After staggering down the lonesome Shirvan Highlands for days, my guide Rufat Gojayev and I wash up against the barren shore of the Caspian Sea.
Every 100 miles on the Out of Eden Walk, I have been taking multimedia recordings of the landscape. This particular “Milestone” denotes the 3,100th mile covered since my first step in distant Ethiopia. It seems utterly unremarkable—a featureless, wind-polished desert outside the Azeri town of Gobustan. Yet it marks a major fulcrum point: one of the few true frontiers, a rare genuine border, of this immensely long foot journey.
Days of grass and silence are behind us. Nights of asphalt and manmade skies—the glow of Baku’s city lights—stretch ahead. Milestone 32 punctuates the end of the Caucasus. It suggests the first inklings of Central Asia. One world, oriented toward the West, recedes. Another, pivoted toward the East, looms.
A played-out old petroleum well, its gauges rusted at zero, stamps the boundary.
