The unexpected twists on a writer's 24,000-mile walk across the world
Journalist Paul Salopek's route is anything but direct as landscapes, politics, and unexpected encounters drain time and energy.
What tales do our feet scribble?
The daily GPS tracks logged by the Out of Eden Walk, a 24,000-mile foot journey across the world along the pathways of our Stone Age ancestors, contain hidden stories in map form.
Ruler-straight segments of the walking trail, for example, suggest dull slogs along inhuman car roads. (No life-forms move in a brutal direct line.)
Sharp twists or curves, like kinks in a garden hose, usually indicate interesting encounters. Dense seesawing tracks hint at muscle-scorching trails up or down steep cliffs or mountain ranges. (See a map of when authorities halted Paul Salopek's storytelling odyssey.)
Abrupt right angles signal an encounter with a fence or a minefield. But what about densely tangled clumps of GPS data? Inexplicable dead-ends? Backtracks? The routing that resembles a clot of spaghetti?
Such doodles often pinpoint an unforeseen blip in the journey: a quirk of landscape (like the yo-yoing ridgelines of northeastern India), an alarming anecdote (being run out of a Kurdish village in Turkey), or a knot of utter confusion (looking for a stolen water cache in Uzbekistan). Hence: Welcome to the Kinks Map.
It works like this.
My antique walking path from Africa to South America is being accurately logged, for archival purposes, via a pocket-size GPS device that’s slung from my neck on a bootlace. This tiny machine receives a continuous stream of signals from satellites orbiting 22,236 miles above the Earth. Using a process called trilateration the GPS device converts these signals into exact latitude and longitude locations. This information gets poured into a digital map—a gigantic canvas—that is pored over by Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis mapmaker Jeff Blossom. Jeff identifies curious kinks in my trail. (No easy task: I’ve covered about 11,000 miles so far, or more than 20 million footsteps through 18 countries.) And I dig back through my journals to try to identify the cause of each messy GPS doodle, erratic curve, sharp angle, or retreat.
So come join us. Take a virtual ramble along the squiggly global trail. We’ll be updating the Kinks Map periodically.
View the interactive Kinks Map.
