What would it be like to walk across the world? Nat Geo Explorer Paul Salopek has been on a 13,000 mile foot journey over the last 10 years, in the footsteps of our ancestors. And he has another 12,00 miles to go. Video by John Stanmeyer
the past 10 years of my life to walking across the Earth, I’m sometimes asked, “How do the big issues of our day look—from boot level?” Or, “Has walking changed the way you weigh current events?” Or put more simply, often by schoolchildren, “Any surprises?”
By this I mean the fading corners of the inhabited Earth still not subjugated to—or transformed by—the demands of our machines. Call it the handmade world. Hand-terraced fields in northwest Yunnan add a visual touch to wild slopes hemming the Jinsha River that were punched up by the collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates and worn down by centuries of human sweat. The antique China that lingers in this eastern margin of the Himalaya is a redoubt of human-nature harmony.
Eighty-six years ago, working tirelessly seven days a week, this civilian army chopped a 717-mile truck route through some of the rainiest, craggiest, most malarial terrain on Earth to bring war-crippled China desperately needed munitions, food, and medicines via British-ruled Burma.
Today the Burma Road in most places is paved. The wartime track sinks under concrete superhighways throbbing with traffic. But in the volcanic hills around Tengchong, it still sways atop the land like a dancer, past tile-roofed villages and the green green panes of rice paddies. Walk its verges to their ultimate terminus, and they dead-end, like all vernacular architecture in Yunnan, in the corrugated palms of a human being.
An ethnic Naxi shaman, Yang Hong Zhang, displays the accoutrements of his metaphysical trade in the hill country near Lijiang. Yang officiates at family ceremonies and religious holidays. Yunnan shelters roughly half China’s 56 official ethnic groups—a mosaic that preserves many of the region’s medieval lifeways.Wang concocted her own fertilizer from pine needles and pig waste. A whittled stick functioned as a corn degrainer. Handwoven rattan baskets stored her potatoes.
Shepherd and pig farmer Zha Xi La Mu stares back from a landscape still shaped largely by the human hand. The so-called factory of the world, China is renowned to outsiders as an industrial dynamo, but parts of the frontier province of Yunnan and nearby Sichuan still harbor outposts of a quieter, more human-scaled time.In Yunnan I walked through modern cities too, down in the flats.
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