Why our shared planet is not a dangerous place

or the past four years I have been walking across the earth. As I retrace the paths of our species’ first Stone Age migration out of Africa, I’m writing about my encounters along the modern global trail. I am often asked about safety. Americans, in particular, seem preoccupied by risk: How do I escape beheading or assaults? I have had close shaves. In Ethiopia, I was forced to sneak at night around pastures contested by armed nomads on camels. Israeli soldiers fired rubber bullets at me as I zigzagged through the West Bank. Some joker stole my buried water cache in Uzbekistan, stranding me in a corrugated desert the size of Arizona. And to date, the police in 10 countries have detained me 84 times for, well, suspicious walking. (I’m logging these police stops on a digital “freedom of movement map.”)

As a member of one of the most disempowered minorities in our motorised age — a pedestrian — I can assert with confidence that by and large, our shared planet is not a dangerous place. In fact, it’s chockablock with exceedingly nice people. Few of them speak my language. Almost none look like me.

Yet during the past 1,567 days on foot these strangers have helped me stay healthy and alive. This inclines me to like them. I suppose this makes me a xenophile. Xenophilia is the opposite of xenophobia. Broadly speaking, it describes openness to the immense human diversity of the world. But the concept is supple. On the political front, George Washington, the founding isolationist, warned America against xenophilic foreign alliances that risked bogging the country in pointless wars.

And conservatives have long mocked shallow cosmopolites whose displays of cultural xenophilia — wearing Japanese kanji tattoos or Guatemalan textiles — tend to smack of mere appropriation.

My own brand of xenophilia is biographical. I was born in suburban California but raised in semirural Mexico. Like many children who straddle borders, I learned to pour my loyalty into relationships, not places. For me, relying on random encounters across continents — for food, shelter, safety, understanding — isn’t a source of anxiety, but an affirmation. It’s my normal.

Despite the current mood against globalisation and immigrants in Europe and the US, the vast bulk of the world remains staggeringly hospitable.

In the Arab world, I learned to scale human compassion by the pound. Or rather by the absence of such weight. Daily invitations to meals and tea had the effect of lightening my rucksack in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the West Bank: I simply didn’t need to lug much food around. One Saudi host grew so irate when I pulled out my wallet that he ordered me off his property.

And in the Caucasus, the Georgians did Christian charity proud. During my 42-day trek through their mountainous nation, I was kindly invited into private homes every night. I resorted to hotel rooms on three occasions. I needed to. I missed my personal space.

Paleoanthropologists say that catastrophic climate change twice almost wiped out the human species in prehistoric Africa. Improbable as it seems, all 7.3 billion souls alive today most likely descend from as few as 600 lucky souls who made it through those ancient genetic bottlenecks. From my experience as a war reporter, I know this interrelatedness doesn’t reliably translate into empathy; family fights are always the ugliest — hence the singular brutality of civil wars. Yet, even in extremism we offer an open hand.

I was ambushed while walking through eastern Turkey. A gunman from a militia of “village guards” raised by the Turkish Army to fight the Kurdistan Workers Party fighters nearly shot me from behind a tree. I was hiking with a cargo mule, and he mistook me for a Kurdish guerrilla. After he uncurled his finger from his Kalashnikov’s trigger, and while I hyperventilated from adrenaline, the village guard patted me paternally on the shoulder. “You gave us a scare,” he said. “Enjoy your walk through our beautiful land.”

I am walking across the world. Like a human baton, I am passed from stranger to stranger across continents. In Uzbekistan, a police state where I was detained by security forces 37 times, villagers sometimes did turn me away. They were frightened — not of me, but of their government. “I’m sorry,” they’d whisper. “I don’t want trouble with the K.G.B.” Often, they looked acutely embarrassed. Their fear clearly at war with their own thwarted neighbourliness. They sent out children with fresh-baked bread as I walked away.

There’s no question that my reception at the throbbing souks, tense police checkpoints and lonely shepherd’s huts along my route is shaped by my ethnicity and passport. Gender, too, plays a decided role; it has been tough finding female walking guides. Few of us can escape the walled homeland of our personal identity. But we do control who gets in.

“The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world,” wrote the 12thcentury French theologian Hugh of St. Victor. “The strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man extinguished his.”

The medieval monk was referring to the ultimate xenophilia: the boundlessness of divine love. Over the next five or six years, I’m hoping to apply a small measure of that openheartedness down here, on fractured Earth, among all us mugs plodding the muddy trails. I’m making for Tierra del Fuego, the last continental horizon colonised by our species. I’m not seeking the exotic Other. I’m walking toward the familiarity of people. This delivers me the world.

— NYT Syndicate Paul Salopek is a writer for National Geographic.