For over a decade, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has woven a tapestry of human stories from his epic trail retracing human migration.
From “Let’s Walk,” the first dispatch from the Out of Eden Walk. Salopek and his Ethiopian guide, Ahmed Alema Hessan, leave the village of Bouri in the Afar region of northwestern Ethiopia.
Photograph by John Stanmeyer-VII
October 20, 2025
Setting out from Ethiopia in 2013, Salopek has traversed the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and East Asia on foot, documenting stories of people he encounters — an odyssey enriched by walking partners, contributing writers and photographers. Now beyond the halfway point, his slow listening, storytelling project, the Out of Eden Walk, has arrived in North America, where Salopek is planning the ways ahead toward his final destination, the southern tip of South America.
These photos offer a look back at the trail so far. Follow along on the journey here.
Paleoanthropologist Tim White, co-director of the Middle Awash Project, searches for fossils in Ethiopia’s Afar region. In “The Glorious Boneyard” Salopek explored the roots of human restlessness.
Pistachio guard Cebir Sercan and the treasure he protects. From “Pistachio Mafia,” October, 2014, Near Nizip, Turkey.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
A mountain mule’s first bath in the Euphrates River, with guide Mustafa Filiz. Near Siverek, Turkey. “There are jack mules (male) and jenny or molly mules (female). There are blue mules, cotton mules, sugar mules, and mining mules. There is a mammoth mule that weighs a thousand pounds. George Washington was a mule breeder,” Salopek wrote in “Mule-ology.” “But all mules are immune to politics. There is no idealistic mule.”
Photograph by Murat Yazar
FromAni, Salopek chronicled life in “the ruin of a vanished world in modern Turkey.” Pictured: Aram Khatchigian in the rebuilt Sourp Giragos Armenian church in Diyarbakir, the Kurdish cultural capital in Turkey.
Photograph by Murat Yazar
Walking partners have accompanied Salopek throughout the trail since the beginning, as local guides, companions and often story contributors to the Out of Eden Walk. Matthieu Chazal (pictured), who walked with Salopek more than a decade ago for a month, leads the mule named Kirkatir down to theTurkey-Georgia border. Near Posof, Turkey. In “The Forgiving Moment,” Salopek pays tribute to his walking partner and friend, who passed away in 2024.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
“Evidence of long-boned Vikings?” The crypts Salopek crossed atKiş, Azerbaijan, “contained some very tall medieval people. One man was at least six-foot-six. A woman was seven-two.”
Photograph by Paul Salopek
“Archaeologists digging through a 35-foot burial mound in the Republic of Georgia. Deep inside: 4,000-year-old wagons and a jumble of dead.” Salopek saw the Bronze Age site in 2015. He wrote about an ancient mummification practice in“Honey I’m Dead.”
Photograph courtesy Georgia National Museum
Cleansing themselves in sheep fat fires, pilgrims to the necropolis of Amir Khan, a certified sage, seek relief from medical ailments inMangystau, Kazakhstan.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
“Paul carries a GPS mapping device (photo above) that determines and records his position every 15 seconds.” The Out of Eden Walk’s chief cartographer, Jeff Blossom explained what it takes to map Salopek’s steps — all 10,062,044 he’d taken up to December 2016.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
“Konstantin Inchin, ‘a taciturn maker of fine apple wine,’ and Salopek’s walking partner, Sergei Gnezdilov, take a break from hunting in the foothills of Kyrgyzstan.” From Salopek’s Dispatch, “Did We Hurtle Out of Africa on a Spear Tip?”
Photograph by Paul Salopek
From “Islam in Hiking Sandals — and Red Spike Heels.” Mountain guide Safina Shoxaydarova dances with friends at her traditional Pamiri wedding in Khorog, Tajikistan, where Salopek arrived in 2017. “I am really feeling pleased to join you for the trip we made,” Shoxaydarova later told Salopek. “It was really making me feel more strong and confident.”
Photograph by Paul Salopek
As the seventh year of the Out of Eden Walk began, Salopek, is seen here at the edge of theGanges in Varanasi, heading east toward Myanmar.
Photograph by John Stanmeyer-VII
“Buildings are being torn down in a historic quarter of Varanasi. A major redevelopment plan is under way in the city,” Salopek wrote in his dispatch fromVaranasi, Uttar Pradesh, India.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
Walking partner and freelance editor based in Dali, Journalist Bhavita Bhatia is one of 14 women who had joined Salopek on his global trek by 2019. She says that walking through two Indian states known for their conservatism and violence has made her confident that she “could go back and do it” again — alone. In “Women Trailblazers,” Camille Bromley, former social media editor for the Out of Eden Walk, reflects on her conversations with Salopek’s female walking partners: “The project has inspired a question, one I frequently see on our channels: ‘Could a woman walk around the world? Does this project rely on maleness? Or whiteness? Or Western visa privilege?’ The answer is yes: These markers of identity serve as valuable currency. But also no: Storytelling is not simply a megaphone for those in positions of power and privilege.”
Photograph by Paul Salopek
A spent bullet Paul Salopek picked up on the road to Bethlehem, in the West Bank in 2014.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
Small business owner Aung Ko Ko (left) distributes food packages to homeless people in his city ofMandalay, Myanmar. Here Salopek paused the walk in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Porters in western China — sometimes including women and children — lugged crushing burdens of tea along trails to Tibet for centuries until trucks replaced them by the mid-1900s. Salopek followed the trails of these tea porters in 2022. In “250 Pounds of Grief,” he described “the ghostly trails of Sichuan.”
Photographs by Paul Salopek and courtesy E. H. Wilson
Walking partner and freelance editor based in Dali, Yunnan, China, Liu Kankan, documented life in aremote matriarchal mountain village. “Mosuo people still practice a custom called ‘walking marriage’: nocturnal visits where both sexes are relatively free to have multiple partners and break off unsatisfactory relationships,” Kankan wrote. “Unlike in much of mainstream China, Mosuo divorces carry no stigma.”
Photograph by Zhang Hongyi
The carcasses of Asian giant hornets (murder hornets) are found at a bee farm in the Qinling Mountains, a segment of the trail Salopek described as “China’s Hinge.”
Photograph by Paul Salopek
Near Quli Village, in China’s Shaanxi Province, Salopek and his trail companions pitched their tents on the banks of the Yellow River, lined with abandoned shrines, in the winter of 2023.
Photograph by Liu Lifeng
Curator Sooyoung Leam, Paul Salopek and exhibition artists gave a talk at the opening of the "Walking Korea" exhibition in Seoul, South Korea, in 2024. The exhibition, intended to expand the project’s journalism focus to include the arts of the countries Salopek walked through, was nearly shut down when martial law was declared in the country. “As it turned out, South Korea’s political crisis made the exhibition all the more purposeful and urgent,” Salopek wrote.
Photograph by Youngrae Kim
A sleepy rail line runs through an empty stretch ofYamaguchi prefecture in Japan, where Salopek concluded his walk through the Eastern Hemisphere and set out for North America. Salopek bade Japan, and its “innumerable tunnels,” farewell in hisfinal dispatch from the Asian continent.
Photograph by Soichiro Koriyama
This Explorer's work is funded by the National Geographic Society
