PUBLIC MARKS with search desert

November 9th 2007 - November 13th 2008

one year on foot - 4646km through China

unlimited beard & hair growth

thelongestway.com

musical score by the kingpins ( myspace.com/theoneandonlykingpins ) and zhu fengbo

Additional info:

- I never finished my original goal of walking to Germany. Instead, I walked for a year and roughly 4500km, passed the desert of Gobi, and then decided to stop walking for now.

- All of the distance from Beijing to Ürümqi has been completed solely on foot, straight good old walking. There are instances where you can see me in the video sitting on a plane or riding a boat, but those are during breaks I had to take from walking, either to sort out bureaucracy issues or to take care of some personal things.

- I had been planning this trip for over a year before I even started, and getting as far as I got was an experience for which I am very grateful.

- Obtaining the necessary visa for a trip like this was not very easy, hence I had to go back to Beijing a few times to resolve some issues.

- The songs I used in the video are 1) Zhu Fengbo - "Olive Tree" and 2) The Kingpins - "L'aventurier" - visit the Kingpins website if you want to know more, they are very cool I think.

- This is not a strict "1 pic a day" video, because I wanted to make it a bit more alive by adding some additional movement. Sometimes during the film you would follow me turn around, or something would happen in the background. I tried to capture these moments to make the video more interesting.

- The core of this project is in fact my website "www.thelongestway.com" where I have posted my extensive travel diary, starting from day 1 (Nov 9th 2007) and describing every single day until the end one year later.

For an ambitious landscape design project, Magnus Larsson, a student at the Architectural Association in London, has proposed a 6,000km-long wall of artificially solidified sandstone architecture that would span the Sahara Desert, east to west, offering a combination of refugee housing and a "green wall" against the future spread of the desert.

In its court documents Google said: "Today's satellite-image technology means that even in today's desert, complete privacy does not exist."

Indeed, the distant future looks bright, but getting there will be an adventure. At Shell, we think the world will take one of two possible routes. The first, a scenario we call Scramble, resembles a race through a mountainous desert. Like an off-road rally, it promises excitement and fierce competition. However, the unintended consequence of "more haste" will often be "less speed" and many will crash along the way. The alternative scenario, called Blueprints, has some false starts and develops like a cautious ride on a road that is still under construction. Whether we arrive safely at our destination depends on the discipline of the drivers and the ingenuity of all those involved in the construction effort. Technical innovation provides for excitement.

L'énergie solaire frappant chaque année 1 km2 de désert est en moyenne de 2,2 térawattheures (TWh), soit 80 millions de TWh par an. Cela représente une quantité d'énergie si considérable que 1 % de la surface des déserts suffirait pour produire l'électricité nécessaire à l'ensemble de l'humanité." Dès lors, il devrait être possible, en multipliant les centrales solaires dans le désert, d'alimenter les pays riverains. Voire les pays européens.