National Geographic: “Out of Eden Walk - Trail’s End”

Two years ago Paul Salopek started a seven-year journey along one of the routes taken by early humans to migrate out of Africa.

During his Out of Eden Walk he encounters different people and discusses the major problems of our time – with each person having their own perspective.

Georgia was one stop on his path. As he walked across the snow-topped, Salopek describes his experience.

"At Posof, on the Turkish border, we step—through a magic mirror, an invisible membrane of culture—into another world. Into the Republic of Georgia: grey and russet mountains dappled with snow, their vertical horizons razored as knapped flint, clawed by icy rivers whose beds are beaded with stones like blue eggs and spangled with the rusty leaves of sycamores,” he writes.

"We teeter into another dimension, into one of the oldest sites of Christendom, where every barren hill is a tonsured Golgotha topped by tilted crosses. Past fallen castles. By hardscrabble towns populated with women and men whose faces are planed at sharp and gorgeous angles, like early Picassos. The women in gumboots. The men hunched under black porkpie hats. Cyrillic letters fade on peeling walls. Russian trucks clang and sputter alongside, honking. It is the beginning of the end of another history, another empire, another dream.”

Read the full article here: www.nationalgeographic.com