I’ve spent the past 13 years walking 23,815 kilometers across the Old World, from the white thorn deserts of Ethiopia to the cobbled beaches of Japan. I can cite the distance with exactitude because I carry a hand-held GPS device.
Sometimes people ask me: Who do you meet along your global trail?
Many farmers and shopkeepers, I reply. Also poets, street sweepers, astrophysicists, yak herders, bonafide royalty, and beggars. And cops. Quite a few of security types, actually. They stop me everywhere to ask the usual questions. Whenever this happens, I quietly punch my GPS to mark each encounter. Voila: The Out of Eden Walk Police Stops Map. So far, along my erratic route out of Africa and across Eurasia, I’ve geotagged 120 interactions with police or military. Click on the map’s colored icons. You’ll see a brief description of each uneasy engagement and maybe a photo.
Originally, the idea of building a police-stop map seemed nearly a lark. Using GPS to plot my turtle-speed run-ins with law enforcement would be an interesting way, I thought, to chart freedom of movement in the societies traversed. Spatial analysis of police stops—from a hiker’s perspective—could also playfully skewer the hegemony of cars in our go-go era: Pedestrians have become less common and thus more suspect in the eyes of police these days, especially in affluent motorized economies.
A cordon of soldiers blocks the way at the Turkey border. Kobani, a nearby city in Syria, was under attack by jihadists at the time.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
But lately, looking ahead to the continental United States, where a new legion of poorly vetted and trained Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers masked in balaclavas is swarming American streets—and in the case of Minneapolis, shooting dead a citizen—I’m updating the map with considerably less whimsy. I’m an aging white dude: My police profile carries the most unearned privilege of any on the planet. Yet I’d permitted myself to believe, after crossing the Pacific Ocean by ship to trek down the length of the Americas, that the casual brutality of police states was at last behind me. Crossing the U.S. on foot will take about nine months. Let’s see what happens.
As for the global data so far:
My aromatic backpack and I have been stopped by a bewildering parade of suspicious and officially empowered human beings: uniformed police, soldiers, gendarmes, piratical ethnic militias, self-deputized village cosplayers, and dead-serious secret agents wearing civvies and (the tell) precision haircuts. This is normal. Any foreigner afoot in the hinterlands of most countries will draw police scrutiny. It comes with the blisters.
At my journey’s starting line in Ethiopia—way back in 2013—my two cargo camels were impounded by national police who suspected me of stealing the beloved creatures. In Israel, military police guarding a border checkpoint at the West Bank locked me into a bombproof steel chamber equipped with a small porthole. It was like being confined inside an iron lung or submarine. Plastering my documents against the holding cell’s tiny window of thick glass, I was required to shout my biography,
National police in Yangon, Myanmar, stop Salopek at a checkpoint. The security forces in Myanmar are being investigated for the crime of genocide in the country’s brutal civil war.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
at length, to an officer on the other side. (“Have a nice day,” one of his colleagues, perched on the rooftop with an M-4 carbine, cracked when I was at last allowed through.) In China, three secret policemen shadowed me in an unmarked car through the dusty canyons of the Yellow River. My Chinese walking partner became so fed up with the surveillance, he marched back to berate them through their rolled-up windows.
National police in Yangon, Myanmar, stop Salopek at a checkpoint. The security forces in Myanmar are being investigated for the crime of genocide in the country’s brutal civil war.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
at length, to an officer on the other side. (“Have a nice day,” one of his colleagues, perched on the rooftop with an M-4 carbine, cracked when I was at last allowed through.) In China, three secret policemen shadowed me in an unmarked car through the dusty canyons of the Yellow River. My Chinese walking partner became so fed up with the surveillance, he marched back to berate them through their rolled-up windows.
What did they say? I asked.
“They were city boys,” he hooted. “They complained that they hadn’t washed their hair in three days.”
On the map, I have rated all these involuntary meetings with security forces as friendly (“Need some water?”), investigative (“Empty your pack, please”), or outright detained (“Get in the car—now”).
Twenty-five stops involved humane or merely curious officers who, naturally enough, were still quietly checking me out. Sixteen devolved into something like arrest. The bulk—79 stops—were in-between. All this ricocheting off lawmen was not spread evenly across my path, of course. Police stops clustered where you’d expect.
Salopek and his walking partners were detained for a day in a village in western China and obliged to undergo COVID testing. They were forced to leave the area by car.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
The mined border of Jordan and the West Bank. The sensitive Kurdish-minority inhabited zone of Turkey. Uzbekistan under the throwback Stalinist dictator Islam Karimov took first prize with 34 police stops. Exiting that country through the frontier barbed wire, I actually kneeled and kissed the dusty pavement in neighboring and freer Kyrgyzstan. (Thankfully, Karimov died in 2016, from a vodka-ignited stroke, reportedly, and life is much improved in Uzbekistan.) I walked scot-free through only two of the 21 nations spanning my route: Kazakhstan (empty steppes) and Japan (high social self-control).
Salopek and his walking partners were detained for a day in a village in western China and obliged to undergo COVID testing. They were forced to leave the area by car.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
The mined border of Jordan and the West Bank. The sensitive Kurdish-minority inhabited zone of Turkey. Uzbekistan under the throwback Stalinist dictator Islam Karimov took first prize with 34 police stops. Exiting that country through the frontier barbed wire, I actually kneeled and kissed the dusty pavement in neighboring and freer Kyrgyzstan. (Thankfully, Karimov died in 2016, from a vodka-ignited stroke, reportedly, and life is much improved in Uzbekistan.) I walked scot-free through only two of the 21 nations spanning my route: Kazakhstan (empty steppes) and Japan (high social self-control).
For all its pinpoint accuracy, however, the Police Stops Map remains a tad misleading. It doesn’t begin to account for the rapidly accelerating surveillance technologies deployed by security agencies the world over.
Saudi Arabian agents monitored my tiny camel caravan almost constantly as we slogged through the vast Hejaz desert. My local walking partners and I often could spot their 4x4s, hairy with antennas, in the heat waves of distance. “It’s for your protection,” the men said, when confronted. This may have been partly true. Four European tourists had been murdered earlier by jihadists in the region. But in many countries this rationale is a tiny shield that covers all manner of abuse. In China, the phones of foreign journalists are regularly snooped.
Mannequin soldiers "guard" the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, in South Korea. Checkpoints manned by live troops dot the tense border.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
And low-tech policing also leaves some blanks on the map. A team of up to eight plainclothes Chinese agents trailed me 24/7 for 10 weeks. They were conducting “overt surveillance”: allowing me to know I was under intense observation, yet never once making contact physically. They checked into adjoining rooms at motels and truck-stop inns. They followed me into convenience stores. Then, one morning, the whole grim entourage vanished. I can only assume I had strayed into and out of a sensitive security zone. Jeff Blossom, my walk’s cartographer at the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, has marked sections of my trail with orange hash marking to denote such phases of continuous monitoring.
Mannequin soldiers "guard" the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, in South Korea. Checkpoints manned by live troops dot the tense border.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
And low-tech policing also leaves some blanks on the map. A team of up to eight plainclothes Chinese agents trailed me 24/7 for 10 weeks. They were conducting “overt surveillance”: allowing me to know I was under intense observation, yet never once making contact physically. They checked into adjoining rooms at motels and truck-stop inns. They followed me into convenience stores. Then, one morning, the whole grim entourage vanished. I can only assume I had strayed into and out of a sensitive security zone. Jeff Blossom, my walk’s cartographer at the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, has marked sections of my trail with orange hash marking to denote such phases of continuous monitoring.
The world is shifting underfoot. Even on the most isolated trails, I can feel the tremors. The renewed popularity of building walls, the growing backlash against the injustices of globalization, a slide back into old nativism, all cast a sobering shadow across my color-coded Police Stop Map waypoints. When officers begin hunting passersby on city streets with total impunity, I can only share what I’ve gleaned from the motley constabularies patrolling my trails. Ideology notwithstanding, police masks are tough to peel off once they’re on. Just as it's impossible for my hair, whitened to cotton under the strains of close observation in Shaanxi Province, China, to regain its color.
