The Current - Paul Salopek: Around the world on foot

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

For 12 years, Paul Salopek has been tracing the paths of human migration, by foot.His 38,000 km walk has taken the American journalist across parts of Africa, Europe and Asia.Now he's about to begin the final leg of his journey, from Alaska to the southern tip of Chile

This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over-delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing.

Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. In 2013, Paul Salapak set out from Ethiopia on foot. His goal was to walk across four continents tracing humanity's migration out of Africa. The first leg of the trip, about, I don't know, six or 700 kilometers up the Rift Valley of Ethiopia into Djibouti, involved walking along with two cargo camels and a couple guides from the local Afar Pastoralist group.

The current reached Paul Salafuck in Jordan almost 12 years ago to talk about how that long walk was going. Ten months in, I can honestly say that I'm still fascinated and compelled by this journey. And I think it's the stories that I'm seeing in front of my eyes or the richness of it that is keeping me going. Well, he's still going. He's still walking and still collecting stories.

the goal eventually to walk to the southern tip of Chile. Paul Salopac is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, National Geographic Fellow. And in the years since he set out in 2013, we have been regularly checking in with him on the current. Paul Salopac joins us now from where he has recently landed in Alaska. Paul, good morning to you. It's good to have you back on the program. We heard you there near the beginning of this journey, talking about the stories that you heard, the richness of your travels, and how, I mean, step by step, that keeps you going.

Is that still the case? It is. And indeed, listening to those early interviews snippets, I must say, it seems like I was listening to a ghost. That's a long time ago. But yes, 12 and a half years or so, it's the stories of, mostly from these random, serendipitous encounters along the global trail that keep being the engine of the storytelling on this project.

What's it like to be back in North America? I'm still processing it. As you know, this journey, this journey, this journey. journalistic, slow journalism idea is continuous, so I've never, never kind of gotten on a plane and come back to the Americas. It's been, you know, on the trail getting into the Pleistocene frame of mind, if you will, as I follow these ancient migrations. And it's a bit strange. It's, you know, I didn't grow up in North America and I grew up in Mexico, but still, you know, it's kind of my psychic home. I'm still adjusting to it. I'm still feeling, kind of getting my feet planted in this landscape of memory. You talked about this, and for people who don't know, just explain what slow journalism is and how that fits into why you are doing this. It's a tough one to define, and it basically is more than just slowing down. That's an element of it. But basically, way back when I started this project in Africa, I got the sense that reporting journalism media was going faster and faster, and of course it's only accelerated since back then.

At the expense of understanding and meaning, and I think that, you know, I would argue that we have a lot of information. It pours out of our phones every day in a volume that none of us can process. I generate some of it and even I can't process it. What we're missing is meaning. And so this project was a conscious attempt to kind of get out of airplanes, get off of buses and stop being a traditional foreign correspondent. I was based overseas for years before I started walking and use my body, use my feet and my head to kind of move through the headlines of the day at five kilometers an hour at the pace that the human body and psyche is adapted to absorb information meaningfully. And so it's slowing down the methodology, but it's also, it's more

also analytical, it's more giving more time to dig into nuances of people's lives and hopefully honor the three-dimensionality of issues like the climate crisis or war or cultural survival. I'd heard you say that, I mean, and this speaks to the idea of walking, that when you're walking, everybody that you meet is a potential story, right? That's absolutely right. I mean, as far as I'm concerned with the approach that I'm taking, there are 7.7 billion stories waiting to be told out there. And I can, you know, bump into somebody, say it's a clover farmer in the Punjab or a yak herder in Kyrgyzstan or a poet. in China. And as long as we spend time together, strolling together, you know, for a few hours to a few

days, to weeks, I can turn that, that some would consider a micro story into a macro story that's universal. And that again, Matt, is another kind of gift of this long walk, is it's taught me that every person's story is connected to another story. So the connectivity, not just kind of the blowing up into a global issue from a person's life, but the fact that all these stories are interconnected, and increasingly so, is the kind of bedrock of the out-of-eaten walk. Between the last time you were on the program and now, you ended up in Japan. How did you end up there? Because that wasn't the original plan, right? That's right. Yeah, this project has, has, you know, bumped into a few obstacles along the way and if I had to pivot left or right

or over or climb over or dig under, usually what I tell my readers is I'm following the ancestors, right, these Stone Age peoples who first explored the world and they ran into obstacles as well, glaciers and big deserts and whatnot and they had to adapt. I'm doing the same. Today, the difference is that a lot of these barriers for me are political. And so, you know, a modern border is my glacier, if you will. So I have to do something. something about it. In this case, I had planned to walk out of China. I'd been walking two and a half years through China. And the plan was to walk into Siberia the way that people didn't go over the Bering Strait, right? In this case, by boat. The war in Ukraine, the invasion

of Ukraine, put the kibosh on that idea because it just didn't seem like the right time for an American journalist to be walking through Russia. So I pivoted to the right and walked through South Korea, took a ferry boat, walked 1,500 kilometers through Japan. all the time waiting with one eye on Siberia to see if it would be doable. And unfortunately, sadly, tragically, the war in Ukraine continues. And I had to kind of bite the bullet and take a ship over the North Pacific to Alaska. You posted, when you were leaving Japan, you posted on X, a walker who comes from far away becomes a safe receptacle for such inconvenient emotions

as longing, nostalgia, wanting, aching, and thirst. We listen without judgment. We carry your secrets away. who did you walk with and what did they tell you pretty much anybody that you could imagine any ethnicity any social class any ideology um i've walked with them and the thing about walking in i think it's built in it's got to be very old it's got to go back to kind of our not the memory in our brain but the memories in our in our bodies this limbic memory um is that we've been walkers and storytellers for 300,000 years.

And so if you're living in a small village in Kazakhstan or you're living in a big city, you're among the 38 million people living in the greater Tokyo area, if you have some heaviness in your life or you have some yearning or your, you know, curiosity, whatever, and you're not finding an outlet for those emotions among your immediate circle, your family, your friends, or what have you, if somebody walks into your life, that walking person becomes a vessel for those emotions that can often be. you know, tricky. They can be heavy. And so I've walked with people who've had difficulties in their lives. I've walked with people who have survived wars, of people who are like grappling with

loss. And it feels safe to them to unburden themselves to somebody who's passing through, right? I think this is part of the almost kind of a sacramental nature of movement of using our bodies to move through landscape. We carry your woes with us, but safely, where you don't have to kind of embarrass yourself or bring attention to yourself in your home. What do you do with that? People are that's a lot for you to absorb. What do you do with that? Well, you know, it's been said

that journalism is kind of being a medium, if you will, where you take people's lives with their struggles, their joys, and you're kind of channeling it to share it and broadcast it with other people, right? And so there's some truth to that. You know, what also

maybe goes unspoken is that, you know, some of that lingers inside of you. You know, I'd covered wars for many, many years before starting this project. And indeed, one of the reasons why I began this project was to kind of address all of that stuff that I'd channeled for years. All, you know, refugee camps, war zones, you know, famines, et cetera. Try to make sense of it. Try to kind of be a more transparent conduit. So, yeah, I mean, it's a privilege.

What can I say? It's humbling. You'd better damn well do it, do it well to honor the people that are sharing this with you. Did you say that you took a container ship from Japan to Alaska? Yeah, I wrote a one of the things, one of the conceits of this project is to kind of, if I can't walk, then kind of bump it up to the kind of the least kind of abstracted form of motorized travel, right? So I try to avoid airplanes. I've had to get on airplanes a couple of times.

I was deported or, you know, encouraged to leave in quotes Pakistan during a difficult moment. I got back in the coup in in Myanmar was another time because of security where I had to kind of fly ahead

to China and then walk back to the border and continue I didn't want to take a since the Bering the Beringia

migration through Siberia was shut off I didn't want to take a plane so I tried to find a ship and so yeah

I wrote a container ship from Yokohama 11 days across the North Pacific What was that like? It was amazing Matt, it was also just kind of an astonishing window into our globalized world. Yeah. Because what I would submit is that whatever you and I are wearing today to work,

you know, the furniture in our homes and offices and much of the food that we're eating, that's in the global kind of pipeline that's being traded, close to 90% of that is being moved around the planet on these gigantic container ships. And yet we almost never see it, right? It's this vast, invisible industry of seafaring. The terminals are often outside of the cities. They're behind walls. The people who move this stuff for us that make our lives truly modern and global, we don't even know them.

And so I got to know these 21 guys on this one container ship quite well, and that's going to be in an upcoming story. And so what's the plan now? I mean, it's the end of October. You're in Alaska. Winter is on your doorstep, if not in the house already. And so what is the plan for walking through the cold? Yeah, so the plan is to follow what the locals, say, follow traditional systems of knowledge and do what everybody else does up here in high latitudes, as you probably know, same in the high latitudes of Canada, is hunker down, dig a snow cave, build a fire.

And so I'm going to, I just finished walking, by the way, I think about 800 kilometers through Alaska, and including a really long wild stretch down the outer coast, where I saw almost. nobody um and i'm going to stop uh for the winter and i've chosen a place there's a small friends are loaning me a small cabin near glacier bay national park and the idea is to turn the GPS back on and relaunch the walk in the spring excellent so a couple of minutes left two questions one is the obvious question that everybody is yelling at the radio which is how many pairs of shoes has he worn walking 38 000 kilometers yeah again you think i would have this stat on the top of my head. I honestly don't know. I've lost track. And it, you know, it's involved everything from, you know, Russian combat boots to, uh, sandals, um, to, you know, inexpensive plastic

sneakers, um, probably dozens and dozens and dozens, yeah. The other thing is just, I mean, the tagline for this is, and we've hinted at this throughout the conversation, slow down, find humanity. Have you found humanity in this? I would say it's found me. It found you. Yeah, there's no, it's like, you know how you enter some landscapes and the landscape welcomes you? That's what this project has been like. And I wouldn't be sitting here in a nice little cabin in southeast Alaska talking to you. If the world hadn't welcomed me, if human beings hadn't taken me into their lives and suck forward me and helped me and given me advice and directions and a hot cup of tea. So this is a project that's about hope. And I know we live in

really fractious times, the horizons ahead seem pretty turbulent. But I try to remind people that in the larger human family, at the ordinary person-to-person level, it's generally a positive experience. It's not a dangerous world. That's a really moving thing to hear, I think, for a lot of people, especially right now. It doesn't feel like that to a lot of people. It feels the opposite in some ways. No, I'm picking up on that, Matt, being back here a few months.

There seems to be a lot of fear and tension in the air. Yeah. And you're not feeling that out on the road. Well, in people that I encounter that when they talk about their lives, I definitely, definitely am feeling it. It's a little bit of a different world, right? Consider when I left Africa, it was the beginning of Obama's second administration in the United States. Twitter had just gone public. It's a different world. And so coming back here is a bit surreal. I feel a little bit like Gulliver, who was away so long that when he got home, he felt like so disconnected from this idea of home that he started talking to his horse. Now, that contradicts what I just told you.

But that's a personal feeling. It doesn't reflect the goodness that I'm still receiving from all sorts of people that I've met as I've been walking highways and wilderness beaches here in North America so far. Paul, we will talk again on your travels. In the meantime, have a good, warm winter, and we will see you out on the road.

Sounds great, Matt. Thank you so much. Paul Solopach is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, journalist and National Geographic Fellow. You can follow his walking through National Geographic. He's also in social media as well. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m.

at all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca. slash podcasts.