🌅 After 12 years of walking steadily towards sunrise out of Africa, Out of Eden Walk is poised to step out of Asia, steam across the North Pacific by cargo ship, and set off on its final, slow pivot south to our immensely long foot journey’s finish line—the tip of South America. 👣
As ever, our nonprofit organization needs your muscle to help us complete this next stage of our storytelling trek.
✨ We invite you to join us with a donation at any level to support our annual crowdfunder at the link in our bio ✨
Your kind donations will assist us in gathering stories of people we encounter along our upcoming trail—the diverse inhabitants of the tundra, boreal forests, and cities of North America who are grappling with drastically shifting climates, rapid ecosystem change, growing competition for resources among Arctic nations, & the endurance of vulnerable Indigenous cultures. We also will seek out, as ever, solutions to shared global problems by publishing engaging stories of homegrown innovators.
And we will collaborate with local journalists, farmers, photographers, writers, artists, scientists, fishers, & original thinkers, inviting many to walk along and weave their own tales into the braid of Out of Eden Walk narratives.
Exploring the complexity of human connectedness through “slow journalism” seems more vital than ever in our age of global uncertainty, throwback conflicts, profound technological disruption, & troubling political polarization. In an interdependent world, we increasingly confront decisions that impact lives far beyond our own households, to shape the wellbeing of our neighbors and, indeed, strangers living continents away.
Our motto has always been, “People are our destination.” Help grow the footprint of a project that not only fosters understanding across human divides, but emphasizes practical outcomes as well: collaboration with schools and campuses along our walking route and workshops that provide, for free, the p
Seoul at night
I want to play my komun’go
But my fingers hurt.
So let me place its strings
On the pinetree by the north window.
There they will hum sweet notes
In the wind.
—Songgye-yŏnwŏl, 18th Century, Korea.
Milestone 101: A Landscape Afflicted With Amnesia
✍️ “We were walking the Yeongnamdaero, the Old Scholars’ Road that once linked the South Korean cities of Seoul and Busan. For 500 years, from the 14th to the late 19th centuries, young men—always men—plodded the rugged, 600-kilometer track to take government exams at the Joseon court, hoping to obtain sinecures as clerks of a Confucian empire. Back then, the road was made of mud and stone and, sometimes, timber walkways. Aristocrats in tall stovepipe hats that protected their topknots rode saddled mounts along the road, moving in long caravans of soldiers and courtiers. Peasants encountered on the ‘royal’ road were fined and shoved aside—including off cliffs. We would have been too.
Today the Yeongnamdaero is largely vanished. Erased like so many ancient features in Korea. Wiped away by a war that pulverized the built environment in the 1950s. Paved over more recently by a dizzying economic boom.
A local historian showed us a stretch of horse trail carved into the forested hillside. I placed my hand on its stones polished to a high gloss by hooves. This relict trail petered out at a parking lot. Beyond the parking lot boomed a highway. There was a café along the highway. Photo-realistic murals of Manhattan circa 1995 decorated its walls. Paris themed bric-a-brac packed the counters. Ceramic ashtrays. A miniature Eiffel tower. South Korea is a landscape afflicted with amnesia, I told myself, sipping an iced Americano. It was all right, though. Many places have it.” —Paul Salopek
👣 Every hundred miles, Paul pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets.
Milestone 101 was recorded near Miryang, South Korea on day 4,241 of the Walk.
🔗 Explore “Milestone 101: A Landscape Afflicted With Amnesia” in full here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestones/2024-11-milestone-101-landscape-afflicted-amnesia#introduction
Videography by Paul Salopek. Edited by Jessica Wang.
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A note: Out of Eden Walk is glad to repor
🙏 A thank you from Paul to our community, with footage filmed while walking over the Sobaek Mountains in South Korea, using convenience stores as caravanserai.
We’re grateful to everyone who has donated to Out of Eden Walk’s annual crowdfunder, taking place now.
🌱 If you haven’t yet donated, please consider joining the journey with a donation today.
🥾 We need your support to keep this slow, mindful voyage moving forward.
To give, tap the crowdfunder link in our bio or visit www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign 🔗
All donations are currently being matched at a 1:1 ratio thanks to a matching campaign generously donated by the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit Board of Directors. This means your giving will go twice as far. 🌱🌱
👣 Twelve years ago, Paul began the Out of Eden Walk foot journey, leaving an ancient human fossil site at Herto Bouri, Ethiopia, and setting out to walk 38,000 kilometers to the tip of South America.
Out of Eden Walk’s mission: Follow the pathways of the first humans to walk out of Africa during the Stone Age, and collect stories of our shared humanity in a modern world fractured by borders, mistrust, and mutual incomprehension.
🌍🌏🌎 Far from being a solo journey, this collective effort engages a global community committed to using the power of storytelling for improving connectivity across borders.
We provide a thoughtful alternative to the frenzy of shallower, fast-paced media that often sows fear and ideological division.
Your support keeps Out of Eden Walk independent and freely available to the public.
Out of Eden Walk is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. While we’re immensely grateful for support from our partner organizations, about 50% of our operating costs are funded by readers like you.
Thank you for your support and for joining the journey! 🙏
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A note: Out of Eden Walk is glad to report that our friends in the Republic of Korea are safe, and we are closely following political ev
Walking Korea: Cut Pieces
In case you missed it, we’re delighted to announce that “Walking Korea: Cut Pieces” is due to open at 더 윌로 The WilloW, Seoul, South Korea on 8 December, 2024. This exhibition is inspired by Paul Salopek, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Explorer, and the ongoing Out of Eden Walk project.
For over 11 years, Salopek has documented the footsteps and migration history of humanity through walking, a practice rooted in “slow journalism.” Beginning in January 2013 in Ethiopia, this journey continues today, with Salopek traversing the Asia Rim from Incheon to Busan and onward to Japan since July of this year.
Curated in collaboration with independent curator Sooyoung Leam, Walking Korea: Cut Pieces likens the journey of walking together to the act of “cutting.” It is a motion that slices through continents, carving time and land with diligence. It is a motion that delves into the lives of individuals and communities encountered along the way, which are edited into narrative form.
Similarly, the works by participating artists in this exhibition—Oksun Kim, Youngrae Kim, Son Hyunseon, Alexander Ugay, Jun Jinkyoung, and Cha Ji Ryang—delicately cut into the social topography pushed to the periphery, carve through layers of history with fictional narratives, and reconfigure the functions of tools by merging them with the unfamiliar, or dwell on the wounds embedded in reality.
Collectively their works create a new temporary terrain at The WilloW nestled in Gyeongdong Market, a space defined by the relentless movement of goods and capital.
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Walking Korea: Cut Pieces
Dates: 2024 Dec 8 – 2025 Jan 5
Opening Hours: Tue – Sun 11:00 – 18:00 (closed on public holidays)
Venue: The WilloW
Curated by Sooyoung Leam
In collaboration with Paul Salopek
Participating artists: Kim Oksun, Youngrae Kim, Alexander Ugay, Son Hyunseon, Jun Jinkyoung, Cha Ji Ryang
Graphic design: Moonsick Gang
Space design: Johoon Choi
Exhibition manageme
✍️ “Lost or found on our trails from the African cradle to our ancestor’s prehistoric finish line at the bottom of South America, we always do better when walking together.” —Paul Salopek, “Goodbye to China”
Thanks to this community, last year, Paul completed a groundbreaking walk across China as part of this 38,000-km trek that began in Africa in 2013.
🌍🌏🌎 We’re 12 years into the Out of Eden Walk journey: Half of the world lies ahead.
The Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization needs your support to continue elevating the voices of people along our global route and to continue fostering a community of professional storytellers, journalists, and lifelong learners who are committed to building a more meaningfully connected world.
Please consider joining our annual 30-day crowdfunder to support Out of Eden Walk’s independent journalism, storytelling, and education programs.
✨ Out of Eden Walk’s Board of Directors is generously matching all donations at a 1:1 ratio up to $30,000, so your gifts are being matched dollar for dollar. ✨
🌱 Donations may be made at the crowdfunder link in our bio and at www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign 🌱
Your donations help us move forward: They keep Paul and local Walking Partners on the trail, and they also support integral impact mission projects — from amplifying local voices, to innovative education resource-building, to the preservation of the Walk’s enormous photograph, audio, video, and text archive, and so much more.
Your support keeps Out of Eden Walk independent and freely available to the public.
Thank you all very much for walking with us! 👣
Pictured: Paul and Walking Partner Yang Wendou spend time at a tea plantation temple in the hills of Sichuan.
👣 As an independent nonprofit organization, Out of Eden Walk relies on public support. We are committed to creating fact-based, high-quality storytelling content that fosters cross-cultural understanding, bridge-building, and ethical journalism along our 38,000-km global route—but we need your help to keep going forward.
🌱 Make a donation to our crowdfunding campaign today, and you’ll receive special communications, community rewards, and more.
🔗 To support Out of Eden Walk, tap the crowdfunder link in our bio or visit outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign
Thank you!
Support Out of Eden Walk
👣 After 12 years of walking steadily towards sunrise out of Africa, Out of Eden Walk is poised to step out of Asia, steam across the North Pacific by cargo ship, and set off on its final, slow pivot south to our immensely long journey’s finish line—the tip of South of America. As ever, our nonprofit organization needs your muscle to help us complete this next stage of our storytelling trek. For the next 30 days, we invite you to join us with a donation at any level to support our annual crowdfunder here: https://www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign
Your kind donations will assist us in gathering stories of people we encounter along our upcoming trail—the diverse inhabitants of the tundra, boreal forests, and cities of North America who are grappling with drastically shifting climates, rapid ecosystem change, growing competition for resources among Arctic nations, and the endurance of vulnerable Indigenous cultures. We also will seek out, as ever, solutions to shared global problems by publishing engaging stories of homegrown innovators. And we will collaborate with local journalists, farmers, photographers, writers, artists, scientists, fishers, and original thinkers, inviting many to walk along and weave their own tales into the braid of Out of Eden Walk narratives.
Exploring the complexity of human connectedness through “slow journalism” seems more vital than ever in our age of global uncertainty, throwback conflicts, profound technological disruption, and troubling political polarization. In an interdependent world, we increasingly confront decisions that impact lives far beyond our own households, to shape the wellbeing of our neighbors and, indeed, strangers living continents away.
Our motto has always been, “People are our destination.” Help grow the footprint of a project that not only fosters understanding across human divides, but emphasizes practical outcomes as well: collaboration with schools and campuses along our walking route an
Milestone 100
“We’d passed the Milestone without realizing it. I dumped my pack and jogged two kilometers back, tripping along an old railroad track rusting to oblivion amid sweltering green slopes and brown rain-swollen rivers.
No one was around. As was proper. The place was a graveyard.
In 1951, South Korean and American forces had battled the North Koreans in these hills. The Americans had bombed enemy positions in the villages, and many civilians were killed. A few survivors, women and children mostly, took shelter in caves and those were napalmed too, by mistake.
The caves are still there. They gape like eye sockets from the hillsides, and in their dusty floors are embedded stone tools: the knapped spear points of the early humans I’m following, the first Homo sapiens who stumbled out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. What can one say of such cracked places? We always forget. It hardly matters. Aleppo, Bucha, Cholula, Gurganj, Nanking—and Danyang, Danyang, Danyang. We keep finding our way back to you.” —Paul Salopek
👣 Every hundred miles, Paul pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets.
🔗 Milestone 100 was recorded near Danyang, South Korea on day 4,214 of the Walk. Explore Milestone 100 in full here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestones/2024-11-milestone-100-graveyard#introduction
Videography by Paul Salopek. Edited by Jessica Wang.
Video description in comments.
River Wall
“We followed dirt paths shaded by high bamboo along the Han River. We marched atop searing concrete sidewalks guarded by South Korean boys armed with M-4 carbines. Signs hung on the riverbank fences instructed North Korean defectors to press a button to summon help—food, water, an unlocked door. At a DMZ overlook near Gimpo, a shopkeeper told us the story of one melancholic defector. He’d swum the river to freedom but changed his mind after living years in South Korea. He then returned one night to squeeze under the fence and paddle back north. The river was nearly two kilometers wide at that place. He was reported to have made it. But the world hasn’t heard from him since.” —Paul Salopek
🔗 In case you missed it, read “River Wall,” about hiking a watery stretch of the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/articles/2024-10-river-wall
📍 The Demilitarized Zone, South Korea: 37° 47’ 20” N, 126° 29’ 19” E
Videography by Paul Salopek. Edited by Jessica Wang.
Rain Walking
Ganghwa Island, South Korea, a natural redoubt against the country’s many foreign invaders.
Out of Eden Walk: Among the tea pickers and plantations in Sichuan, China (The World)
🎙️🔈 “So for about 250 years, until the last dynasty finished in China, there was a stream of, imagine these high kinds of eastern outliers of the Himalaya mountains, and they’re a stream of porters going back and forth over a stretch of almost, I don’t know, about 200 km. That would be like 130 miles up mountain passes, down into canyons … all of them staggering in one direction towards Tibet, carrying, kind of, cheap black tea from Sichuan into Tibet. And these porters were amazing athletes, [with] almost superhuman feats of crossing these passes, carrying up to 400 pounds of dried tea on their back, wrapped in bamboo packets. It’s hard to imagine.” —Paul Salopek
🎧 Paul recently spoke with The World’s host Carolyn Beeler about the history, culture, and traditions of tea in China.
Their discussion is part of an ongoing series of conversations about Out of Eden Walk produced by The World in collaboration with the Walk and National Geographic Society.
🔗 Listen to or read along with their conversation, “Out of Eden Walk: Among the tea pickers and plantations in Sichuan, China” here: https://theworld.org/stories/2024/09/20/out-of-eden-walk-among-the-tea-pickers-and-plantations-in-sichuan-china
Pictured: During a trek across the old trading trails in Sichuan, China, Paul recorded Walking Partners singing the Mandarin version of “The Internationale.”
Videography by Paul Salopek. Edited by Taylor Schuelke.
Video description in comments.
