Paul Salopek: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yunnan may be my favorite part of the world. Why is India such a good place to walk? Because Indians will certainly tell you that it is. Yes. People are still on foot by the million, whether it’s on pilgrimage or getting to work and back or getting to the fields. I was always in walking company in India. I walked how far? I think close to 3,800 kilometers across India and spent 17 months doing it because it was just so fascinating. I was stopping all the time through northern India, which is its own India, very different from southern India. But yes, there were walkers every day. You could ask somebody — and this is important if you’re walking horizon to horizon — for directions, and the directions would be accurate because the teller of the directions had paced off part of those landscapes. Whereas in motorized societies — and I’ve written about this — it’s pointless to talk to somebody in a car — if you’re on foot — about directions because the scale of their sense of landscape is limited to these strips of asphalt that are a few meters wide that wheeled vehicles can go on. Beyond that, it’s just this moving tableau that’s an abstraction. In India, people can tell you shortcuts. They can tell you where the best tree is to take a break, where the best temple is to sleep at night, where the next jug of water waiting the foot traveler lies ahead. India was marvelous. I felt among a brotherhood and sisterhood of walkers there. Where has been the worst food of your journey?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.