View Full Image Travelling east along a Roman road near Tarsus, Turkey. I’ve had many, many, many, many discussions-arguments-with my colleagues about this. You said in an interview that what you do is an “anthropological way of doing journalism"-how do you see the space for “slow journalism", seriously immersive journalism, changing? Newspapers around the world are shutting down, and the idea of journalism itself is changing with the digital age… We were two men stranded on a tiny raft of shade. Among the oldest farm furrows in the world. A 3x3m oasis of cool in a landscape of incinerating white light. A few days ago, a millennium ago, laying in the watery blue shadows of a pistachio tree, on a blistering hot day of walking with my Turkish partner Deniz Kilic. Or that he is a library of fading Bedouin lore? (A bitter desert melon call hadaj, when cut in half and placed on your cheeks, sucks the thirst right out of your body.)" ( For the full story, click here).ĭespite what you said about “favourite places", tell us about a place that really moved you? That his medical condition has been aggravated by too much jollity? (By way of a warning during his current recovery, the doctors say his previous operation’s incisions may have never mended because Banounah belly-laughs too uncontrollably, too hard.) ‘Weren’t we?’ What can be said about this man? ‘We were a great team,’ Banounah, gripping my hand in his hospital bed, says hoarsely. (When is it not?) And this trek, this strange journey, this forever walk begins to circle a familiar, melancholy topography, the rolling basin and range of new friends made and left behind: beloved people waving, one hand up in a parting salute, on the horizons. He is trained to keep pain stoppered, this time to his detriment. This is not a small matter.’īanounah is an ex-soldier. ‘I don’t know how he made it this far,’ marvels the Egyptian doctor at the hospital where we take him. He has walked 240 miles with an abdominal hernia. (Here is an excerpt from that article) “Mohamad Banounah, my friend and Saudi guide, has landed in intensive care after complications from an earlier surgery. I’ll take an easy out: I’ve written about him-Mohamad Banounah, one of my Saudi desert guides. You’ve said in an interview that you don’t have a favourite place, but favourite people. The curtain on the first human discovery of Earth basically dropped there. I will end at Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America because this is one of the last places colonized by our species, back in the Stone Age. I am following the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa. Herto Bouri is the oldest reliably dated Homo sapiens site in the world at about 160,000 years old. It took all day to find them (their handlers-the men responsible for renting them-caught up with me on the trail a week later). They were out somewhere in the desert pastures, unaware of their epic appointment with history. They had been arranged months in advance. I was wondering where the cargo camels were. Tell us a little bit about Day 1 of the journey? What determined the starting point (Herto Bouri in Ethiopia) and the finishing line of your journey? Then she cut me a look: I’m not going to bail you out again, buster. My ex-boss, a phenomenal woman who once had walked into a prison yard in the war zone of Darfur, Sudan, in order to spring me out of captivity, gazed down at the global route I had penned on to a cocktail napkin. All of us had left that paper recently, due to the downsizing of its journalism mission. I first shared the “Out of Eden" idea in a Chicago bar with my old editor friends from Chicago Tribune. I kept looking out over those iron horizons, wishing I could just walk away…. I was trying and failing to write my first book in a cowboy’s bunkhouse in West Texas. How did the idea of the walk come about? Who did you first speak to about it and what was their reaction? I’ll be walking through it soon as I restart the walk towards you-China and India. I am keeping an eye on the weather out the window. The first rays of autumn have come to this part of the Caucasus. I’m in Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia, doing my usual thing-trying to build interesting sentences. Where are you now on your walk? What are you doing today?
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