— E S S A Y · MAY 2026 —
Almost Salopek
A full life, a woman in boots, a mule with attitude, and the most possible version of a walking dream.
My daughter just won a category in an Australia-wide jazz competition. Five thousand high school students from a hundred different schools competed there. My heart is painfully full. I had been eagerly waiting to see photos of her performing in front of hundreds of people or maybe receiving the award. Instead, I had to make do with TikTok videos she made on the bus ride home with her friends.
On her first day back to school, I went to a fancy pastry shop at 6 am and bought a box of assorted pastries worth one week of grocery money. I asked her to bring it to school to celebrate with her jazz group with the message: “Congrats on your winning and great performance. Thank you Mr. B for his patience.”
By sending that box of pastries, I positioned myself into the victory. The proudest moment of my life but it is not my winning. It is not mine to claim. This very moment that I will always remember with fondness has become a pattern in my life. A good life but nothing to claim as mine only. For fifteen years, I have been building a life alongside my husband. A good life. A life that is more than just okay. A house where the children have their own room to decorate as they please; pig pen aesthetic. A car that works perfectly well with a little help from duct tape over a leak in the boot. A daughter and a son who are sizzling good at maths and not many sins (according to my son’s writing in his homework book). We have a small business and jobs that sustain us. We are all healthy and we quite like each other. This is our achievement. A blessing for the two of us.
I have a full life. And yet…
Many years ago, I used to write. Then life became loud. Another child, Mount Washmore, more bills rolling in. So, I stopped. Then I discovered Paul Salopek.
But first, a woman in boots.
The hospital where I work appointed a new CEO. A fifty-year-old woman who moved through the corridors with an air of conviction. Boss babe. I watched her pass by in her boots, maxi skirt and curly hair tied up in a way that was messy but not unruly. The very opposite of me, who aims for neat and arrives at vagrant. And I fell into a daydream. What must it be like to be a career woman? Not a working woman because I also work. But a woman on a career path heading upward. “How gorgeous they are,” I thought with genuine admiration.
“Meg, can you come in Monday? We need someone,” asked the staff coordinator. I only work part-time.
“No way, I’m allergic to working too much,” I replied, still busy fantasizing about becoming a CEO.
But supposedly, if there is a life in another dimension and I could choose to do something entirely different from what I do now, what would I choose? Surprisingly (or perhaps not, given my disdain for work), I would not choose to become a CEO nor even a billionaire. In a parallel universe, I would want to spend a day as Paul Salopek.
A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner (the highest honour in journalism) who, since 2013, has been walking across corners of civilisation. Thirty-eight thousand kilometres on foot. While the world is obsessed with speed; news must be published five minutes after it happens. The journey from Asia to Europe can be done in 13 hours only by plane, Paul Salopek swims against the current. He introduced slow journalism. The journey is walked and success is not measured by distance covered. Travel is not a race but an opportunity to witness civilisation scattered beyond the borders of nations.
Paul earned his Pulitzers for his reporting on the Human Genome Diversity Project with Stanford University, and for his articles on political conflict and epidemic disease in the Congo, Africa. He is a journalist with formidable credentials. He knows his shit. National Geographic fellow, contributor to the Chicago Tribune, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and much more. Paul loves his art and he is tremendously good at it. But the one quality that makes me return to his essay over and over is that he takes life seriously yet with breeziness and dry wit.
He finds a story in everything and everyone he meets. From Kirkatir the Mule and a Saudi Prince who went to space. From the scorching desert of the Afar Region to a remote corner of rural Japan, both equally still and desolate, in an ambitious OUT OF EDEN project with National Geographic.
Mule-o-logy.
The first essay I read. Years later, it still warms my heart.
First thing first: A mule is not a donkey. A mule is a crossbreed between a donkey and a horse. There are jack mules (male) and jenny or molly mules (female). There are blue mules, cotton mules, sugar mules, and mining mules. George Washington was a mule breeder. But all mules are immune to politics. There is no idealistic mule.
Being hybrids, mules are biologically sterile, which helps explain their disposition: angry at the world.
Mules do not tolerate names. True, one can call a mule anything one wishes. Our white jenny, for example, has been baptized differently by each of my walking partners across Turkey. Deniz Kilic called her Barbara for reasons only he can explain. Mustafa Filiz dubbed her Sunshine. Murat Yazar calls her Sweetie. My preference is Kirkatir, a Turkish name meaning “grey mule”. The truth is that, like all mules, she answers to no label meted out by mere humans. Kirkatir does not come when called, or when whistled to. She comes when she feels like it. This is not very often.
Me: “Now I can relate, let me call my teen daughter Kirkatir.”
Mules eat everything. On a cross-country foot journey, this tolerant belly is a useful quality. Horses are much too finicky. That said, the mulish appetite does have its disadvantages. In Jordan, one of the animals, Selwa, ate my Bedouin guide Hamoudi’s walking stick. Walking sticks are very hard to come by in empty deserts. Hamoudi cursed Selwa. Days later, after much intense searching, he at last found another stick. Selwa ate that one, too.
Me: “Ohhhh, the resemblance is becoming deeply unsettling. Grumpy, stealing food, and refusing to answer when called.”
If a miracle were to occur; the children were suddenly grown and no longer needed me, the mortgage fully paid off, the retirement fund sufficient to sustain life until the age of one hundred and fifty like a blessed sea turtle, and Paul were to suddenly send a WhatsApp message inviting me to continue his journey with him (if he called, I wouldn’t pick up. I draw the line at answering a random phone call), would I immediately pack my bags, kiss my husband goodbye, and fly to Tierra del Fuego or wherever in the world Paul happened to be?
My heart would race. My mind would scream yes please! But my guardian angel would sit me down and present me fifty reasons why it simply wasn’t possible.
Reason ONE: Decades of glamorous suburban life have resulted in a soft and frail body. Last year, I walked through an airport jetway after a flight. Limping, I looked at my husband and solemnly said, “I don’t mean to be precious about this, but from now on, we cannot fly budget economy for anything over five hours. My back feels like it’s been kicked by an elephant and my bottom has gone numb with gangrene.”
A week in the Caucasus Mountains, at the first Anatolian village I reached, I would send a WhatsApp message to the National Geographic’s editor.
“Hi fam ❤️, about this project…. I don’t know, but should we pivot to OUT OF ANATOLIAN BEDROOM project instead? Also, do you happen to have in-house masseuse I can reach?”
Reason TWO: My creepy crawly phobia. Never mind leeches or the giant Amazonian centipedes, one afternoon I was cycling with my husband and young son. Passing through a meadow, my bike wheels cut through tall wildflowers. I watched as a clump of something was flung into the air, spun for a moment, and landed on my right calf. A cold sensation crept up from my leg into the depths of my soul and, I let out a shriek like Mak Lampir, the Indonesian folklore witch, hit with a string of garlic.
For three seconds the earth stood still. The very unfortunate caterpillar that had landed on my leg curled up and froze. No doubt questioning the turn of fate. One second it was peacefully munching the tender tip of dandelion, perhaps imagining a beautiful future as a butterfly, and the next it had been launched onto the calf of an overdramatic middle-aged woman. My husband scrambled off his bike and charged toward me. Gasping, I tried to point at my right calf. He looked at me for a moment, clearly questioning my sanity. With one light flick, he sent the caterpillar back to the ground. He then placed his shoe on top of the poor creature and ground it into a smear of greenish slime.
“How manly,” I thought, staring up with adoration like my teen daughter watching a BTS member.
One second later, outraged, I snapped. “Why did you have to squash it? You could have just left it alone!”
“You’re welcome,” said my husband, calmly walking back to his bike and our son.
Reason THREE, and the most critical of all: My navigational capacity. Nil. Non-existent. If our garage were not located directly next to the house, I would end up in the next suburb on my way to the car. A high school friend once tried to help me overcome this. “Imagine you are in a helicopter looking down at the road below you. The road becomes clear from above, doesn’t it?”
I focused intensely on the image, like a magician trying to bend a spoon. “Nope, can’t do it,” I shook my head. “If I’m the one in the helicopter, suddenly the sky is overcast. You still can’t see the road below.”
If you have ever been inside Jakarta’s Soekarno- Hatta Airport, you know what I’m talking about. The toilets inside the gate are positioned in the middle, connected to two corridors on either side. “Just a moment, I need a toilet,” I said to my husband. “You keep going, our gate is just straight ahead, right?”
My husband nodded. I walked quickly, already desperate. After five minutes, I emerged victorious. I walked straight to the end and was completely lost. No husband, no gate. With trembling hands, shame and panic colliding in my chest, I called him. “I don’t know where I am…”
“Just stay where you are. I’m coming to get you. What can you see around you?” he answered.
When I saw him appear, I immediately launched at him, “I don’t understand, how could I not find our gate? It was just straight ahead!”
“It’s confusing I know,” he said, giving me a quick hug. “You just turned left instead of right. Anyone could do the same.”
“Are you annoyed that you had to come find me?”
“No. I should have known. I should have just waited for you at the toilet.”
A fragile body, the absence of mental fortitude and no sense of direction. There are many more (absent) qualities that should give me pause about the dream of becoming Paul Salopek. But I will stop here, otherwise the reader will start wondering, what exactly is the point of my existence.
Ok. I can keep my eyes on the star but my feet on the ground. I may never meet Kirkatir, but I can tell stories about Jojo the dog who was rotting before he even died. I may never have a Bedouin guide, but I once had a guide who convinced me I was capable of riding a massive ATV through the rice paddy terraces of Ubud, Bali. It was the biggest scam of my life. Paying a substantial amount of money for one solid hour of terror at the prospect of tipping into a rice field. Or the fucking river. Disclaimer: my husband considers that one hour among the greatest experiences of his life. The problem, as always, was me.