28/01/2026
✍️ “I’ve spent the last 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.
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.”
— Paul Salopek
🔗 Read Paul’s latest dispatch, “Papers Please,” about mapping police stops on a walk across the world: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/papers-please
Linked within the dispatch is a new interactive map of these police stops.
Map by Jeff Blossom
Image description in comments.
