China News Service, Nov. 21 — According to a report by CNA on the 21st, American journalist Paul Salopek has embarked on a round-the-world journey, hoping to retrace the migration of human ancestors out of Africa, across continents, and to settlements around the world over the course of seven years — from Ethiopia to Chile.
This journey, titled “Out of Eden,” is sponsored by National Geographic magazine, the Knight Foundation, and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.
Paul Salopek, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, plans to write one dispatch per year about his journey, with the first year’s writings to be published in the December issue of National Geographic.
In the first year of his journey, Salopek walked alongside camels in Ethiopia, where he saw no glass, bricks, or any other modern human artifacts. He also ate hamburgers at a U.S. military base abroad. Now, he still has 32,000 kilometers to go.
As the first year of the journey drew to a close, Salopek experienced both beauty and hardship. In the second year, he will bypass the violence-ridden Syria and instead choose to cross Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 51-year-old Salopek has hiked approximately 2,100 kilometers, crossed five language regions, filled 40 notebooks with his thoughts, and said goodbye to four camels.
Salopek set off from Ethiopia’s Rift Valley, an area inhabited by early humans, traveled east into Djibouti, ate a hamburger at a U.S. military base there, and then waited nearly six weeks for a ship to take him across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia to avoid pirate attacks.
Speaking by phone, Salopek said: “(Taking in) the echoes of history across Africa, traversing historic rural cultural areas like Afar, and walking through landscapes shaped by human footsteps — it’s been quite an extraordinary experience.”
Salopek’s round-the-world journey spans a total distance of about 34,000 kilometers. Starting from Africa, he will cross the Middle East, enter Asia, move on to Alaska in the United States, traverse the western part of the U.S., Central and South America, and finally arrive in Chile.