AMT: [Anna Maria] Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

AMT: Well of all things journalist Paul Salopek has stumbled across over the past five plus years, hearing Ella Fitzgerald's heavenly voice calling out to him in the wilds of northern Pakistan, was among the most unexpected. But when you're trekking the world by foot in pursuit of so-called slow journalism, you're bound to come across some unexpected moments. We've been checking in with Paul Salopek periodically since he began his Out of Eden Walk in Ethiopia in January of 2013. That was more than five years ago and his daunting project continues. Paul Salopek is attempting to retrace the journey of our ancestors out of Africa, through the Middle East and Asia and then across the Pacific to North America. And then he'll walk down to the southernmost tip of South America, a Journey of some 34,000 kilometres. Paul Salopek is the founder of the Out of Eden Walk. He's a fellow with National Geographic. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent and he's a little more of a third of the way along that global walk. And we've reached him in Chennai, India. Hello.

PAUL SALOPEK: Hi Anna Maria. Good to hear your voice again.

AMT: It's great to hear your voice. I have to ask you, Ella Fitzgerald and northern Pakistan don't sound like an obvious match. Tell us about the day that you came across that sound and you made the recording we just heard.

PS: Yeah, that's one of the things about walking across the world are these unusual encounters in juxtapositions. I had just come over the border from an even remoter place in Western Himalayas and that would be the walk on corridor of Afghanistan. And I was joined by a local walking partner, who met me in these glacial valleys. I mean if you could imagine the most rugged high alpine wilderness of the mountains of western Canada, but probably higher. And then this came wafting out of the shepherd's hut that we were sleeping in that day and it was my guide, Naveed Khan, a Pakistani, playing music on one of his mobile devices and again as you noted, heavenly music for a heavenly landscape.

AMT: And just underlines I guess the universality of beautiful music as well.

PS: Yes it took me to a different universe altogether, in that context.

AMT: Paul, we've spoken to you a couple of times since you started this remarkable trek and I just touched on briefly where it began, but can you remind us a little more of where you started and where you've been?

PS: Yeah. So I'm retracing the ancient pathways of the first modern human beings who migrated out of Africa, back in the stone age. And they left Africa sometime between 60 and 100,000 years ago and began radiating out from the mother continent and spread across the world in about 2500 generations, finally reaching the very tippity tip of the last continents about 7000 years ago and that happens to be Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America. So I decided more than five years ago to go ahead and attempt to recreate that epic journey. The first discovery of the world on foot, also on foot in the original way and I'm about more than five years in, about five and a half years in. After having crossed through the Rift Valley of Africa, taking a ship across the Red Sea, walked through the Middle East, walked through Asia, Central Asia and then crossed these enormous mountains. These wild mountains of the western Himalayas and now I'm in South Asia, walking across the vast river plains of India. That's it in a nutshell.

AMT: And how many kilometres have you walked so far then?

PS: Well the total journey according to my GPS track is about 18 or 19 thousand kilometers from the starting line in a place called Herto Bouri, Ethiopia. Now about a third of that has been by cargo ship because when I hit big bodies of water, I have no other way to kind of get across or around them. So it's about I think, about 12000 kilometers on foot so far.

AMT: Wow. Well let's go back to where you were at the time of the Ella Fitzgerald recording because that was rural northern Pakistan. Most of us imagine it as tribal and rife with religious fundamentalism, but that talk to me about your experience in that area.

PS: Yeah you know, you mention that you're going to walk across Pakistan, in this case northern Pakistan. And most people who are not from Pakistan, would question your sanity. But people forget how big Pakistan is. It's almost 2000 kilometers from north to south, is extraordinarily diverse. The people in the extreme north, among whom I walked, are very different from the people who live down on the south on the Arabian Sea. Their Alpine cultures, their pastoral nomads. Many of them are not Sunni Muslims. They're Shia. They're Ismailis, followers of the Aga Khan, a relatively moderate and open-minded and worldly community and basically like walking through you know parts of Central Asia that would be more familiar to Westerners as tourist destinations, such as Nepal. Really jagged peaks. You know the northern Pakistan has the densest concentration of peaks above 8000 metres, anywhere in the world. It used to be a world renowned climbing centre for extreme Alpine climbs, until Pakistan began getting this reputation for instability and extremism. And last year, when I walked through it, I basically had that region to myself. The Pakistan's reputation had scared off much of its international tourism, so I had this extraordinary experience of walking through this fantastically beautiful luminous landscape and I was the only person like me there. It was really quite a privilege and it was a bit surreal, to be honest.

AMT: What do the Pakistanis you met think about how they're perceived by the rest of the world?

PS: That's a really, a really interesting question and again it goes back to being able to slow down enough, as a journalist, to be able to have these kind of conversations at a human level, right. Because if you and I, let's say you and I would go to Afghanistan or Pakistan, the northern part of Pakistan has many cultural affinity with neighbouring Afghanistan, as traditional kind of fast journalists. You arrive in a village in a Rent-A-Car. You know you've got a translator you've hired from a city, whose culturally as alien as you are, from these tiny villages of nomads. And you've got all these barriers that you're going to have to get through, economic, cultural. There are these huge power differentials, between you and the local people. But if you walk through these communities, it lessens those barriers, those obstacles to true communication. You arrive on foot, literally at eye level with the people that you're meeting. You're kind of on the level with them literally. Your boots are planted on the same earth. You're dirty, you're sweaty, you stink. You're you're burned by the same sun. You've got the same dust on your shoulders and there's a much easier access into their lives and what they say to you when you slow down and have a chai with them, a tea is that you know Paul, we really are regretful that our country is perceived in the outside world by its worst traits only. Because look at, here we are we're having some tea underneath the tree in my yard. And am I here threatening to cut off your head? No. I think the biggest danger of walking through northern Pakistan is that I would die of tea intoxication right. I was being invited in constantly to have tea all the time. And if I took up every offer of having tea, I would still be in Pakistan, right. So you know the way I put it to my readers, Anna Maria is that it would be like an outsider coming to say the United States and judging that extraordinarily complex country, the very regionally diverse country, with different ethnic groups and different languages, by its gun violence only, right. And that's the way the Pakistanis feel about being judged by their by their association with extremist terrorism. They feel it's unfair. And so I had a lot of talking to do to kind of you know, I had to along with their pride and their hospitality, absorb some prickly sort of resentment that they were viewed this way by the outside world.

AMT: Now it's important to hear all of the different sides, but of course there are parts of Pakistan that can be dangerous for foreigners and at one point police intervened in your walk. What happened there?

PS: Oh absolutely. I mean there are sections of Pakistan that I wouldn't set my my boot toe in. It's just way too dangerous, especially in the tribal areas near the Afghan frontier that are further south from the areas and west from the areas that I walked through. I thought I had planned my route through northern Pakistan through very safe areas, but when I came out to a mountain valley near a town Chilas, the Pakistani police stopped me and my walking partner, Naveed Khan and said, guys we're not going to let you go through this area on foot. We're going to force you to get in a car. And I argued vehemently against it. I said you know here I have these permissions from your government to walk through, my visa is valid. I'm on this you know storytelling project and I cannot not walk. My whole project is premised on keeping my feet, you know in contact with the earth. And the local Pakistani police chief looked at all my bona fides, all my documents and still shook his head said, I don't care what your documents say. I don't care if you're invited here by our you know prime minister. If something happens to you, it's my head on a platter. I'm going to lose my job and it comes back to me. So he forced us to get in the car and I had to you know mark that spot with a GPS mark, as I mark all of my route, and drive about 130 kilometers around a mountain, a wild mountain. And the danger in this case was twofold. One, back in 2012, a bus load of pilgrims of Shia pilgrims had been attacked by Muslim extremists by Sunnis and killed. Many people, I think about a dozen people were killed. And so there was this after effect of communal violence around Chilas that had local people had authorities still anxious. The second reason was that there were some banditry going on up on the mountain that I was hoping to walk over and some carjackings. And the bandits were stopping people and robbing them. And the local police just said, you know an America,n really walking through, really? You know totally exposed and you know forget it, we're not going to let you do it. So this was one of those rare cases on a transcontinental foot journey, where I had to alert readers and say look I don't want to martyr myself for this project. So it would be foolish under only those circumstances to not heed the advice of the local police. So I did in fact get into a car and drove 130 kilometers and then we started the walk again. And these kind of lacunae, if you will, these kind of interruptions of the journey, we mark on our map too. To be honest with reader, this has happened. It's happened once before in Turkey when I was ambushed in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict.

AMT: So getting into northern Pakistan from Afghanistan was difficult as well. You were initially deported, weren't you Paul?

PS: Yeah I mean officially not deported. Requested to leave with some enthusiasm, let's put it that way. You know crossing the borders, between countries in this part of the world is often difficult right. There's they've got political histories. Pakistan and Afghanistan have a very bad recent history. Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of interfering with its internal affairs. Pakistan denies that, but of course you know there is evidence of course that they do. And so that border has been sealed since 2015 because Pakistan also accuses Afghanistan of sending militants over to carry out attacks on its territory. So it's become and in recent years, a really tense border. And further to the south it's quite militarized. So getting permission to come you know on foot from Afghanistan into Pakistan was quite an undertaking. It took months and months of diplomacy with National Geographic and the Pakistani government and with the help of Pakistani friends, we finally got the visa to do it, but something happened. When I made it over that that frontier, that border. Now imagine it's a mountain pass, up almost around 16000 feet, it's covered with snow. There's no border checkpoint. There in fact, there was no sign of human civilization within eye shot for hundreds of square kilometers around. Just just these amazing mountains, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush. Peak after sarod peak, pyramids of snow as far as the eye can see. That's the border. And I knew it was the border because I had a GPS, but if you were just standing there, you'd never know. But I had alerted the Pakistani authorities weeks in advance that I was coming over that border. I told them what day I was planning to come over the border and I was sort of expecting to be received you know maybe with an official delegation down on the other side of the mountain pass, if not with an open hug, then at least with a strong handshake. But instead we were greeted with a military, a group of security officers and they took me and the French photojournalist I was traveling with the Mathieu Paley into custody and we were driven and flown to the capital of Islamabad. And within two days, I was on a plane leaving the country and I had to go to the nearest international air hub that would take me without a visa and that turned out to be Abu Dhabi. So here I am in snow pants, in heavy kind of winter gear, still smeared with the mud of a mountain pass in the Karakoram, arriving at this hot desert city, where it's like almost it was probably close to 40 degrees. It was quite a shock and it was the first time this had happened on my project. Now officially, that was not deportation because the Pakistani officials, the security officials who took us into custody, told me that you know you're welcome back. But there was some mistake where the word didn't trickle down apparently to some local commander up in the mountain area that we were coming into Pakistan. And by the time like you know, once the wheels of security organs start grinding, they don't go back again. You know the guys who had us in custody just told me kind of off, you know in a whisper, look come on back. You'll be welcomed back. So within a few days, I was back in Pakistan and I motored back up to the place where I was detained and restarted the walk again.

AMT: And this is the Wakhan corridor where you kept walking then?

PS: Yes.

AMT: We are posting some photos from that region and your walk on our website. The pictures are just breathtaking.

PS: Yeah. The Wakhan tcorridor, which I crossed for entering Pakistan and I entered the Wakhan of Pakistan from Tajikistan. And let me just lay some names on you and just these names are redolent of wild raw mountains. The Palm Ears, the Hindu Kush, the Karakorum. These are three of the four mountain chains that I walked through from Central Asia, South into South Asia and that route took me through a finger of Afghanistan that almost no outsiders ever go to. It's extremely remote. It has one dirt road. It has no mobile phone service. No Internet. No electricity. People who live there are farmers or nomadic pastoralists, who live a pre-industrial way of life and there are only about 15000 of them. And this finger of land is a giant alpine valley that goes for about 150 or so kilometers pointing towards China. And walking up this alpine valley hemmed on both sides by mountain peaks that were 7000 metres tall was for me one of the most exhilarating parts of this five year journey because it seemed as if the mountains radiated this pale Alpine light in cupped light in cupped time in the same river valley. And it was a river valley of apricot orchards. It was a river valley of farmers using oxen driving them in circles to thresh wheat in the old biblical way. Thousand year old technology. It was a river valley of water mills, pushed by glacial melt, grinding out wheat into flour. Using stone, millstones that weighed 300 kilos carved by hand. It was a river valley of villages where everything visible in those villages was handmade from the door knobs to the door jams to the hand tools. Everything was made by hand, including the iron forged by hand. It was just intoxicating in its beauty. It had a hallucinatory sort of clarity to the light and the people were both extraordinarily tough and heartbreakingly generous.

AMT: Paul Salopek you're such a poet. The picture you paint is so beautiful. I know that you speak regularly to students around the world. I want to ask you about some one experience in particular. Tell us about Catherine Lal.

Yeah I met Cathy in March of this year, up in a small town in northern India, right smack next to the Nepal border called Mombasa. And Cathy is an orphan. She when she was quite young, was taken to this orphanage, which is run by a very warm generous fabulous family and grew up there. And I was asked to go there under the auspices of a National Geographic photo camp. And that's basically giving kids cameras so that they can document their own lives in the process kind of take control over the narrative of their own lives and claim back their power, right. It's a tool of using storytelling to really help focus yourself on who you are and the strengths that you have and give you, it's not me giving them their voice. They have their voice. They just have an instrument now to help record it, which is which is a camera. And I was asked to go help teach writing alongside Matthieu Paley, my French friend who walked with me across the Afghan Wakhan corridor and I met Kathy and Kathy was this natural born writer. She had the light. She had the fire. And I remember working with her. This workshop went for about five days. I remember working with her on her story at least you know through as many drafts that I would go through on my own work. You know three, four times. She was up at all hours working, polishing her story. That was the story of her life and I still stay in touch with her. We still communicate. So the ability to mentor kids both in person and digitally has become a really strong thread of meaning through this journey and I think it's just going to get stronger and stronger.

AMT: Well you know you brought new meaning to the whole concept of road trip and being on assignment. But I'm wondering how you juggle all this. You're married. You have a family. How do you connect one world with the other?

PS: Well I remind my readers, you know and I've got to be honest, my family asked to stay out of the spotlight of this project and I've got to respect their privacy. But I would I will tell you is that everybody I love in my life, knows who I am. So they sort of knew who they grew up with in the case of my siblings and my immediate family, my relatives and everybody else knows who they're involved with, right. And so it might seem crazy to some people that I could maintain you know family relationships, even deep friendships, when I'm inching across the world for five years, but this is not a departure for me. I've been doing this my whole life. I've sort of been a nomad since I was 6-years-old and my family moved from Southern California to a small village outside of a city in Mexico. I think that border crossing changed my life and turned me into a kind of a global nomad and taught me that well, whereas I may never be truly at home anywhere, I'll be, I'll feel at home everywhere to some degree. And that home is where my boots are. And so my family and friends, the people I love, come and walk with me as often as I can. I have to remind readers that I don't go back to the United States. I have not been back for five and a half years. The idea of this project is to kind of get into the ancient mindset of migrants who spent entire lives moving across the world. And that's been okay. It's been actually alright because as I get older, I think it's a factor of aging too, I carry my the people I love and the places I love with me, no matter where I am. I could be in New York City. I could be you know sitting in a town up in the tundra in Canada. I could be down in the tropics of Mexico. Home truly is where you are, where you are when you're alive. When you're alert. And so my ecosystem, my emotional ecosystem is mobile and it's portable so it's not as hard as it seems. I would argue in fact that you know moving around like this, moving with people who you are connected with emotionally is actually the norm. It's been the way we've been relating to each other for 90 per cent of our history when we were hunter gatherers.

AMT: Do you always have someone who's from the relative area like from nearby, walking with you to sort of approach these places as you go?

PS: Yes, unless I have somebody from the region who can walk with me. I would be walking mute and blind through most of these landscapes. I wouldn't know the folklore. I wouldn't know when to turn left or right. To stop it someplace that might have an interesting story. Never mind the translation because they also help serve as literal, as literally as interpreters, but it's more as cultural interpreters, as as prisms through which to view the landscape of their own home. And what the great joy of this is that these local or regional walking partners, as I call them, because they're more than guides, they're coequal with me, end up discovering their own homes for the first time on foot. Because most of them come from the modern motorized society that most of us live in and watching them rediscover their own home is one of the great joys and gifts of this project that was unexpected. I sort of never, I've never thought about it. And I hope at the end of this long, long journey to gather them all. And by then, there will be hundreds of them, right. Gather them at the finish line, down at the tip of South America and walk to the Antarctic sea together, the last kilometer or two and we're going to have a big party. This project belongs to all of them, as much as it does to me.

AMT: That's a beautiful image to end this conversation on Paul Salopek. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. It's always wonderful to listen to what you're thinking as you continue this walk. Take care of yourself.

PS: Thank you so much. Good to hear your voice again, Anna Maria. Let's check in again from somewhere down the trail.

AMT: For sure we will. Thanks Paul.

PS: Bye bye.

AMT: Paul Salopek, the founder of Out of Eden Walk and a fellow with National Geographic. He's a Pulitzer Prize winner, who was a foreign correspondent with The Chicago Tribune. We reached him in Chennai, India. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.