For the past 10 years, Paul Salopek has been walking the longest possible distance on Earth.
He began the 24,000-mile trip back in 2013, setting off from Ethiopia and following in the footsteps of his and our ancestors, who made the same journey thousands of years ago.
Just to put that into some kind of context, that is almost double the 22,387km route that was recently shared on TikTok.
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By Paul's own admission, he has had to use boats and cars, whether for safety or just simply having to cross over water, but even with that taken into account, when he has completed his expedition, he will have covered over 20,000 miles on foot.
A journalist by trade, Paul is no stranger to travel, having working and lived in Africa for nine years, as well as travelling the globe, reporting on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The goal of his 'Out of Eden Walk' was to better understand the subjects of the stories he has told for decades, and how communities thousands of miles apart are shaped by and how they shape one another.
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So, almost a decade ago, Paul left Herto Bouri, the site of the oldest human fossils, and made his way through Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, India, and Myanmar, to name a few, often walking for weeks and months at a time with locals sharing their knowledge of the region.
He had hoped that he would be able to complete his journey, finishing up at the southern tip of South America, in just seven years, but almost a decade and a pandemic on, he is still going, having most recently made it to China.
Speaking to UNILAD about his voyage, Paul says it's allowed him to form bonds most couldn't even imagine, but which are increasingly difficult to leave behind as he moves forward.
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"There's something about walking that forges these emotional connections very quickly," he tells us.
"If you go hiking with someone, you learn a lot about them very fast, you talk about their lives, both good and bad, right?
"And so there's something about the act of walking that kind of unlocks... it's kind of this internal movie, kind of like the reel of your life starts to unspool in your mind, and you go over things through some sort of mysterious mechanism that your body is processing, as you kind of, you know, take two steps. And so you get very close to people.
"It's an emotional toll to say goodbye over and over and over again, and it doesn't get easier, it gets harder.
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"The walking partners stick with me from a matter of a couple of weeks to half a year, depending on the human landscape we're moving through. So they become very close."
Looking back at the inspiration for his journey, Paul said it was years in the making, even though he wasn't aware of it at the time.
The Pulitzer Prize winner was born in the US but moved to Mexico when he was just six, and his career has taken him much further, allowing him to report on the rise and fall of governments and the horrors of war around the world.
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But he says the fast-paced nature of his reporting meant that he never felt like he was getting a full picture.
"All the way over infinite horizons, human stories are interconnected, they don't happen in isolation," he says.
"And we lose track of that, because we put stories in boxes, including me; we have themes for stories, whether it's political or education.
"I mean, we have to, otherwise it's overwhelming, but it's also artificial. It suggests that human stories happen in isolation, and they have these tidy little boundaries around a beginning, a middle and an end. And that's bulls**t.
"It's not true at all, they are intimately connected with a million other stories, just as we're connected with people around us."
'Out of Eden', he says, has allowed him to take the time to focus on these stories.
Adding: "One of the great gifts of the walk is being able to make these connections that are kind of sub subterranean that require slowing down for you to see them.
"And I don't think I would have gotten those stories had I not slowed down and had the time to kind of cogitate and absorb the information."
Topics: Travel, World News, US News
Dominic Smithers