国家地理:一次翻越世界屋脊的历史性旅行(1)

Her hair was dyed purple. She wore spandex. She was dancing alone, the young foreigner, swaying barefoot on the roof of a car parked at an utterly remote frontier in the rocky core of Asia, hard beside the Panj River that saws Tajikistan from Afghanistan -- a notorious opium smugglers' paradise at the southern edge of the Pamir mountains. The car had EU plates. But who was she? A belated pilgrim on the old hippie trail? A mystic? An addict? A tourist? An adventurer? It was impossible to know.

她的头发染成了紫色。她穿着紧身衣。她独自跳着舞，这位年轻的外国人赤脚在一辆小车的车顶上摇晃着，车子停在亚洲岩核中十分偏远的边境地区阿富汗一侧，紧靠喷赤河，与塔吉克斯坦隔河相望--帕米尔高原南部边缘一个臭名昭著的鸦片走私者的天堂。这辆车有欧盟牌照。但她是谁？是古老嬉皮士小道上迟到的朝圣者？一个神秘的人？一个瘾君子？一个旅游者？一个冒险家？谁也不知道。

I raised my sweat-pickled hat in greeting as I shuffled past, chivying a tired cargo donkey, wind-chapped, and hollow-bellied from camping more than a month among the crags of Central Asia. I am walking across the world. For five years I have been pacing off the Earth as part of a project called the Out of Eden Walk, a storytelling pilgrimage along the pathways of the first ancestors who explored the planet during the Stone Age. To walk in this way -- continuously, day after river, month after continent, over a route that eventually will span 21,000 miles -- is to inhabit a state of daily wonderment. So the wilderness dancer was not really a surprise. Nor did I startle her. She didn't see me. Lost in the techno beats punching out of her car's stereo, she never even opened her eyes.

我慢吞吞地走过去，举起我满是汗渍的帽子打招呼，赶着一头在中亚峭壁之间露宿一个多月、遭受凛冽寒风、空着肚子爬山过河的疲惫驼着货的驴。我正在徒步穿越世界。5年来，为实施“走出伊甸园”计划，我一直在一步一步地丈量着地球，那是沿着石器时代第一批探索这个星球的先祖们的路径的讲故事式朝圣。连续地日复一日、月复一月，跨河渡海，最终走完21000英里的路程，这种方式徒步旅行每天都有新奇惊叹的状况，因此这位荒野舞者真的不是一个惊奇。她没有看我，我也没有惊吓她。她迷失在汽车音响发出的高科技舞曲节奏里，根本没有睁开过眼睛。