by Stafford, Ed
Now a graduate and terrified by the prospect of an office and a desk, I joined the British Army. This might sound an odd choice from someone who had had such an issue with boarding school, but I felt that I was capable of putting up with the regulations in return for a life that was physical and outdoors – a life that played to my strengths. I was always adamant that the military would not change me; I wanted to learn from it but I didn’t want to become like so many of the pompous old idiots who had made it past the rank of major. The fear that people sometimes describe when they enter military barracks for the first time never really left me, and although I had some great individual moments in the army, mostly involving nights out in Tamworth, I never quite felt that I fitted in.
In 2002, after four relatively successful years, I’d made the rank of captain but was pleased that my contract was up for renewal and had decided I did not want to extend it. I said as much to my Commanding Officer at the end of a Northern Ireland tour to Crossmaglen, South Armagh. He smiled, recognised my decision was probably for the best (and no great loss to the battalion, I am sure), and so I went looking for civilian work.
After weeks of trying to network in the London financial sector I stumbled across an advert seeking expedition leaders to run conservation projects in Central America. This offered a three-month contract that I accepted; it allowed me to bide my time until the economy recovered and I stood a better chance of becoming a stockbroker. The experience changed my life more than any other: I fell in love with the adventure, the people and the lifestyle. This was outdoor living as a career without the regulations and inherent seriousness of the military. What’s more, the whole thing had a purpose that I believed in – my days as a Scout meant that I had a deep affinity with nature and a real desire to conserve the rainforest. The combination of the two made me happier than I’d ever been and dreams of a Porsche 911 and fancy wine bars full of Essex girls slipped away.
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Five years later, having led expeditions from that point onwards, I was now Country Director of Trekforce back in Belize. I started to plan how Luke and I were going to get this personal Amazon expedition off the ground. We made a list of the different areas that we had to work in. The checklist below gives an idea of all the things that had to come together if this was to work.
1. Research. We need to do enough to know that our trip is, in theory at least, physically possible.
2. Mission. What is the expedition’s aim? Is this a purely selfish feat or do we have a deeper purpose to our journey?
3. Risk assessment. We need to evaluate the risks, highlight the dodgiest areas and actively work to make sure we aren’t going to die.
4. Evacuation plan. If things go wrong how will we get to medical help or safety?
5. Training. We need to be at a competence level that is appropriate for the task. Are there any areas we should focus on where our ignorance is dangerous?
6. Languages. There are more than thirty languages spoken in Peru alone. We have to be able to converse in Spanish (Peru) and Portuguese (Brazil) at the very least to understand our surroundings and be in control of situations.
7. Accounts. We need to estimate the total cost of the expedition and account for all spending.
8. Fundraising. We need money to live while planning and organising in the UK and we need money for conducting the expedition itself. We need to try to get as many of the individual expenditures as possible sponsored (given to us for free or at a reduced cost) so that the overall monetary cost is reduced to the minimum.
9. Insurance. We need to find a package that is appropriate in the middle of the Amazon that covers our kit breaking or being stolen or lost as well as medical evacuation and treatment costs.
10. Communications. How will we communicate with the outside world? What will work under the jungle canopy? What if it breaks?
11. Website. This will be our shop window to sponsors, charities, the public, and everyone. It’s also the way most people will experience the expedition.
12. Charities. Who do we want to help? How will we raise money? How do we work with these charities?
13. Permits and visas. Where do I start getting permits to allow us to visit indigenous tribes in Brazil who are autonomous and yet have a governmental department overseeing their welfare? How do I legally stay in the two main countries longer than the normal three-month tourist visa?
14. Kit. We need to ensure we are taking the best kit we can find that will survive extended exposure to the humidity and wetness of the jungle and the extreme cold of the mountains. Everything from jungle boots to warm gloves, hammocks to kerosene stoves.
15. PR. How is anyone going to know about us? If no one does, how will we achieve our aims?
16. Filming. How will we record the journey? Where do we start to ensure that somebody someday might watch what we’ve filmed? Can we speak naturally in front of a camera?
17. Book. Where does one go to try to get a book deal? Can we write?
18. Guide. Can we find one who will walk with us for $7 a day and who speaks English, Spanish and, initially, Quechua?
19. Photography. How will we get great images that can be used to tell our story when we are both rubbish photographers?
By far the most important of the above tasks was getting the expedition funded. With sponsorship everything else would fall into place. Our back-to-nature dream would become a reality only if we addressed that most boring of modern-day worries: money.
As we attempted to put together a proposal document we realised that we needed the expedition to have a purpose for which it was worth giving up our lives. We immediately saw the scope for raising awareness of the need to conserve the rainforest. We would create a website and write regular blogs that adults and kids alike could read, following our adventure in real time. We could describe the rainforest day to day, and how it was taking its toll on us. We could engage people in their schools and offices so that they would start to feel they had a connection with the jungle. Neither of us wanted to be eco-warriors; we were aware that if we branded ourselves as such we might alienate the Brazilian authorities and have difficulty getting permits. So we didn’t want a ‘Take action now!’ campaign, but what we thought we could do was educate and raise awareness. As soon as we discussed this it felt appropriate and worthwhile; we now had a cause worthy of giving up a year of our lives.
For this to be a Guinness World Record we had to be scrupulously strict. We would walk 100 per cent of the journey and never use a motor, a sail or even the flow of the river to propel us. Clearly we would have to cross bodies of water, and for that we would be in boats, but we knew from the outset that every metre of each crossing should be paddled by hand to make the journey truly human-powered.
We also saw the scope for raising money directly for charities. We wanted a rainforest conservation charity as it made sense, as an umbrella charity that was in line with the main mission of the expedition: Rainforest Concern fitted the bill. My dad had died of cancer a few years earlier and my sister had (and still has) ME, so Cancer Research UK and the ME Association were two more charities that I wanted to help as well. Finally, we wanted to select charities that would benefit the host nations, so we found two UK-based children’s charities, Project Peru and Action for Brazil’s Children, which would mean we could give something back to the countries we passed through without upsetting governments by backing strongly anti-deforestation organisations.
I don’t ever want to pretend that the charities and rainforest awareness were the reasons why we chose to walk the Amazon. These were things that we believed in, that were worthy, but the initial drive was far more selfish: the adventure, the challenge and the recognition were at the core of our motivation when we set out. The nice thing was that the adventure was essential for the other parts to work. A nice safe walk that had been done before wouldn’t have attracted any media attention and therefore wouldn’t have had the same potential for doing good. Equally, we also saw that carrying o
ut the journey for purely selfish reasons was empty and pointless. The selfish and non-selfish goals weren’t just compatible; they ended up being essential to each other.
Carried away by our excitement, we thought that this might make a good documentary so I got in touch with the only person I knew in television, Craig Langman. Craig is a softly spoken bloke who often takes a back seat among more forceful characters. What he does say, however, is all the more worth listening to as a result. ‘Of course you are completely crazy,’ Craig said, ‘I love it. It will make great TV.’ He agreed to help us find a production company which could partner with us in the making of a documentary.
Permits and visas were the next thing I looked into and at the time both Peru and Brazil normally gave out only three-month tourist visas. I wrote to Mike Horn, the South African adventurer who had descended the Amazon on a hydrospeed and later in a dugout canoe, to find out what he’d done. His wife kindly wrote back:
Dear Ed,
Thanks for your mail. We have found it best not to speak too much about your expeditions to the consulates and embassies. Get all your visas as is necessary through the usual methods and take the necessary safety precautions ie global tracking device, satellite phone etc. The authorities do not know how to handle anything out of the norm! All the very best for your adventure!
Best regards,
Cathy
Such wise words from Cathy and, looking back on it, I wish I’d taken her advice to the letter. But at the time I was adamant that we needed to be above board because, unlike Mike, Cathy’s husband, we already had commitments to charities and I felt that, to be safe and insured, we had to be 100 per cent onside with the law in each country.
I contacted the embassies and consulates and started a long and tortuous journey to try to get us extended cultural visas that would cover nine months in Peru and a further nine in Brazil. This would allow buffer time if our journey took more than six months in each country, which I was already beginning to think it might.
Convincing companies that you are worth giving kit to without paying for it isn’t easy. We were two balding nobodies who were planning an expedition far bigger than either of us had ever attempted before. The chance that the company would see any return on this ‘sponsorship’ deal was slim and so we wrote endless emails to very little effect.
I thought one piece of kit that I’d seen used in Patagonia would make a perfect transition to the jungle. Inflatable pack rafts are one-man boats designed to be light enough to carry in your backpack. We knew there would be hundreds of tributaries to cross and so we had to have a workable strategy. Alpacka rafts are made in Canada and so I emailed them asking if they could help. Their response was kind: they had some superficially damaged rafts that they could let us have for US$300 each. This saved us $475 per raft, which I thought was a great deal, and it was the first positive response we’d received. I bought three on my credit card – one for Luke, one for me and one for a theoretical local guide. Hennessy Hammocks then agreed to give us two free hammock systems and Altberg gave us a couple of pairs of handmade jungle boots. Each one of these small sponsorship deals gave us great satisfaction; we were inching closer to making the trip happen.
Despite the success and the accumulation of a bit of kit, however, we were now a couple of grand in the red. We really needed a financial sponsor.
Still planning from Belize at this stage, I received a cautious email from Rainforest Concern:
Firstly, we want to make sure that we are not encouraging you to do something which is excessively risky to your personal wellbeing. You have backgrounds in expeditions, but we would like to meet you to discuss this further. You have already listed the kind of dangers we would have envisaged, but equally I am sure you can expect progress to be painfully slow on occasion.
Secondly, there is the impact of your hunting to eat. Fishing is one method you might be planning and we would probably be comfortable with that. However, the hunting of mammals and birds is not something we would want to encourage for unessential endeavour. This is something we will need to discuss.
The third question is your potential contact with indigenous people as this is not always to their end benefit.
All these points were very sensible and the expedition began to take shape as we drew up a no-hunting policy and we started to formulate a plan as to how we would carry food and resupply at settlements along the way. Both Luke and I glossed over the question of indigenous people as we had very little experience in dealing with them and could only come up with the rather feeble ‘We are nice people and we will treat everybody with respect’. How naive we were.
Our deployment date from the very beginning had been 1 January 2008. It would give us enough time to prepare, we could spend Christmas with our families, and on paper it seemed like a good solid date. We contacted a Peruvian mountaineering company and they firmly advised us to avoid walking in the Andes between December and March: it would be winter, snow would be heavy and the swollen rivers and gorges might be impassable.
Bugger.
Neither one of us was very experienced above the snowline and so the idea of ‘crossing the Andes’ was formidable enough without our electing to do it in winter. So we put back the start date to 1 April 2008 to ensure that our time at over 5,000 metres was as comfortable as we could make it. At the back of my mind I already had suspicions that the expedition could take more than a year, so the chances were that we were going to have to endure at least one Amazonian flood season anyway.
It was now May 2007 and Luke and I were becoming good friends, having been very amicable colleagues before, with a strong collective purpose of getting this expedition off the ground.
Despite all our work trying to ensure that we had kit, a purpose and permits, the fact still remained that no one in the world of expeditions we had spoken to could be convinced that it was in fact possible to walk the entire length of the river. The main reason for this was that the Amazon is characterised by a very shallow basin that is prone to enormous flooding. The river regularly bursts its banks and water enters the forest up to 70 kilometres from the main channel. This means that the forest adjacent to the river is flooded above head height for large parts of the year. Not great for walking.
In my simple mind I knew this and thought that we could just handrail the river at a distance that was safe enough away from the main channel. The trouble was, there was no way of knowing the extent of the flooded forest in each area so I scoured the Internet for more information. I eventually stumbled on a very low-resolution image that seemed to show the flooded forest as a different colour from terra firma or solid ground. The image was credited to Bruce Chapman at NASA and so I emailed Bruce to see if he would share his data. Two days later a CD-ROM came through the post at no charge with fantastic images of the entire Amazon basin at high and low water. NASA’s project enabled me to effectively see through the canopy from above and get an overview of the extent of the flooded area at peak flood season.
This was a big breakthrough. With this data I would be able to annotate the maps when they arrived and we could plan our route to avoid the worst of the flooded areas. OK, the images were from 1995 but the topography wouldn’t have changed too much since then – just a few river-shape changes. We had a workable plan.
We still had the flooded forest adjacent to each of the tributaries that we needed to cross to contend with – that was unavoidable – but now we could use NASA’s imagery to cross rivers at points where the floodwaters were at their narrowest. In such circumstances, we would just have to inflate the pack rafts and advance through the forest in them, with machetes in hand, if the water was too deep for us to walk through. The thought of cutting through undergrowth from our inflatable rafts both scared and excited us. We envisaged nights spent in hammocks above the water and even designed ideas for fire trays in which we could light fires in the crooks of trees above the murky water.
People go to the jungle all the time; in fact, several mi
llion people live in the Amazon Basin. The Amazon River is well populated and therefore good for resupplying food and broken gear. There is substantial traffic on the river and so if we had an emergency it would afford our natural exit strategy. These were all positives but our problem was that, once we pushed away from the main river channel to avoid the flooding, all the previously manageable dangers would now be amplified. If we went where there are no people then we had to fend for ourselves. In places, self-evacuation would be long and hard and on conventional risk assessment came out as simply ‘unacceptable’. With no helicopters in many areas and no rescue teams, we just had to make the decision that if we wanted to do this journey we had to accept the risks. Thus, an injury or illness that needed urgent medical care, such as appendicitis, snakebite or a serious head wound, would probably be fatal.
Luke had his first success with kit sponsorship when, at the end of May, he got Macpac to come on board and sponsor us for tents and backpacks. This meant a lot to Luke as he’d not been able to designate as much time as I had to the expedition planning due to his work commitments to Outward Bound in the Lake District.
In order to raise money to fund the trip we felt there was a need to increase the expedition’s publicity, too. Sponsors would be more impressed if they saw that we were getting at least some coverage in the press. The trouble was that we had no pictures at all of Luke and me together in the jungle. So we piled into a car with my brother-in-law-to-be, Jeremy, and headed to the Eden Centre’s humid tropics biome in Cornwall for some ‘authentic’ jungle shots.
For several hours Luke and I felt very conspicuous standing on the wrong side of the rope amidst the tropical ferns and palms as Jeremy snapped away and every now and then reminded us to smile. Some old ladies with blue rinses decided that, as we were being photographed, we must be famous and we were asked to sign some autographs.