The Big Shlep

Omar Nok's nearly 30,000-mile ground-level journey from Egypt to Japan.

When we first meet Omar Nok in his online video series “From Egypt to Japan without Flying,” he is bidding farewell to his family in Cairo and boarding a cargo ship bound for Saudi Arabia.

Omar Nok started his now-wildly popular series on the cusp of his 30th birthday. The ardent travel-lover, who typically appears onscreen wearing a backpack and a bucket hat, began his journey without any substantial credentials or platform. With no set places to stay and few contacts, Nok aspired to travel at ground-level from Cairo all the way to Japan. Using both YouTube and Instagram, Nok began documenting his journey. Instagram was definitely Nok’s forte, and his popularity on the platform skyrocketed. He amassed almost 1,000,000 Instagram followers by the time he finally reached Japan, after 286 days.

Viewers were able to track Nok’s journey in real time because he posted colorful, informative regular recaps of his adventures in far-flung locations. The videos are friendly, thorough, and well-executed. In them, Nok shows us the people he meets, the food he consumes, the places he sleeps, and the sights he sees.

Nok’s experiences are unusual, yet they feel accessible through his eyes. In Afghanistan, Nok interacts with the Taliban and eats the local cuisine. He spends an extended period in Iran, a country whose people and hospitality deeply charm him. While in East Asia, Nok sleeps at the Great Wall of China in an area forbidden to tourists. He hitchhikes to Mecca while in Saudi Arabia. In Central Asia he sleeps in yurts and parties with locals in the valleys beneath the mountains. The list goes on.

A map encompassing Egypt to Japan. Wikipedia.

Nok benefits immensely from his gender and his Muslim identity during his travels. Throughout his journey, strangers look upon him benignly and provide all sorts of help to him. Not everyone can execute a solo trip in this manner.

Early in the series, Nok discloses that his financial resources are limited. In Saudi Arabia, Nok’s expression is one of pure fear when he discovers that even the cheapest overnight accommodations in this expensive country will cost more than what he can afford. A visibly shaken Nok announces to the camera that he will be homeless for the evening. Nok decides to try and sleep inside a mosque. Fortunately, a benevolent stranger discovers Nok there and offers to host him overnight.

As the video series continues, Nok’s confidence—in his ability to take care of himself in strange new environments, in the possibilities of life, and in the benevolence of other people—visibly grows. An evening without pre-planned accommodations transforms from a source of dread and fear into an exciting opportunity. Those first few shaky nights in Saudi Arabia were simply the prelude to an incredibly successful journey. Looking back, Nok had no reason to be afraid.

For anyone starting something new with a good idea and limited resources, Nok’s journey serves as a reminder: Don’t let those first moments scare you. Just because you can’t see the right people and opportunities immediately doesn’t mean that those things don’t exist. There were probably many Saudis who would have been thrilled to help Nok on his way—they just didn’t know about him yet!

At the start of new ventures, it is easy to feel panic and doubt. You’re watching the little money you have leave your pockets in service of a destination you can’t see yet. You can’t grasp the enormity of what you’re building—you’re too close to it. You must confront uncertainty, over and over again, until you see lasting evidence that you’ve built something real.

Nok’s journey is long and winding, and slow. Nok takes many detours; he travels “backwards” at times so that he can see more of various countries. Roads are sometimes blocked. Occasionally—for instance in Afghanistan—there are no roads at all. Nok’s journey is marked by gradual and often non-linear movement.

Nok’s videos remind viewers of the hugeness of our world, especially when we view it from the ground level. The world is just so big.

In the era of airplane transport—the most popular form of travel globally—it is easy to forget the sheer enormity of our planet. The earth looks very small through an airplane window. On the screen in front of your seat, you can watch a digital depiction of your plane as it travels across continents and oceans. The images provide a sense of control and ease.

Perhaps that is why the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 almost exactly 11 years ago was so deeply disturbing. On March 8, 2014, MH 370 vanished after the routine commercial flight containing 239 passengers took off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing. The fate of this flight is still unknown.

When the aircraft initially disappeared, news networks began a constant churn of surveillance while crews searched for the plane in the Indian Ocean. Suddenly it became clear to everyone watching just how big the ocean was. Satellite images suddenly seemed useless. The ocean wasn’t a computer-generated image that we could control. The ocean is in reality inconceivably vast and deep, and it had seemingly swallowed this plane full of people without a trace.

In a gripping investigative story about MH 370’s disappearance for The Atlantic in 2019, writer William Langewiesche summed up why this incident was so exceptional: “The idea that a sophisticated machine, with its modern instruments and redundant communications, could simply vanish seems beyond the realm of possibility. It is hard to permanently delete an email, and living off the grid is nearly unachievable even when the attempt is deliberate. A Boeing 777 is meant to be electronically accessible at all times.” The bottom line? “In this age, commercial airplanes don’t just vanish.”

What we know about MH’s flight path, compared to its intended route in the bottom-right corner. Wikipedia.

MH 370 should have traveled northward to China from its starting point in Malaysia, but at some point early into the flight the aircraft dropped off air traffic control radar. It made an abrupt left turn and began traveling southwest. Much of the evidence suggests that MH 370 continued over the Indian Ocean, where it eventually crashed onto the water’s surface. Langewiesche speculates: “The airplane must have fractured instantly into a million pieces.”

The Indian Ocean spans over 27,000,000 square miles. Its average depth is almost 4,000 meters. Oceans comprise over 70% of Earth’s surface, yet we have extensively mapped less than one-quarter of the ocean floor. We do not fully know what is going on down there. We have less control over this planet than we think.

For a long time after MH 370’s disappearance, no evidence of wreckage was found. As Langewiesche explains, searchers weren’t looking in the right places. Finally in 2015, the first piece of the aircraft (six feet of airfoil) was identified on the shores of the French island Réunion. In case you don’t know the location of Réunion—I certainly didn’t—it sits off the east coast of Madagascar, which itself is located off the east coast of Mozambique in Africa. Like I said: The world is just so big.

The beaches of Réunion. Photo: Aldo Pavan/Getty Images.

According to Langewiesche’s reporting, Madagascar has produced more pieces of the shattered MH 370 aircraft. He explains that debris likely traveled westward after originating at a still-undetermined crash point further east in the Indian Ocean.

MH 370’s disappearance has attracted its fair share of conspiracy theories. Some people claim that it landed intact in the jungle. A British blogger and tarot reader who “was vagabonding around southern Asia with her husband and dogs in an oceangoing sailboat” came forward claiming that she had witnessed MH 370’s downward descent firsthand. Langewiesche reports, “On the night MH 370 disappeared they were in the Andaman Sea, and she spotted what looked like a cruise missile coming at her. The missile morphed into a low-flying airplane with a well-lit cockpit, bathed in a strange orange glow and trailing smoke. As it flew by she concluded that it was on a suicide mission against a Chinese naval fleet farther out to sea.” Wow.

Wherever the plane ultimately crashed, Langewiesche believes the flight’s Malaysian pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah—who was depressed and likely suicidal—was to blame. Essentially an internal hijacker on a murder-suicide spree, Zaharie would have executed his plan to kill himself and the plane’s occupants by locking out his subordinate pilot from the cockpit. He would have then killed everyone else on the plane quickly and easily by depressurizing the aircraft and thus depriving its occupants of oxygen (Zaharie would have used his own oxygen supply during this time). Langewiesche paints a shocking picture: “The scene would have been dimly lit by the emergency lights, with the dead belted into their seats, their faces nestled in the worthless oxygen masks dangling on tubes from the ceiling.”

Then, says Langewiesche, Zaharie would have continued flying over the Indian Ocean until the fuel supply ran out and the plane crashed. Langewiesche muses: “It is easy to imagine Zaharie toward the end, strapped into an ultra-comfortable seat in the cockpit, inhabiting his cocoon in the glow of familiar instruments, knowing that there could be no return from what he had done, and feeling no need to hurry.” Zaharie had practiced this flight path using his at-home simulator before the flight, so this hypothesis seems quite likely.

A new search for MH 370 just started. (You can follow it here.) Langewiesche had noted in his reporting that the Malaysian government lost credibility due to its mishandling of the flight’s disappearance and its aftermath. I wonder if this new search is an attempt to save face in some way, or reestablish domestic goodwill for families who are still seeking closure after the crash.

Daily life, I increasingly realize, involves a tremendous amount of shlepping. Even in New York City—a far cry from Tajikistan, or Afghanistan, or Malaysia—I hear people say, “The blocks are really long here.” Relatively short walks can become drearily dull and routine. There are some city blocks here that I intentionally avoid because of how bored they make me feel. I am constantly looking to distract myself—with music or thoughts or conversation—from long walks.

For the last several years, one of those routine walks has been from the Upper East Side where I live across Central Park via the Great Lawn to the Upper West Side, to the home of two of my dear friends. It’s a pretty walk and also a long one. I’m not always fully mentally present during those walks. I am usually just trying to reach my destination.

These friends of mine recently moved. Even though they told me many times that they would eventually leave the neighborhood, I was shocked by the news. During my last walk home from their apartment, I realized just how much time had passed. So much had happened, and those experiences would never be coming back.

We never know how much time we have. Omar Nok’s journey probably became so popular because this man understands that our time here is limited and uncertain. We should make the most of the time we’ve been given, and squeeze as much juice out of life as possible.

Some journeys take a lot longer than we thought. Others are abruptly and tragically cut short. For even the most mundane trips, I think the best we can do is to be as fully immersed as possible. After all, no journey is permanent.

I advise clients across industries on a broad array of writing and career projects. If I feel right for you, visit my business website to learn more and to book a session.

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• She’s not a client, but she is my sister. Claire Grant (New York, NY) and her friend Molly Young have just launched a podcast. The topic? Romance novels. It’s already made me laugh out loud on the subway. Listen here.