilemmas of our day—war, mass migration, spiritual isolation, sustainability, cultural adaptation, and more—as seen from boot level, with a creative output that so far approaches a million words and tens of thousands of images.

Independent journalism requires public support.

🌱 Join our annual crowdfunder today. 100% of funds raised go toward our mission to connect people across borders through the power of slow storytelling.

Out of Eden Walk is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

🔗 To learn more and donate, please visit outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

Thank you! 🙏

Pictured: Photos by Paul Salopek from Out of Eden Walk Chapter 1: Out of Africa, which includes Ethiopia, Djibouti, and a crossing of the Red Sea.

Learn the stories behind these images: Visit www.outofedenwalk.org to read Chapter 1’s dispatches from the trail ✍️

11/30/2025

✍️ “I roam the ship’s passageways at all hours, confused, groggy-eyed, strung out in a fog of misfiring neurons. My parietal cortex, that quadrant of my brain cued to time perception, stretches like warmed rubber in four directions:

First, my body is synced to Japan time. (GMT +9.) Second, my mind is cued to a slew of ‘daytime’ work communications—phone calls, emails, text messages—all pegged to my ultimate destination, Alaska. (GMT -9.) Then there is the palpable tug of a chronological bubble called ‘ship’s time.’ According to calculations that only captain Lechowski understands, he orders the ship’s clocks to advance with the push of a button from the bridge. On the fourth day at sea, he compresses an afternoon by three hours; on the sixth day he skips ahead two hours more, etc. In this way, the crew maintains equitable work shifts as we swallow time zones on our eastward journey into dawn. And finally, there is the gauzy reality of ‘natural time.’ Glance out a porthole: Light or darkness mark the hour, minute, and second that slips beneath the keel at our actual longitude. One morning it is Philippines time. Two afternoons later, it becomes Vanuatu time. Steaming over the International Dateline, marked at 180 degrees longitude and squiggling from pole to pole east of Hawaii, we snap backwards into yesterday.”

— Paul Salopek, “Blue Highway” 🌊

🔗 Read Paul’s new dispatch from the Out of Eden Walk journey, “Blue Highway,” about crossing the North Pacific aboard a container ship: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/blue-highway/

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

✍️ Learn more about the journey and support our slow journalism during the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization’s annual crowdfunder, which is taking place now at the link in our bio and at www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

Thank you to everyone who has donated so far! Our community keeps us moving forward.

Videography by Paul Salopek. Editing by Chisomo Kawaga.

11/28/2025

✍️ “Meet Dan John Caballero. Twenty-nine years old. Husky. Driven. No-nonsense to the point of blunt. The second officer of the Maersk San Vicente. ‘I want to be a captain pretty soon,’ he tells me matter-of-factly. ‘I have dreams.’

Early in his young career Caballero was forced to abandon a container ship on fire. He recalls smoke and shouting. And diving from the deck railings as though from a high cliff . . . falling, falling, falling into the moiling waves below. This disaster occurred on an older vessel, with a different company, in a different ocean. He is writing a book about it. He taps out words on the glowing screen of his smart phone during breaks from the brutal middle watch, which lasts from midnight to 4 a.m. Every 12 minutes, an automatic alarm clangs on the blacked-out bridge. Its loud jangling shakes the calm oceanic darkness. Caballero gets up from the captain’s seat to disarm it, again and again, with the press of a red button. It is meant to keep the watchman alert through the night. Caballero is from Cebu, the Filipino port where Ferdinand Magellan planted a cross before falling to a blow from a Filipino cutlass. Derived from the Cebuano word sugbú, the city’s name means ‘to dive into water.’”

— Paul Salopek, “Blue Highway” 🌊

🔗 Read Paul’s newest dispatch from the Out of Eden Walk journey, “Blue Highway,” about crossing the North Pacific aboard a container ship: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/blue-highway

Out of Eden Walk is a 38,000-kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors. Learn more and donate to the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization during our annual crowdfunder, taking place now at this link: https://www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

Thank you to everyone who has donated so far! Our community keeps us moving forward. 🙏

Pictured: Dan John Caballero

📷 Photo by Paul Salopek

Image description in comments.

11/27/2025

✍️🥾 Out of Eden Walk is a 38,000-kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors. We’re grateful for our global community of readers, teachers, students, and fellow travelers. Thank you to everyone who has donated so far to support the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization during our annual crowdfunder!

✨ During our crowdfunder, the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit Board of Directors is matching every donation at a 1:1 ratio up to $45,000, doubling every dollar donated for twice the impact.

🌱🌱 Learn more and donate here: https://outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

With your support, Out of Eden Walk has:

🥾 Traversed 21 countries and 17,000+ miles on foot from the Rift Valley in Ethiopia to arrive in North America this year. The final two continents on the global route lie ahead.

🗞️ Trained 100+ journalists in long-form, place-based reportage, generating stories that reached 25 million readers in India alone and many more in countries including Japan, China, and Myanmar.

📖 Collaborated on educational programs that reach 70,000+ students in 70 countries.

🗺️ Provided training to 1,100+ university faculty in media literacy, geography, anthropology, and history.

✍️ Published 500+ dispatches and 100+ guest dispatches translated into 34 languages.

✍️ Released 13 National Geographic Magazine feature stories, with another forthcoming in 2026.

🌐 Partnered with The World on an ongoing interview series exploring global issues through the Walk.

🗣️ Updated the HomeStories map in partnership with Esri to better serve a global community of 2,000+ lifelong learners and storytellers.

🎨 Co-curated the “Walking Korea: Cut Pieces” exhibition that explored the act of walking as a form of artistic and historical intervention, interpreting migration, displacement, and temporality through the works of six contemporary artists in Seoul, Korea.

✍️ Reached an audience of 45+ million readers worldwide.

Thank you to this community for making the journey possible. 🙏

📷 Pictured: Members of the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit team, including Paul Salopek, Julia Payne, and Arati Kumar-Rao in Shishmaref, Alaska.

Photo by Paul Salopek.

Image description in comments.

11/27/2025

✍️ “In my spartan cabin that night I lie awake listening. Thousands of cargo containers rub against each other inside the holds. They groan and squeak through the steel bulkheads in a doleful, low-decibel symphony as the ship torques its way atop a plain of water. Maybe a herd of dinosaurs sounded like this.”

— Paul Salopek, “Blue Highway” 🌊

Below, read Paul’s newest dispatch from the Out of Eden Walk journey, “Blue Highway,” about crossing the North Pacific aboard a container ship.

Across the North Pacific by container ship.

11/27/2025

“The way I try to think about ‘slow journalism’ is that it’s not just about slowing down. It’s much more profound than that. It’s the whole way of looking at how current events shape the lives of each one of us. Slow journalism implies having a hunter-gatherer mindset where you don’t know what the story is. You go out open-minded into the world to find the stories or have them find you.” —Paul Salopek in Outside Magazine

Read the full story here: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/hiking-and-backpacking/what-its-like-world-walk/

In 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek walked out of Ethiopia’s Rift Valley, the beginning of a seven-year journey on foot to follow the trails of the first Homo Sapiens. Two continents and 13 years later, Salopek has returned to North America for the first time in over a decade to continue his worldwide trek.

11/26/2025

Paul Salopek in Outside Magazine: “Walking is like a meditation—it unleashes this kind of movie in your head about your life that you play over and over again. It’s this internal reexamination and kind of a reverie that happens simultaneously when your neurons are firing because they are being exposed to the outer world. You’re feeling the sun on your skin, you’re hot and sweaty, your big toe hurts or you’re thirsty or you hear beautiful birdsong. There’s something about walking, this inward outwardness happening simultaneously that I think cannot help, if not make you a better person, at least a more empathetic one, including to yourself.”

✍️ From Outside: “In 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek walked out of Ethiopia’s Rift Valley, the beginning of a seven-year journey on foot to follow the trails of the first Homo Sapiens. Two continents and 13 years later, Salopek has returned to North America for the first time in over a decade to continue his worldwide trek. This spring, he will begin the final phase of his 24,000-mile odyssey—walking to the southern tip of South America. Outside caught up with Salopek during a layover in Gustavus, Alaska.”

Read the full story here: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/hiking-and-backpacking/what-its-like-world-walk

Pictured: Paul Salopek on the Out of Eden Walk.

Image description in comments.