Steve returns home

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April 1,1983, a man decides to go for a walk.

Around the world.

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Steve Newman, 28, a freelance journalist, left his house in the town of Bethel, Ohio for a 4-year journey that saw him getting attacked twice by armed bandits, pelted with stones by students in India who thought he was English, arrested four times, beaten by a drunken construction worker, and taken captive by the Turkish military. He was also accosted by wild boars, bull ants, a poisonous snake, fleas, and ‘disgruntled bison’. 

Upon his return, 4 years later, to Bethel on April 1, 1987, city officials declared it an official holiday, and he became the first person to walk around the world solo.

In numerous interviews after his return, including the New York Times, The Travel Channel (who did an episode on him) , The Cincinnati Enquirer and People Magazine, he said “I don’t really like walking that much. I just knew if you wanted some stories, go for a walk.” In his blog he said that his ‘dream of walking around the world was born in a nine year old’s excitable mind’. It was during one of those frequent southern Ohio rainy afternoons, when my imagination was lost in the pages of a stack of old National Geographic magazines. Though the covers of that dignified periodical may have been worn and faded at the time, the beauty of the glossy photographs inside was still unmistakably very much alive. I knew then and there that someday I had to visit all those exotic lands and meet all those smiling faces.”

He wanted to discover whether the world was really as bad as people had painted it.“It was a great curiosity to see what the common people of the world were like. Walking is the best way because you are one-on-one with people.”

“We also hear so much about how dangerous the world has become and how it’s falling apart socially, morally, whatever. I had this deep urge to find out if it was really such a terrible place as everybody was saying.”

So what was his verdict after completing his trek?

He concluded: “They were totally wrong.”

‘The world is a better place than we give it credit for. There are more good people than bad, even in areas that are dangerous.”

Newman gained notoriety and was entered into the Guinness Book of Records when he completed the first known individual walk around the world, crossing five continents and 21 countries. He had walked 40 million steps and 21,000 miles, (with flights to get him from Boston to Ireland, Yugoslavia and Australia).

He accomplished this feat in four years, which he now says, on reflection, can probably be done in two. What slowed Newman down was his objective – not just to accomplish a remarkable test of endurance, but as an explorer abroad, meeting with the people of the world.”I wanted it not only to be a look at the world, but a test of the world,” Newman said. “I wanted to see how the world treated a stranger. I set out with the pledge to never ask for more than a drink of water, and if someone didn’t offer me food, I would go hungry that day. If no one offered me a place to sleep, I would sleep on the ground.”

“I met millions of people and stayed with 400 families, sometimes with one family for as long as a month,” Newman said. “I had enough adventures to fill 100 books. The world is a place of beauty and of ugliness and more horror than you can imagine. But mostly the world is filled with love.”

Newman later published a book about his travels entitled ‘WorldWalk’.

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‘we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.’

-anais nin

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source/photo credits: New York Times, Bethel Historical Museum, Travel Channel, Mental Floss, Cincinnati Enquirer, People