We Drew Backpacking Routes Years Ago. They Still Work. Use Them.

This is not a hajj. It is not a pilgrimage circuit, and nobody has to believe anything to walk it.

In October 2016 I published three long-distance backpacking routes. The whole point of them was one thing: every stop is reachable from the one before. Long overland travel does not usually fail because someone runs out of will. It fails at the joins — you can afford to get to a city and then the next leg needs a flight you cannot buy, or a visa you cannot get at the border, or a crossing that quietly closed. So the routes were drawn backwards from that problem. Each leg was chosen because you can actually get there from the last place by road, rail or a short boat, inside the days the previous country gives you.

Across all three routes there are only four places where the land genuinely runs out, and the document names each one and where you pick the road back up.

The three routes

Route 1 — the Americas to the Indian subcontinent. Colombia (Medellín, Cali, Sincelejo, Cartagena) → Venezuela (Maturín) → Brazil (Manaus) → Peru (Cusco) → fly Cusco–Los Angeles–Delhi → India (Delhi, Manali, Pushkar, Palolem, Palakkad, Varanasi) → Nepal (Kathmandu) → Tibet (Lhasa, visa obtained in Kathmandu) → China (Chengdu) → Guam.

Route 2 — Western Europe, the Maghreb and the Levant. Ireland → England → Netherlands → Germany → France → Spain, which share one Schengen allowance between them → boat to Morocco → Algeria → Tunisia → boat to Sicily → Italy → Albania → Macedonia → Bulgaria → Turkey → boat to Lebanon → fly Beirut–Larnaca–Tel Aviv → Israel → Egypt.

Route 3 — Southern and Eastern Africa to Egypt. South Africa → Eswatini → back through South Africa → Zimbabwe → Mozambique → Malawi → Zambia → back through Malawi → Tanzania → Kenya → Ethiopia, where you get the Sudan visa in Addis Ababa → fly to Khartoum → Wadi Halfa → Aswan, Luxor, Cairo.

That is the whole of it. Four flights and three boats in three circuits spanning most of the inhabited world.

Every stop has a list of what the place is known for

The original carried, under each stop, the goods that region actually produces — crafts, gems, metals, textiles, spices, seeds, plants. Not a shopping list. Knowing what a place makes is how you understand why anyone goes there, what work exists, and what moves along the road you are standing on.

Writing it up again I noticed something I had not fully clocked in 2016. A lot of these stops are not merely known for a thing. They are where the thing comes from, full stop.

Eskişehir is the only commercial meerschaum deposit on earth — and the original entry for Turkey says "pipes." Tyre is where Tyrian purple came from, and the entry says "dyes." Merelani, outside Arusha, is the only place tanzanite has ever been found. Kagem in Zambia is the largest emerald mine in the world. Every shaligram in every temple came out of the Kali Gandaki above Kathmandu. Coffee arabica is a wild forest plant in Ethiopia and nowhere else. Most of the world's gum arabic comes out of Sudan.

Read as a line instead of a list, the routes keep landing on old corridors — the Tea-Horse Road out of Ya'an that the Chengdu tea bricks travelled into Tibet, the Nabataean incense road through the Negev that Mitzpe Ramon sits on, the Nile.

Why I am putting them back up

A route is worth more the more people walk it.

One person with a map has a map. Enough people moving along the same chain of stops, often enough, and it stops being a map. It becomes a corridor — known crossings, known costs, people who went last year and can tell you what changed, somewhere to sleep, goods that move because there is now a reason for them to move.

That is all the Silk Road ever was. Nobody built it. No one surveyed it or paid for it. It was a set of routes that enough people used often enough that it turned into infrastructure, and then it carried not just silk but paper, gunpowder, mathematics and four religions.

What a waypoint actually does

Here is the part that matters, and it is economic rather than romantic.

Take a house on one of these roads — somewhere ordinary, in a town nobody has a reason to stop in. Put it on Airbnb today and it earns nothing, because nothing routes through there. It is not that the house is bad or the town is bad. There is simply no flow for it to catch.

Now suppose a few hundred people a year walk a chain of stops that happens to pass through it, because the leg before it and the leg after it are both reachable. That same house is now a waypoint. It earns. And it did not become valuable because anybody invested in it or marketed it — it became valuable because a route formed past the door. The road made the asset, not the other way round.

Multiply that by every bed, every meal, every repair shop, every person who can tell you which border post is quick this month. That is what a corridor is: a line along which places that could never previously make money suddenly can, purely because of where they sit.

This is also the only way large-scale settlement has ever worked, and it is how space travel is going to work too.

Most of the planets and moons in this system will be mined and harvested for something — metals, volatiles, water, gases. That is the cargo. But cargo alone does not make a civilisation; it makes extraction sites. What turns extraction into a network is the waypoints between them. Mars does not need to be a destination to matter — it needs to be a way station, the place where you stop because the next leg is reachable from there and not from where you started. Same for the asteroid belt: not one target but a chain of them, each worth something partly for what it holds and partly for being the only reachable thing between two others.

And once that chain exists, a rock that nobody could justify going to becomes a place where someone can make a living — exactly like the house in the town nobody stopped in. The chain is what creates the value, and the chain is created by people moving along it.

I am not claiming these three routes are the Silk Road. I am saying the mechanism is not mysterious and it is not closed. It needs a usable chain of stops and enough people willing to walk it — and we may as well get good at building those here, on roads we can already stand on, before we try it between planets.

And this is where crypto actually earns its place

A corridor needs three things: a way to get between the stops, something worth moving, and a way to settle up. The first two are the routes and the goods. The third is the part nobody drew on the map, and it is the part that fails first.

Consider the walker on Route 2. They cross a dozen borders in a few months. They do not have an account in most of those countries and will not be given one. Every conversion costs them, every remittance costs them more, and in several of those towns the nearest bank that would deal with a foreigner is a day away. The house that wants to become a waypoint has the same problem from the other side: it can host someone but it cannot easily be paid by someone whose money lives somewhere else. The flow exists and the settlement does not, so the waypoint does not form.

That is a solved problem, and crypto is one of the things that solves it. Not as an investment — as plumbing between strangers who have no shared bank. That is the whole job.

And then take it off the planet, because the argument gets much harder to wave away out there.

Mars is between about three and twenty-two minutes away at the speed of light, one way. Round trip, that is up to three quarters of an hour. Every payment system we currently run on Earth assumes you can ask a central authority "is this good?" and get an answer before the transaction completes. You cannot do that across that gap. There is no card authorisation, no real-time fraud check against a server in another country, no central bank that can clear a settlement for a colony it cannot reach inside an hour. The latency does not get better with more funding. It is physics.

So trade between planets needs a ledger that can be verified locally, by whoever is holding it, without phoning home — one where the chain of custody proves itself and the two sides can settle now and reconcile with everyone else later. That is not a description of a cryptocurrency price. It is a description of what a blockchain architecturally is: consensus and verification without a trusted third party in the loop.

I will say the careful version of that, because I do not think the loose version helps anyone. It need not be Bitcoin, it need not be any coin that exists today, and the unit of account is the least interesting part. What will be needed is a ledger with the properties blockchains have — independently verifiable, forgery-evident, settles without a central authority, survives a partition between two halves of a network that physically cannot talk to each other for twenty minutes. Whatever ends up carrying trade between a Mars way station and a belt mining camp will have those properties, or it will not work.

Which is the same reason it is useful on a road in the Maghreb, just with the latency turned down from twenty minutes to one. The problem is identical in shape: two parties with no common institution need to settle, right now, without asking permission.

So: the routes are free, they were always free, and they are written up properly now, stop by stop, with the entry allowances as they stood and the goods of every place.

Read the full write-up on the wiki: Backpacking Routes.

Two honest warnings and then I am done. The visa figures are from 2016 and some are certainly wrong now — check every one against the current official source before you move. And carrying seeds, cuttings or live plants across a border is regulated everywhere and illegal in a lot of places, quite apart from anything else; ordinary garden seed is covered by agricultural quarantine law on its own. The lists say what a region produces. They are not permission to put it in your bag.

If you walk any part of one of these, come back and tell me what had changed. That is how the thing becomes a network instead of a document.

— Hathor