Hiking the Glenn Highway through Alaska. Published in Asphalt Pilgrims.
Paul Salopek
Every hundred miles Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind. Milestones reflect straight-line distances, but his walked distances are generally much longer. More on these waypoints here.
Every hundred miles Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind. Milestones reflect straight-line distances, but his walked distances are generally much longer. More on these waypoints here.
We’d been getting lost for days among the canals. There were hundreds of them: muddy capillaries of river water slaking the thirst of countless fields of rice, cotton, sorghum, thickets of reeds. Sometimes we had to swim, driving the packhorse first into the water, then pulling the cargo donkey into the currents. The river carried the bone dust of its mother, the Pamirs.
The Amu Darya was once called the Oxus. Everyone had crossed its snaking channel: Bronze Age nomad raiders, Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, Silk Road traders, the armies of Genghiz and Tamerlane, sunburned Russian and British spies during the Great Game. Today the river is patrolled by ants. We looked for its scarce bridges. At the bridges were shops with freezers. They sold ice cream.
A wraparound soundscape at this Milestone
This Milestone’s location on a map
Photos of the ground under Paul’s feet and the sky above at this Milestone
A brief question and answer with the first person Paul meets at this Milestone
Atabek Abdulayev
Student, age 14
Who are you?
I’m Atabek.
Where do you come from?
Pavarot. (A nearby village whose name means “the bend.”)
Where are you going?
To swim in the river.
Observations from social media from the Milestone location
Along the border between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, people are celebrating the feast marking the end of Ramadan (the fasting month for Muslims). Someone shares a video of Patyr (traditional Uzbek bread) being baked. A girl shows off henna art on her arm. Another is reading the Russian translation of the novel Me Before You. Instagram user @pavlovskyroman shares a photo of a physical fitness badge awarded to his mother in 1978 by the Soviet government.
A video showing the landscape around this Milestone
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