This week focuses on the Paul Salopek and his Out of Eden Walk where he is documenting the journey that our ancestors have taken to across the globe. This project started in 2013, beginning in Herto Bouri, Ethopia and eventually ending near Cape Horn in South America.

I started out by looking at Paul’s start in Ethiopia. Milestone 1 is in Herto Bouri, a place where there is not a whole lot. Here Paul speaks with Idoli Mohamed who is an Afar (a group of people that live in the region). He is a pastoralist who wants his children to go and study in order to make their lives better then his own. Idoli says this land has two main problems, a bush called Wayne that blocks the sun for the fields and that animals do not eat. The second problem being the lack of water. Idoli hopes with education they could move to anywhere else but there.

The next point I wanted to cover is in the middle of where Paul Started and currently is. While Milestone 20 is not the geographic center, it is the beginning of Chapter 3 and Paul is currently working on Chapter 6. In this section Paul is aboard the cargo carrier MV ALIOS in the Mediterranean Sea. He is going to the island of Cyprus from Israel.

While Paul did not get the chance to speak with anyone on the vessel, he was able to get some sense of what it was like to travel aboard a cramped ship. Ancestors most likely traveled in much smaller boats, like canoes, to get to Cyprus. But in ore recent history people have crammed into cargo ships in order to travel and move about the modern world.

Milestone 74 is the newest entry into Paul’s epic journey. This one coumes out of Yusan in China. Due to the pandemic his travel was suspended in Myanmar, and after a coup there he had to leap frog by plane in order to travel into China after the borders opened up again.

Here Paul spoke with Jiang Ji Bing, who grows flower that are used in medicine and fertilizer, But business is bad because the borders were still closed for trade. He plans to only pick the flowers that are remaining and then pack up to go back to Tengchong where he is from. A sober setting for Paul, a painful display of how the pandemic is affecting all jobs that were once able to sustain someone.

Paul will continue his trek, and if you would like to know more then go to National Geographic and read about all of Paul’s astonishing milestones.