by Stafford, Ed
Everything became harder. Putting my wet clothes on every morning became a mental obstacle, walking became laboured and I found enjoyment in almost nothing. I didn’t see the jungle we walked through; I didn’t taste the bland fish soups or the tough paca (rodents) that we ate. I was, I am sure, depressed and yet deep inside me I had a voice asking me, ‘Are you physically moving forward?’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Then everything is OK.’
I had completely subordinated pleasure for my long-term goal. I existed in a manner that was less than human. I went to bed early and didn’t chat to the guides. I withdrew from putting up blogs until I had unusually confident days, scared of the outside world seeing what I was becoming. When I did blog I tried to hide my true melancholy. I carried myself like a nervous teenager and I looked at the floor. I couldn’t call my family or friends because I knew I had lost perspective on the expedition and I couldn’t face their normality or their humour. I was thoroughly miserable and many nights I let myself cry silently in my hammock, tears streaming down my face in self-pity.
From the base level of unhappiness I did get glimpses of a world that had humour and goodness in it. Cho wanted to learn some basic English and could now say ‘Let’s go wash!’ to me at the end of a long day. It was a small thing but it made me smile. The Asheninka brothers could see me struggling, too. Andreas, who had become my pack-raft buddy, would look me in the eye when we had the privacy of being face to face in the bath-like boats and ask me if I was OK. He had a kindness to his face now and his mannerisms made me smile. He would point with his lips to indicate what he was talking about and he and I formed quite a close bond as we relied on each other when crossing the difficult currents of the river.
On 11 September 2008 we arrived in Diobamba, an Asheninka community where Andreas’s and Alfonso’s uncle lived. Alfonso had also picked up a tortoise as a gift for the community about half an hour before we arrived and so for two reasons we were welcomed more warmly than usual. The family with whom we stayed was headed by a single mother of about thirty-four whose husband had died. For an Asheninka she was tall and athletic with the graceful feminine curves of Florence Griffith-Joyner. Most noticeably, she was very confident; she looked me straight in the eye and smiled widely. The Dongo brothers teased me that she wanted me for a husband – and from her manner they were not making this up and a surge of unexpected excitement and warmth rose in my body. The attention, in my weak, self-doubting state, caught me off guard and I wasn’t composed enough to do anything but smile and thank the lady as she brought food and drink and entertained us magnificently. She had the most generous laugh I have ever heard in a woman and deep inside me a switch flicked and I began to crawl back into the land of the living.
The tortoise that I had thought to be a gift of a pet was clinically opened with a machete like a can of beans and ripped from its shell. The shell was then rubbed with salt and barbecued as an entrée for us to pick at while our hostess cooked up a tortoise casserole. We were also given a plate of giant armadillo meat to devour and I could feel my strength returning physically and emotionally.
Despite this incredible hospitality my mental state was too distorted to be healed by a single incident. From my hammock I remember listening to the Dongo brothers who, in my state of half-sleep, I was sure were plotting to kill me. There was an Asheninka word that was very common that sounded like the Spanish word matar, to kill. Part of me knew I was being paranoid, but not enough of me to get a grip and to stop my brain racing in my hammock.
Walking the river beaches meant we had to cross the river several times a day. The walkable beaches alternated from one side to the other with the meanders. As the river was low this was still faster than cutting a path through the dense undergrowth in the forest.
On the first proper day of these multiple crossings the Dongo brothers were in a boat together and they worked out that if they didn’t paddle hard, the river would take them further downstream and they wouldn’t have to walk as far. Their logic was understandable but both Cho and I failed to stop them doing it time and time again as the day went on. The problem was that I had committed to walking the entire length of the river and Alfonso and Andreas were gaining 500 metres downstream with every crossing. Because staying together was important, Cho and I were gaining ground on the water, too.
We could see each other getting agitated about this. We were here to walk the Amazon and neither of us wanted to do it anything less than 100 per cent.
‘Cho, we have to tell them that from here downwards we absolutely cannot let the river take us downstream and that, if it does, we must walk back to opposite from where we started on the other side.’
‘We need to do more than that,’ replied Cho. ‘We need to go back and do today again.’
For the first time I saw the depth of commitment that Cho had now decided to give this venture. His values dictated that today was unacceptable. We smiled at each other, shook hands and made a plan that in the next community we would hire a boat and return to rewalk this section of the river.
It was a lesson for me. A niggling doubt or guilt that had been manifesting itself in me all day was replaced with a pure, clean feeling of doing the right thing. It would slow us down by a whole day and it would cost money, but it would mean our consciences would be clear. This was an instinct that I would become used to relying on as the weeks passed and I learned for the first time in my life how really to start living based on what felt right or wrong.
From Bolognesi we hired a boat at great expense and redid that section of the river. Once they understood what we were driving at, the Dongo brothers bought into the concept completely.
As we intended to be back in Bolognesi by nightfall we stashed all our gear there and just had with us minimum kit: water bottles and a GPS. But the river took longer to walk than we expected and night began to fall. We were forced to make camp on a beach where a man was fishing. He lent Alfonso a hook and line and the skill with which, when faced with the prospect of no supper, Alfonso pulled out fish after fish was phenomenal. We shared our catch with the fisherman who let us use his fire to cook on and gave us some chewy tortoise to eat. As it grew colder, Cho found a small plastic sheet about a metre by two metres with which we made an improvised shelter. Lined up like soldiers under it, with the roof covering us from our knees to our chests, we prayed for a warm, dry night.
At ten o’clock the wind picked up and at eleven the ominous patter of raindrops started to drum on the crisp packet of a covering above our heads. As the storm matured we drew in our knees and sat up in the line we had formed, now soaked to the bone by the driving rain slamming horizontally into us. Sleep was unthinkable so we just sat together shivering in the darkness waiting for dawn. The wind and rain subsided in the early hours and we had small snatches of sleep as we tried to warm up our damp clothes by staying as still as possible.
From this point on we had a firm rule. If we crossed any river in a pack raft or other boat, we would have to walk back to a point perpendicular to the point at which we had embarked. That way we could never be accused of using the flow of the river to advance us.
One thinks of the dangers of the jungle as coming from jaguars, snakes and electric eels but it was the insects that were driving me mad. Regularly we cut through wasps’ nests concealed beneath leaves, and, when the shout ‘Avispas’ went up, we would scatter in different directions into the undergrowth so as to reduce the number of stings we each got. I learned to stop steadying myself on trees or plants as I passed, since tiny ants would run up my arms and bite me, leaving small, wet sores.
Diary entry from 20 September 2008:
We are in a world of shit. We’ve not made the community we were aiming for; we’ve got no water and so we’ve not eaten, drunk or washed. The mosquitoes are the worst I have ever seen. Climbing into my hammock I let about 30 into my mosquito net. I keep thinking they are all dead and then one more appears to swat.
I can tell they are biting me because I get a juicy red blo
od splat on my hands when I clap them but I am not reacting [not coming up in bites]. Perhaps I am building up a resistance like the locals. There are millions of mosquitoes outside the net. MILLIONS.
Today was bad. The guides are guessing our direction. I do not understand anything. There are no paths.
4.30 a.m. additional entry:
I just got up to urinate and looked down at my stomach and there must have been 40 mosquitoes sucking my blood. I wiped them off with my hand leaving a large red streak of fresh blood across my belly.
Sleep was now becoming a problem, too. Despite having almost twelve hours of dark hammock time I would lie for hours worrying and thinking about how we could get through the next part. At first I used antihistamines to aid sleep, but it led on to using diazepam, tramadol and even morphine to enable me to get enough sleep to move forward. I received one email from Chloë, my ex, simply asking if I was taking drugs. She knew me so well that she could tell from my blogs that I was not thinking straight. She was right. The alternative was more unbearable for me, however – the hopeless despair of seeing the sun rise when I had still not managed to stop my brain racing.
The next morning Cho was, as usual, the last to be ready. He hadn’t yet developed a system for organising his kit quickly and the normal routine was to wait for him for another twenty minutes after the three of us were ready. I had a snipe at him about this when we finally set off and his response was to hand me a bottle of fresh rainwater that he had cleverly collected in the night. As I gulped the liquid down, my first drink after an entire evening and night without fluid, I felt a huge pang of guilt for snapping at Cho. He’d collected enough for the brothers and himself to have a litre each. What did twenty minutes’ waiting really matter anyway?
It’s hard to justify why I’d not really been navigating. The previous weeks had been all down the river channel and so it hadn’t been necessary. I assumed that the Dongo brothers were so adept at jungle walking that I could simply switch off and follow them. But as the day progressed I could tell we hadn’t been keeping to the same direction and I started to at least check our direction with my compass.
For half an hour we walked north and then for half an hour we walked south. Still unsure at this point if this was part of the brothers’ plan, I just observed until it became evident they didn’t know which way to go.
I started to talk to them and to indicate the direction that in theory we should be travelling and showed them that the river was on our left. I was amazed to see that they really were disorientated. I was to discover that this was because the last two days had been overcast and they hadn’t been able to use the sun to keep track of our direction. They had never seen a compass before but from that point on I made sure I kept them going in one general direction, which for the first year of the expedition was north.
It made me switch on more to navigation, too. Now that I had a competent team around me there was no excuse for sloppiness and I needed to take control and always to have a good idea of where we were in relation to the river so that if anything happened we could evacuate. I started to realise that when the guides confidently stated ‘The community is this way!’ they were giving me their best guess rather than a statement of fact, and that I still had to check the navigation the whole time.
This actually helped me start to pull myself together again because, as the only person in the team who could navigate without the sun, I was key to our progress.
Fellow explorers, adventurers or walkers of any kind might be surprised at my lack of concern about navigation until this point, and in mitigation I can only say that the walk had now turned into an existence rather than an expedition. We were just walking, loosely following a river, and my perspective and handle on many things had shifted a lot due to my preoccupation with matters such as safety or financial worries.
The Peruvian riverine Amazon – the forested areas that are strongly influenced by the river – can be nasty and dense. The canopy was low and there were very few large old trees left. Thorns and brambles filled the gaps between trees and walking without a machete literally to open a path was unthinkable. Often the forest floor resembled a half-drained lake bed, and exposed roots and vines lay twisted and gnarled over the sucking, thick mud. Locals were able to slip through tiny gaps with the ease of panthers while my backpack snagged on every overhanging bit of vegetation sending dirt and ants down the back of my grimy neck as I fell behind the group, getting more and more frustrated.
The Asheninka communities were much easier to stay in than those of the Shipebo. The pela cara myth was taken far more seriously among the Shipebos and things could be frosty and awkward. Conversely, the Asheninkas would turn our arrival into an excuse for a reunion party with the Dongo brothers, who perhaps knew a couple of them, and would be more than happy to have a night on the home-made sugar-cane rum.
Reading my diary, though, I know that I wasn’t yet completely comfortable.
Diary entry from 26 September 2008 – Selva:
I’m bored with being the butt of jokes that I either don’t understand or just aren’t funny. Maybe I’m just too tired but half of the jokes are about how crap I am at walking and the other half are about killing me. ‘Look after your gringo’ they would say to Cho, ‘or we’ll cut his head off.’
Cho laughs, the Dongo brothers laugh and the community laughs. Everyone but me. I don’t really enjoy anything at the moment except eating, and being clean after I have washed.
I so wish my Spanish was better. In the evenings I am just too exhausted to learn or to concentrate enough to translate. So I allow the noise to pass without making the effort to translate and I end up understanding less and less.
For some time I’d been questioning whether my walk was selfish. Was I causing upset here unnecessarily and could the resulting distress be avoided? Had I really thought through the effect I was having on the people I met?
The indigenous people in this part of the Amazon wanted to develop. They wanted electricity, torches, satellite TV and mobile phones – without exception. The communities that I walked through would be unrecognisable in twenty years’ time. This was not a case of uncontacted tribes that needed to be left to lead their isolated lives – it was, rather, a case of poor communications and gossip and rumour causing ignorance and unnecessary fear.
I came to the conclusion that my walk was a positive thing for these communities, whether or not they were initially upset. Although such communities had to live in a state of high alert to protect their land, ignorance of the outside world is never a good thing. Not all white men were the same and, although I admired the defensive spirit of the indigenous people here, it was good that they had met a gringo who did not want to steal their land, timber, children or body parts. It was good that they had met one who smiled stupidly and waved at them – and bought farine and sugar in the local shop.
By this stage I had slipped the timeline yet again and was now forecasting that the expedition would take two whole years. The big jungle city of Pucallpa marked a quarter of my journey completed and was a landmark that I had dreamed of reaching for months. On 28 September we had been walking for nearly six months and two days, but I was still three days short of Pucallpa. Mark Barrowcliffe, a British journalist, was due to arrive to walk with us so that he could write an article for the Guardian. As Mark had no Spanish he was coming in with Marlene from Lima and I was going to have to go ahead by boat in order to meet him. Once we’d picked him up we would all return by boat to start walking from where we had left off.
The whole experience did me good. Being out on the river allowed my eyes to focus on things further than 20 metres away and the idea of a night in a bed was heavenly. I desperately wanted to get an air-conditioned room, that little bit of extra comfort that would have guaranteed a solid night’s sleep, but, with the Asheninka brothers and Cho in tow, I could not afford to spend so much.
It was great to see Marlene again. She’s a lovely woman, not really very Peruvian
and quite alternative; she laughs and swears like a trooper. Mark was quite nervous at first, I think, and I was equally apprehensive about him coming in. I think we picked up on each other’s nerves and moments after his arrival I was telling him about the pela cara threat and the miserable time I had been having.
He had a wife and a baby daughter and he was seriously considering whether walking with me through these areas was a responsible thing to do. I felt it was my duty to point out that he had to accept that he would be walking at his own risk and that the tribes were unpredictable and anything could happen. That didn’t help.
Marlene was pretty gutsy to walk with us. Totally unprepared, she managed a day of winding, slippery paths and was on her arse for a good chunk of the day before she took the boat out.
Mark walked with us for three days and was pleased to be leaving by the end. For him the jungle was a baptism of fire. For me it was great to have a fellow Brit to talk to about sport, schools, TV and all things British. We were very different but enjoyed each other’s company and Mark helped me see how far I had come. To witness him take his first steps in the jungle made me look like an absolute professional. I looked after him for three days and forgot to worry about myself. It was just what I needed and I saw that I had become pretty efficient at what we were doing by then. Seeing the jungle through Mark’s eyes made me realise that I was comparatively comfortable and at home in the trees.
On the last day Mark looked at a raging river and laughed: ‘For one hellish moment I thought we were going to have to cross that!’ I smiled and he knew instantly that we were. We all linked ourselves together, faced upstream and edged across as the force of the water threatened to throw us backwards.