by Stafford, Ed
The Amazon is three kilometres wide at this point and to be in the middle of it, in a four-foot inflatable dinghy that has a safety label on it which reads ‘Do not use if there is a risk of drowning’ while waves crashed and the wind howled, was exhilarating to say the least.
I tore myself out of my self-conscious English shell and joined in the singing. Not knowing any religious songs in Spanish I sang, for some unknown reason, ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ at full pelt. It seemed appropriately dramatic and it didn’t seem to matter that Cho and I were singing completely different songs. We were three metres apart but could hardly hear each other over the rain.
We grinned at each other and it felt as if we were winning. Small and vulnerable in the midst of the colossal storm, we were sticking two fingers up at the Amazon, and the past week of wading through murky waters.
As the rain passed and the wind dropped, we sat back and floated for a while. We could see Roca Eterna perched on a lonely hill and, as we paddled calmly up to the row of dugout canoes, we were met by about twenty kids with inquisitive faces. They helped us pack up the boats then we climbed up the riverbank, drenched to the bone, to the village to meet the chief, Marcus, who we’d come across two days earlier in Santa Rosa.
Once again out of the rain and the wet, we sipped the hot ‘Yerba Louisa’ drink, a sweet herbal tea, with genuine appreciation.
The average of 2.5 kilometres a day made pretty gloomy reading when I did the maths that night. We could be walking for up to seven years from this point! Even when I took out the inevitable roads and the dry seasons, I determined that it could take a further three years from here if we continued in the way we were going.
There was only one thing for it: we had to change our tactics and head well away from the river. We had to be far enough away from it that the floods would not affect us.
We finished the flooded section to Roca Eterna over the next two days and then walked an additional day on hard ground to Oran. Oran was a town rather than a village and had hardware stores, places that served food and bars that served beer. We checked into the only hotel, which gave us a shabby room with a sad bed but it did have electricity in the evenings from six to nine o’clock. To wash we still had to walk down to the river but having my own space for the first time in weeks was a luxury.
We took a day – 1 February – off to wait for the journalist Matt Power who was coming to walk with us for a bit to write an article for Men’s Journal. Cho and I pottered around Oran, charging and cleaning kit, drinking beer and watching women’s football in the plaza.
The other person who was coming was Ursula (poodle- and motorbike-owner) from Iquitos. I had promised her that she could come and walk with us for three days and she was arriving at eight o’clock the following morning on the fast boat from Iquitos. Matt was due to arrive six hours earlier on the slow boat at 2 a.m. Cho and I decided to wait up for Matt.
By the time he turned up, Cho and I had had a few drinks. Matt stood in the bows of the boat as it came in and leaped down on to the grassy banks with a big grin. He held out his hand and in a New York accent asked, ‘Mr Stafford, I presume?’
‘Hi, Matt. Let’s go for a beer,’ I replied.
Matt was excited and we chatted away for a couple of hours before deciding we should get some rest before tomorrow’s walk. Then, what seemed like only seconds later, the alarm was going off and I knew that Ursula was almost here. I dragged myself out of bed.
I was regretting asking Ursula. Hosting Matt was one thing – it benefited the expedition and got us much-needed publicity – but Ursula’s visit was less logical. She arrived in skinny jeans with a fully made-up face and very tight T-shirt and tottered off the boat. This was going to be interesting.
We found an old boy called Mario who agreed to guide us. Mario had warm, trustworthy eyes and carried his gear in a flour sack with a strap over his forehead. He could walk twice the speed of any of us through the forest despite being sixty-two. He knew the hills behind the town and we wanted to head up into the higher ground in order to speed up our progress. Mario led us through cleared fields of grazing buffalo. I hadn’t laid down any ground rules and Ursula wanted to hold hands. I could feel Matt’s eyes on my back as I walked through these pristine fields of foreign livestock, holding hands with my miniature Peruvian Shakira. He must have wondered what on earth he had just flown down from the States to write about, but he just smiled knowingly and followed in his full Gortex Pro outfit and matching gaiters.
We vaulted buttress roots the size of stretched limos reaching out over the trail and trickling streams as clear as bottled water. Despite our guests, we made about 15 kilometres each day. Ursula walked well considering what she was wearing and that she was so far out of her comfort zone. She walked for three days, pretty much all on paths through the jungle, through small streams, over log bridges until we arrived at a community called Sanalillo. It took us three days to reach Sanalillo. Mario normally did it in a day.
On the third day we opened up into a field that had been recently slashed out of the jungle and the stumps of the felled trees were still smouldering. The Yawa village was having a minga, where everybody works together, and the inhabitants were working the field and drinking the infamous masato. The red-faced Amerindians welcomed us without hesitation and after three days of hill walking the fermented liquid tasted wonderful. After a night in the local school I organised a boat to take Ursula home.
Matt was joined by a larger-than-life ice-hockey-playing photographer called Pete McBride who came in to add some images to Matt’s article. The two of them enjoyed the walking and Matt relaxed considerably in Pete’s company. Their energy bars and Western ideas seemed almost foreign to me now, slightly brash and overdeveloped.
Despite our more considered route we still had to cross large areas of flooding as we neared the small jungle town of Pebas. We would be up to our waists, then past our chests and then we had to load all the packs into a raft and swim through the shiny black water.
‘Holy shit!’ called Pete in waist-deep water. He had spotted something big in the water nearby. I turned to look and saw what appeared to be a huge catfish with a broad, wide mouth and a snaky body about two metres long lurking in the depths between Pete and me. The eerie thing was the complete lack of fear the weird fish had of us. I called to Bernabet, the young guide, to see if he knew what it was. ‘Aguila,’ he smiled, electric eel. I asked him if it was dangerous. ‘Not if you don’t upset it,’ he replied.
When we reached Pebas I found out that these Amazonian electric eels could indeed be very dangerous. They can produce up to 500 watts, a potentially deadly strike for a human, although the most common way of dying was said to be drowning after being knocked out by the shock. They are an apex predator, the king of their food chain, hence their complete lack of fear because nothing hunts them. I looked ahead at the next four months of flood walking that we had before us and smiled at the ridiculous situation.
At Pebas we said farewell to the Americans, who had achieved everything they’d come for, and had offloaded loads of fancy kit that Cho and I split between us – head torches, trousers, even second-hand socks. Cho and I were more than grateful for the Yanks’ chuck-outs; then we turned our attention east towards Colombia.
Chapter Ten
The Drugs-Trafficking Trail to
Colombia
PEBAS IS AN odd Peruvian town. With no road access, it is completely dependent on the river and it has a large population of gays. Somehow gay groups within Peruvian communities have to be much more ostentatious and extravagant than in other countries. Perhaps in such a macho culture you have to go to extremes if you want to buck the trend. The result in Pebas was teams of the campest volleyball players mincing around the court in the town plaza that directly overlooks the Amazon. The striking thing was that they moved like women as they walked about and interacted with each other, but the moment they started playing they were skilful men hammering the ball from one side to
the other with impressive strength. At the end of a punishing rally they would snap back into camp mode and congratulate each other with theatrical kisses and girly giggles.
The self-installed Lord of Pebas was a famous painter named Francisco Grippa, Pancho to his friends. Francisco lived in an absurdly lavish mansion overlooking the whole town and he allowed every single traveller who passed through Pebas to stay in his house for free, much to the annoyance of the town’s only hotel. Francisco said he did this because, although he was Peruvian, he was proud of his travels and enjoyed meeting the people who visited the town. If his guests chose to, they could buy one or more of his huge, brightly coloured paintings of the Amazon that hung in his vast gallery.
Francisco was a bit of a player as a young man and his current wife was young and beautiful. Stories of the parties that he used to host in his castle-like residence were still the talk of the town.
He had hosted Martin Strel, the Slovenian long-distance swimmer, when he had swum past the year before and he enjoyed playing a little part in our folly, too. He was kind to us. We stayed with him for a few days while we talked to as many people as we could about how to get to Brazil from there on foot. We had pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that we were now going to go through Colombia and many people warned us of the dangers of the FARC, the infamous Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group, and the drugs traffickers.
Francisco’s loyal housekeeper, Warren, found us a very professional-looking guide called Juan Rodriguez da Silva. Juan was a logger who had spent time in the military and he was the strongest Peruvian I had met in my entire time in Peru. He had arms and legs like those of a bodybuilder and I would never have believed he had never been to the gym if I hadn’t known that there wasn’t a gym for 500 miles. He had got that strong from hauling vast planks of wood huge distances in the forest. Juan was keen, interested in the walk and spoke knowledgeably about the areas between where we were and the Colombian border.
There were trails for much of it, he said, many of which were used by loggers and drugs runners alike. I immediately liked Juan: he was professional and intelligent and, like many ex-military men who we had walked with, he had travelled outside his hometown which gave him an experience and wisdom that was missing from people who had never left their own patch.
We set off with twenty-one days’ worth of food, the most we had carried so far. Our packs were very heavy and Juan was carrying a large flour sack with cloth webbing around his forehead. The pouring rain was now the norm; I couldn’t remember the last dry day we’d had.
I’m not sure if there was any one particular reason but Cho and I immediately found the going very tough. We had heavier packs with twenty-one days of food; we were not used to hills after having done so much flat walking, and Juan was easily storming ahead. Cho was feeling it more than me and I began to be slightly concerned about his health. He’d been having stomach pains in the night, too, and had occasionally vomited blood. Either way, both Cho and I were struggling ridiculously and it was clear that Juan was slightly frustrated and surprised by our inability to walk fast. We had to ask for several breaks, something that neither of us really took any more, and we were confused by our own weakness.
We passed a small fishing village where one of Juan’s friends, Boruga, was working at the side of the path. Juan turned and asked me if I thought that another person to share the weight would help and I jumped at the offer. Boruga, real name Moises Soria Huane, was asked and immediately agreed to join us. He said he needed five minutes to say goodbye to his wife and kids for three weeks. Boruga and Juan had worked together as forestry workers before and they were both very accustomed to carrying weight and being away from home in the jungle. They were both incredible with weight and as Cho and I had the group kit (communications, cooking and medical equipment) they took much of the food between them. In retrospect, these were the best guides of the lot over the whole journey; they were both ex-military, both loggers. They were absolute naturals in the forest, more skilled even than the Dongo brothers, and they were both very strong. Despite the heavy weight on their backs they walked fast all day long without the slightest problem. Pound for pound, I was the weakest by far; these men were all between five foot six and five foot nine, whereas I am six foot one, but they were a much better shape and build than me for carrying heavy weight through the close jungle.
After just a couple of days, though, through relentless rain, Cho was getting worse.
The air felt cooler and the constant wet seemed to be bad for Cho’s health. One morning we woke up in one of the last jungle villages before we were to start our big crossing of unpopulated rainforest. I had got up early and Juan and I had gone to look at the route we had to depart on. The water was clearly too high to leave that day, the paths were all washed out to chest level or deeper. Juan and Boruga didn’t have the same rubber dry bags as we had so they couldn’t swim through water with their bags on their backs without soaking all their kit. We decided to wait a day and I went to tell Cho the plan.
I made two basic errors in planning this leg of the journey. Firstly, I took Juan’s timings at face value. When he said the route would take twenty days I wanted to believe him as it was such great news. Clearly I should have estimated the timings against the maps, but I didn’t.
Secondly, I let Cho and Juan calculate and buy food for the leg. After seven days of walking we had only three days of food left. At this point I estimated that we still had fifteen to twenty days of walking between us and Colombia.
We were heading away from the river, much further than I had anticipated, and as a result we had gone off our 1:100,000 maps that just covered the riverine areas. I did have a 1:1 million map of this section of Peru but the river had not been plotted accurately as it was an aeronautical navigational chart. Trying to get anything accurate out of a 1:1 million map is difficult, to say the least. Google Earth would have been the obvious answer but there was a stinking big white cloud over the whole area blocking all the jungle below.
We cut the rations and started scavenging from the forest. After two days on very low rations Cho turned to me as we entered a likely campsite and said, ‘God provides!’ ‘Yeah, right,’ I said to myself, thinking this was the start of another lecture on God, only then to see what he was talking about. A large red-footed tortoise was nestling in the leaf litter. Red foots are categorised as ‘least concern’ by CITES (the international agreement between governments that protects endangered species) and are not threatened species and, as we were low on food, no time was wasted worrying about ethics.
Boruga butchered the tortoise while Juan made the fire. I absorbed their skills attentively. Juan’s fire-lighting technique was different from most as he didn’t use any small sticks at all. He found dry wood that was two to three inches thick and he made a base to raise the fire off the wet ground by splitting the logs in half and laying the dry inner side face up. Next, he shaved one of the logs repeatedly to produce dry shavings that he piled up on the platform. Then he just arranged the large logs around the outside of the shavings like the spokes of a wheel and lit the fire using a lump of resin he’d chipped off a tree with his machete. The result was a roaring fire in about ten minutes even though it had been raining solidly for days. The Boruga-fried tortoise liver cooked in garlic and oil was nothing short of breathtaking.
Incredibly, the next day we found another tortoise, wild tomatoes, various nuts and wild bananas. Boruga continued to impress, proving also that he was an able fisherman. He disappeared when we made camp and returned with a little smile carrying catfish, trout and crabs. He taught Cho as much as he could, too, so Cho started to enjoy fishing and began to become proficient from this point on. We were thriving and morale was high despite having three days of food to last the next two weeks. Our carried food totalled:
4 kg of rice
2 kg of salt
13 packets of Ramen instant noodles
1 small sachet of monosodium glutamate.
; No sugar, tuna, farine, coffee or milk powder. Our only hope was that one of the abandoned logging camps that we were trundling through would be occupied and we could negotiate some food with the loggers. The one main thing we struggled to source from the jungle was carbohydrate, which is why these loggers always carried a big bag of farine and not much else.
I wasn’t experienced enough to know the difference between false corals and coral snakes but we saw several red-, black- and yellow-banded snakes of some size near the rivers. The old saying ‘Red next to black – friendly Jack. Red next to yellow – kills a fellow’ referred to the coloured bands but it originated from Central America and didn’t apply here. All of these snakes were potentially lethal and their venom was neurotoxic, which meant that it attacked the central nervous system and the lungs until the victim suffocated to death.
We were normally safe from coral snakes because they have small mouths and short fangs that could not penetrate a boot. One evening, however, when I was washing in a river I casually threw my soap box into a convenient hole in the riverbank, only to see a coral snake wake with a start and slip out of the dirt hole at lightning speed just inches from my bare fingers.
We had not encountered anybody at all in the six days since our departure but when we saw fresh footprints we knew we were not alone.
The laptop had run out of charge at this point and I was still trying to use solar panels to charge it. In the constant rain and rare sunlight this was impossible. We followed footprints for the next two days, never catching a glimpse of who was ahead of us. At the back of my mind the fear of drugs runners was niggling at me and yet I felt I was in good company. But we needed to acquire food.
On 2 March 2009 we set up camp well above the river on high ground but we could see the residual leaf litter of recent floods and knew that the water had risen about three metres recently, almost reaching our camp. Boruga disappeared for a while and returned nonchalantly smoking a cigarette. We’d run out of cigarettes five days earlier. He told us there was a logging camp ahead and that they had food. This was great news but we’d already made camp so we decided to stay put and pass through the camp early the next morning.