Walking the Amazon: 860 Days. The Impossible Task. The Incredible Journey

by Stafford, Ed

  I’m tired mentally and lacking motivation. Physically I’m fine but Cho’s Spanish seems to be different and I don’t understand much he says. He is reasonable and looks fit and intelligent. But he doesn’t speak as much Ashaninka as he made out and that’s a problem. Tomorrow I need to find another guide that does.

  Cho is God squad too and I just had a lecture on why not to put images of Christ up in a church. God gets jealous just like I would if my girlfriend slept with Cho apparently.

  I’m really tired of melodramatic people telling us horror stories. It’s sapping of energy. Yet again everyone says we are crazy to walk where we are going tomorrow. The Machiguenga ‘no entienden’ (don’t understand) apparently. I just want to walk for fuck’s sake.

  Cho was about five foot eight inches tall, of medium build but with very little fat on him. As we started walking, him in his plimsolls, he began to sing Christian songs in Spanish at the top of his voice. This made me smile at first, his confidence was evident and he was doing what he liked doing – walking. He invited me to join in but I wasn’t yet in a place where I could throw off my anxiety and just sing. Part of me enjoyed Cho’s overt confidence; another part soon became irritated by his ging-gang-goolie approach to motivation. ‘How is your motivation?’ Cho would ask me repeatedly. Such questions manage to make me pissed off even if I’d been fine before. I had just done four months’ walking without being jollied along by anyone and I didn’t like the upset to my world.

  The new logging road led up into the mountains and Cho and I walked hard and fast. I saw my first king vulture with its unmistakable purple, red and yellow head. We disturbed it while it was eating a carcass in the road and as it flew off it reminded me of the enormous condors we had seen months earlier over the Colca Canyon. The logging road had just been completed – perhaps a week beforehand – and no vehicles had passed down it since the bulldozers had finished work. It meant that our escape route from the River Ene had been built while I’d been walking the river. Late in the afternoon we arrived at a small settlement of Indians from the Machiguenga tribe.

  To me Machiguengas look, dress and sound the same as Ashaninkas, but the language is apparently different. We asked if we could stay with a family but I could feel they were uncomfortable with our presence. Cho later told me it was because they thought we were drugs runners who were carrying base cocaine in our packs. They gave us a small plate of yucca for supper and asked for fifty soles in return which I grudgingly gave them. The whole thing felt wrong and we were glad to leave the next morning.

  Cho had been worried about one particular community with whom he thought we would have problems, so he led me up an invisible path into the mountains and avoided the community. His knowledge was invaluable. He told me that the community were ‘bad’ and they would not have allowed us to pass. He had worked here before and he knew the families that lived in the hills and we could pass here with no problems.

  On 14 August 2008, Cho and I walked into a town called Masurunkiari. The town was remarkable because it was modern, with wooden and concrete buildings of two or three storeys, a town hall, electricity and a big school and yet it was 100 per cent indigenous Indian. These Machiguengas had sold their wood and they now had money. They were very open to outsiders and clearly dealt with colonial Peruvians on a regular basis so a gringo wasn’t too hard for them to handle.

  In two days Cho and I made 80 kilometres. He was a walking machine – his fallibility was revealed only by a big blister caused by his flimsy plimsolls.

  After five days of walking with Cho we’d arrived back in Puerto Ocopa, but on foot for the first time. We’d averaged an astonishing 35 kilometres a day down spanking new logging roads. Sadly the logging was horrendous. Cho told me that 10 per cent of what we saw was legal logging and that the rest was completely illegal. In my naivety I asked why the authorities didn’t do something to stop the illegal removal of huge trees from the forest here. The obvious answer was that the authorities are involved and benefit nicely from the situation. ‘Perú avanza!’

  At a local level the landowners were presented with an amazing deal. If they had hardwood of value then the logging companies would pay them for the wood and build a road to come in and extract it. Landowners were left with a cleared farm now connected to the Peruvian road network and they had money to invest in livestock. With no environmental education, and a government that encouraged resource exploitation as the future of Peru, who wouldn’t sell out?

  I had now walked for four and a half months from the Pacific, up and over the Andes and had descended the entire Apurímac and the Ene rivers. The infamous Red Zone was now behind me. From Puerto Ocopa, which was as far as Cho had committed to, I still had to descend the Tambo and the Ucayali rivers before the river became the Amazon by name. I didn’t expect to complete the Peruvian part of the expedition for another six or seven months.

  We sat in a bar below the wooden hostel where I had left my spare kit and had a beer. Both of us were very pleased with our pace and progress over the past few days. Another storm had washed away the humidity and the air felt fresh and new.

  If a white man received odd looks round here, one with a black guide got double the number. Peruvians, like many South Americans, were pretty direct and called Cho ‘negro’ and me ‘gringo’. It meant that learning our names was very easy for them. As he quite clearly had some African ancestry, Cho was very used to being identified as looking different from everyone else. We had something in common.

  The hotel restaurant pumped out the typical Peruvian pop videos. Anyone who doesn’t know what Peruvian music is like is very lucky indeed. Never enter Peru without earplugs. For sheer lack of talent and low-quality music, no other country compares. Oswaldo had tried to teach me about the distinct and different types of music from each region but I didn’t bother to learn because to me they all fall under the same category. Utter shite. In the mountains a fat woman in a vast, multicoloured dress will hop from one foot to another as if she’s been locked out of the public toilets and she squeals into a cheap microphone as if she’s giving birth. In the jungle fifteen ugly men will hoarsely shout slightly different lyrics over exactly the same cheap synthesised beat over and over again. Wherever there is a generator in rural Peru there will be a big box TV, a cheap DVD player and the worst music in the world being pumped out at full volume.

  Snapping back into the present from my lapse into despair, I mentioned to Cho that I needed to find a guide for the next section and he paused thoughtfully. ‘I will walk with you to Atalaya,’ he said. ‘It is not far and I know parts of the River Tambo, too.’

  Cho and I completed the stretch along the River Tambo together in six days flat. He brought with him the mindset of a hardworking logger. We had a job to do and he wasn’t messing around. It could easily have lasted a fortnight if his attitude had been different.

  There is a road from Puerto Ocopa to Atalaya that goes straight over the mountains but Cho and I were more than ready to return to walking by the river. We’d only pushed away out of necessity and we wanted to walk as close to the Tambo as possible, through the Ashaninka communities that dotted the river.

  The upstream entrance to the Tambo is magnificent. Large forested mountains on either side make a formidable gateway into the new river. The river itself is channelled into an ‘S’ shape by the mountains, being forced east, before it is then spat out north again. The Tambo marked the end of the mountains.

  It’s difficult to describe the way Cho and I viewed each other but, despite his confidence and intelligence, I think I was sure I would never see eye to eye with him as we had such different beliefs. My thought was that he was good for the moment until I could find a guide who spoke fluent Ashaninka. There was something else that made me uneasy about Cho but I couldn’t work out what it was.

  That said, my mood was better than it had been for weeks. The latter stages of the Apurímac and the whole of the Ene had worn me down. I hadn’t felt fit, healthy or vibrant; I
’d felt tired, old and barely functional. But I was more relaxed now and the towering forested mountains made me notice the beauty of the landscape we were walking through once again.

  On 21 August we made camp on a beach after rounding the prominent kink in the river. Cho was uneasy and noticed a local man about 400 metres away. He decided to go and talk to him while I bathed in the river and cleaned the day’s grime from my pale, spotty skin.

  Cho came back shaken, a state I’d not seen him in before. ‘We have to leave,’ he told me. ‘If we camp here they will kill us.’ Annoyed not to be able just to crawl into my sleeping bag, I agreed to move to avoid imminent death. We walked to the house of the fisherman and received the frostiest welcome we’d had so far. Cho, usually jolly and talkative, was silent for the first time and so I took the lead. I showed our permit and explained our adventure. The three men present all had shotguns and they told me they had to accompany us to the community downriver called Cheni.

  Cheni ended up being two kilometres away and we all stumbled through the dark together with shotguns trained on Cho and me from behind. I wasn’t put out by the aggressive men and made a point of asking their names and being super-friendly. The biggest and meanest man clearly disliked feeling obliged to tell me that his name was Victor. For some reason I was having fun.

  Victor told Cho and me to wait just outside the village as he went to talk to the chief. After a short time a tall, slim man with a university-type scarf and round glasses came out to meet us blowing his nose into a handkerchief. His voice was unmistakably camp. ‘Weren’t you in the Blue Hotel last week in Satipo?’ he asked with a Charles Hawtrey (King Tonka in Carry On Up the Jungle) smile.

  ‘What?! Erm … yes, I was. Erm … looking for a guide.’ I started to laugh.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said and led us to his own house. He dismissed Victor and his heavies and explained that they were crude but it was good to show a strong defence on the outskirts of their territory.

  He told us his name was Fabian and he started to enlighten us about the fact that a Peruvian was never the same once he had travelled abroad. He was clearly educated, and had been to Spain where he had friends at one of the universities. He was now twenty-eight and the chief of Cheni. He ordered someone to cook us fried eggs and fresh fish. We were treated like guests of honour and he even put me in a room with a bed in his new concrete house. There wasn’t a mattress, but the fact that I was in a bed having showered and eaten well was amazing after the experience of being marched through the dark at gunpoint by Victor.

  If there was a future megalomaniac indigenous leader of Peru in the making, I would say Fabian was the man. He knew his importance in the village and thoroughly enjoyed it. He talked of Shakespeare and Beethoven and I found it hard to believe we were in the middle of a remote part of indigenous Peru. Fabian treated us impeccably and we gave the village medicines in return.

  Two subsequent Ashaninka settlements gave us slight problems. Poyeni had a group of women with painted faces shouting and screaming at us from a high riverbank as we climbed to the community. We were not even allowed in to explain who we were and had to scramble down again and continue along the beach – avoiding the community altogether.

  Then, in Quemarija, we met Jorge, an old friend of Cho’s, and he invited us for dinner with his wife, Nelly, and their baby daughter. The couple were lovely but worried about their baby – she had several abscesses on her head and feet. They asked me to have a look at them and I explained that although I was bringing medicines to each settlement I was certainly not a doctor. Nonetheless they were keen for my opinion as there was no medic in the community and no access to medicines either. I gave the baby’s father a quarter-dose course of Amoxicillin for his daughter, a pretty general antibiotic, but told him he must consult the medic in the next community before starting the baby on it.

  Gifts were important to the Ashaninkas. Their language has only one word that means both ‘trade partner’ and ‘friend’. Medicines, despite being potentially dangerous, were the most valuable thing that I could bring to the communities. I had tried other more ordinary items such as fishing hooks and line, lighters and torches, but medicines were appreciated much more. Most communities had a person who had basic training in uses of medicines and I normally gave the drugs directly to them.

  At about 5 p.m. we were still chatting with Jorge and Nelly when a horn was sounded and the village was summoned to a meeting. Cho and I stayed in the couple’s thatched house and started to put up our hammocks for the night. A few minutes later we were summoned to the meeting and subjected to a fiery lecture from the village chief who was wearing his official headdress of feathers, which I had not seen before in any community. He spoke passionately about the community’s right to make its own decisions and as he finished we were ordered to leave at once.

  Confused, we gathered our things together and hoped we could reach the next settlement before nightfall. I asked Cho what we had done wrong – we had donated medicines, shown our permits and we even knew some people in the community.

  ‘He was drunk,’ said Cho.

  In the communities that were ‘more civilised’ (as the colonial Peruvians said without a hint of embarrassment) the educated Ashaninka children wanted to learn Spanish and even English; they wanted to become computer literate and wear Western clothes. The more I saw, the less I thought this regrettable. The Ashaninka lifestyle seemed to me to be both unsustainable and meaningless. Unlike their hunter-gatherer ancestors, these families now lived in communities where they sat around all day drinking and growing jealous of each other. With an education they could start to become productive and proud again. Perhaps then the husbands would stop beating their wives up every Friday night.

  As we spilled out of the narrow Tambo Valley the vast, flat jungle spread out in all directions. We were leaving the tropical dryforest behind and moving into the far more biologically diverse tropical rainforest. This meant greater animal and plant diversity and the start of the Amazon Basin as we know it. Amazingly, we now only had 380 metres to descend until we arrived at the Amazon’s mouth – some 5,268 kilometres (3,274 miles) from here.

  Cho and I pored over the maps looking at the featureless expanse of green that lay between the next jungle city to our north, Pucallpa, and us. I had originally allocated a month for this leg but as we studied the vastness of flat rainforest, the mammoth meanders and scattering of oxbow lakes, plus the ominous lack of settlements (and therefore paths), we really didn’t have a clue how long it would take. Positive butterflies of exhilarated excitement returned to me for the first time in months. Cho loved the sheer adventure of it and told me he wouldn’t go home after all; he would continue walking with me to Pucallpa where he had been born.

  In Atalaya I discovered that all the spare expedition equipment that had been in Lima had been taken home by Luke. To give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he thought that I would prefer the spare medication and water purification to be taken back to the UK, but it meant that I had to start trying to procure everything from scratch in Peru. Having failed to find iodine or chlorine in Atalaya, Cho and I set out for two months’ walking to Pucallpa with no means of purifying cold water to drink. The heated exchange of emails between Luke and me at this point was our last communication.

  From Atalaya northwards all of the communities were now Asheninka with an ‘e’ rather than Ashaninka with an ‘a’. Again, to the layman these indigenous villages looked very similar but whereas Ashanikas on the Ene would sit around on reed mats on the floor drinking purple masato, the Asheninkas of the Ucayali had raised wooden floors to their houses (and sometimes wooden walls and partitions, too) and sat around drinking white masato. The difference in colour came about simply as a result of the lack of a local purple dye that was chewed on the Ene. Cushmas – the form of one-piece indigenous tunic – were rarer, too, and more and more the Asheninkas wore shorts and T-shirts with only a few elders wearing the traditional garment. Red face paint was
still common among men and women.

  On 5 September we stayed with a young couple in Villa Vista. They were half-Asheninka and half-descendants from Peruvians who had bred with colonial settlers and they fed us curried fish and a sweet banana drink called chapo, which was so much nicer than bloody masato. They kept dogs and an enormous pig that accompanied Manuel, our host for the night, and us for several miles out of the community the next morning.

  We were walking on the ‘beach’ for much of this time as we didn’t know the local paths and we thought it was less intrusive to stick to the riverbanks. The going was therefore slow. Some banks were tangled and steep, others were endless stretches of clinging grass that tripped and pulled at our legs. The mosquitoes were out in force and my calves showed more bites than white flesh.

  Two days later, in the morning, we entered a community called Santa Luz with no intention of stopping. They accepted our permit from the indigenous overseeing body OIRA without a challenge but suggested that we wait until 3 p.m. (the allotted HF radio hour) to speak to the next community, Pensilvania. They offered to speak to Pensilvania on our behalf.

  That day the village was having a minga. This was effectively a way to get everyone to work together for free and the person who was hosting the minga provided food and booze afterwards in return for the villagers’ work. Cho and I accepted an invitation to join in, and worked alongside the villagers throughout the late morning and early afternoon clearing the undergrowth for the planting of a new rice field. We then had the best feast I’d had in a long while: chicken, rice, plantain, yucca and beans.

  When three o’clock came round we went with the chief to call Pensilvania over the radio. The response came back crystal-clear. If a gringo walks into their community they will kill him. I heard this myself.

  I was sad to hear this. I had so hoped that hostility was behind us and inevitably we worried a little. Cho came up with a plan to stay the night with our friends in Santa Luz and then head down to the river in the morning and use our pack rafts to cross to a large shingle island where we could walk and avoid passing through Pensilvania.