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

by Stafford, Ed

  When we got there, lots of very tough Peruvian loggers were eating breakfast and joking loudly. We were immediately given plates of spaghetti and ham and cups of sweet coffee. In our reduced rations state, the food gave more pleasure than I thought it possible to get from a meal. We ate fast, loving every mouthful. The loggers had an admirable code of looking after each other and we were treated very well. These guys were not in the least concerned by my presence; they were just amused at what I was trying to do.

  They lived a very comfortable life although, it has to be said, at the expense of the forest. With refrigerated motor boats and shotguns they would hunt everything that moved so that they could eat well while working and take out meat to sell, too. That day a woolly monkey had been shot and I watched as the almost human-looking body was chopped up and put in the cooking pot. The scene was made all the more dramatic as the monkey’s infant offspring was watching, screaming incessantly. I did eat a piece of the tail for interest’s sake. Unlike many indigenous communities that live in the forest, it was clear that these men’s presence was not sustainable.

  The loggers informed us we had reached the end of the path but navigationally, the next bit didn’t seem hard at first. We had hit the River Apicuari and all we had to do was follow it until it rejoined the Amazon. Easy in theory until you see how much the river meanders. This was still an area obscured by cloud on Google Earth and I estimated the 100 kilometres would have turned into 200 kilometres if we literally walked along the river’s edge.

  Clearly we wanted to walk in a straight line, but if we pushed away from the river we had no way of knowing when or if we would encounter it again. I felt blind and just wanted to be lifted above the canopy to see the shape of the river so we could put together a plan. How could we make an accurate map?

  As we pondered the frustrating problem it suddenly came to me: we would hire one of the boats from the loggers to take us downriver. I would have the GPS recording the whole way so that we could sketch a detailed map of the river. We would buy food at the Yawa community of Platanal and then return to the logging camp in the same boat. Two problems solved, food and map, at the minor expense of some long days in a cramped boat.

  We sat in the canoe for three days and two nights solid to complete the round trip, but the plan worked. We bought ten more days’ food in Platanal and estimated we would return there on foot in eight days. We could now plan the walk to stay away from the tangled riverine jungle at the river’s edge for most of the day and return to the river at night to make camp, wash and cook.

  The time in reconnaissance had been well spent. It was long-winded, but we were back in control and I was pleased that we were overcoming difficulties and still going forward. In fact, we arrived in Platanal on foot in just six days and chatted to the Yawa Indians about our journey, while charging the laptop and BGAN in the sun. I managed to get seventeen minutes of internet time – enough to blog and answer the main emails – but my mum lost out as the screen died just before I pressed ‘Send’. The tiny window into the Western world had shut again.

  Once we were back in Platanal, an old Yawa man called Vicente asked, ‘Why don’t you take the path to Colombia?’ I rolled my eyes at this apparent contradiction. I explained that the loggers had told us there was no path. He informed us that there was indeed a path but that it broke away from the river and went due east towards Colombia to a border post called Tierra Amarillo on the River Loreto Yacu.

  We hired Vicente as a guide and took six days’ food for the five of us, heading directly east towards Colombia. We knew that we would be relying heavily on Vicente’s knowledge of the paths as they were old and completely closed in places. He was meek in comparison to the loggers and spoke softly but he knew the path and we advanced 13.3 kilometres in the first day – the furthest we’d walked in weeks.

  We reached a new river and started snaking, doing vast sweeping bends that meant we weren’t getting very far, but the river was extremely sinuous. We took the decision to attempt to walk from one meander apex to another in a straight line, but that is easier said than done when you can’t see more than 15 to 20 metres ahead of you and don’t have a map of the river. We headed away from the banks to attempt a more direct route and soon rejoined the river, easily identified because it was the only one of its size in the area.

  Juan was up front, in his element. Never flinching in the rain, he cut and slashed with his machete making slow but steady progress. After about an hour, we saw fresh footprints and an opening in the forest made by machetes, the first signs of human existence we had seen since leaving Platanal. My thoughts immediately turned to drugs traffickers and, even though I was soaked to the bone and covered in sweaty grime, my senses heightened notably.

  Then Boruga started to laugh. ‘Look over there!’ he pointed. ‘That’s where we had lunch!’ We all groaned as realisation dawned. The footprints and machete cuts were our own. I hadn’t checked the compass in over an hour and just followed Juan blindly. We had come full circle. Somehow, when we’d crossed from the apex where we’d actually picked up the river further upstream, thinking we were moving on we had turned and hacked our way back to where we’d started. Juan, who’d been cutting like a machine for an hour, was the most crushed by this farcical error. We made camp and Vicente told us he would return home the following morning.

  At about six o’clock that evening I heard a loud bang. ‘What the—?’ I sprang out of my hammock and looked around the gloomy, twilit forest. Bang – another shot – and Cho ran off into the trees. Vicente was the only person with a shotgun and he was not in camp. ‘He must have gone out hunting,’ I thought. Despite being intrigued I had just washed and had no desire to rush through the forest in the dark in my clean, dry clothes and flimsy Crocs.

  When they did come back the news was bad from my perspective. Vicente hadn’t just shot an animal – he’d shot a bloody tapir. All species of tapirs are listed as either endangered or vulnerable and this massive herbivore is such a gentle giant that I couldn’t help but feel sad.

  Vicente was a Yawa hunter and he just saw the tapir as food; I understood his point of view. My issues with it were that it was far too big for us to carry and so only a fraction of the animal could be used and the rest had to be left on the forest floor to be eaten by other animals. It was a pregnant mother the size of a small cow and the fact that we’d been involved in its death annoyed me. Now that it was dead, however, I was absolutely sure we should make the most of the meat and carry as much as we could. Juan, Boruga, Cho and I set to cutting up the beast, salting and smoking as much of the meat as possible over the fire. Vicente would carry what he could back to his community and we would take as much as we could manage, too.

  The incident reinforced my belief that we were right not to walk with firearms. I didn’t want this expedition to turn into a Victorian hunting farce.

  We weren’t too far from the Colombian border but there were no paths in sight. Every which way we turned was a wall of thick, dark forest that stretched for miles and miles and we weren’t following a river either. I entered the coordinates of where I could see the river crossing the Colombian border into my GPS and got a compass bearing to walk on. Then we just blasted through the jungle in a straight line, opening a path as we went. The terrain was hilly but with all the trees we still never got any view. It was almost as if we were driving a car in the pouring rain with broken windscreen wipers so that we couldn’t see out of the windscreen. We were reliant on our compass and had to have faith that the bearing was good and that in a few days we would hit the border post. What we would find there – armed military, drugs traffickers, razor wire, passport control, a gift shop, information centre – I had no idea.

  Then, just as we were in a position in which we were fairly reliant on the GPS, it decided to die. It had moisture inside it and none of the controls worked. So we headed on the compass bearing to a point where we all thought the community, and the Colombian border, would be. We could judge dis
tance only really on a feeling or hunch that it had been a seven-kilometre day, or perhaps an eight.

  Sometimes you need a bit of luck, but our accuracy was extraordinary. At 4 p.m. on our fourth day from Platanal we heard music and before long stumbled out into a party that was being held in Tierra Amarillo. The village was a cleared area of forest on the banks of the River Loreto Yacu. Tatty thatched huts housed friendly, drunken, indigenous people who offered us masato to drink. We were in Colombia.

  The Peruvian part of the expedition was now over. It had taken us 11 months and 2 days, only four weeks short of my original estimation for the entire journey. Cho and I were shattered and needed a rest and time to dry out our sores and parasite infections. We’d been walking without a real break for over two months in the relentless rain and I was drained of enthusiasm, energy and life. I had raw sores on my hips from my pack, my feet felt bruised and my muscles weak and empty. I dreamed of a hotel room with a real bed, fresh white sheets, and air conditioning. I didn’t want to see any people – if I’d been on my own I could have cried from exhaustion. I just wanted to sleep.

  Diary entry from 4 March 2009 – Tierra Amarillo:

  Pull your socks up, Staffs – you sound like a right pathetic twat. Two days in Leticia and you’ll be right as rain. Well maybe five days anyway.

  As was always the case when we broke free of the jungle, my mind turned to our desperate money situation. I was living well beyond my means and accruing debts that I had no ability to pay off. This feeling of being out of control financially continued to keep me awake at night and seemed to take the fun out of everything.

  There was no passport control at the point at the border where we had arrived so we had to take a boat down the Loreto Yacu and then another to the Colombian city of Leticia. There we could leave Peru officially, get our passports stamped, try to source some maps of Colombia, then return to the border to walk the short (three-week) Colombian stretch to Brazil.

  It was this type of journey, external to the expedition, which cost me valuable time and money. Moneywise, I couldn’t keep the four men on for this period time and as Boruga had dual Colombian/Peruvian citizenship I had to send Juan home. The big man was sad to go; I could tell his pride was hurt that Boruga had been chosen over him and that the team would continue without him. But I had to be logical rather than sentimental and Juan didn’t have a passport to travel outside Peru. So home he went.

  We spent six days in Leticia in the end and my diary tells me I spent about 80 per cent of my waking time in front of a computer doing neglected accounts and sorting the running of the expedition. We couldn’t afford nice hotels or air-con so we slummed it in a cheap place and I would wake up with my face stuck with sweat to the old mattress. An old school friend of mine, Sam Dyson, had said that he would come out and walk with us for a while and I organised his entry. The vast majority of this time was spent trying to chase the Brazilian fixers so that we would have permits to enter the indigenous reserve on the Brazilian side of the border.

  We had been put in contact with two Brazilian men, Kavos and Dwight, who were reported to be the best at sorting logistics problems for foreign film crews. Despite not being a film crew I had met the two men in Brazil on the way out in 2008 and they agreed to help me with my visas and permits for Brazil, but for a not insignificant fee. Without these papers I couldn’t continue and by April 2009 I was getting very irritated with their attitude and the complete lack of progress. This was quite stressful at the time and meant that I couldn’t relax with Cho and Boruga because, unless I was working hard to move things forward, the expedition couldn’t continue without us having to backtrack or detour several weeks north into Colombia. Permits from Kavos were vital if we were to avoid this vast detour.

  Everyone told us that the southern spit of Colombia we were about to go through was a big drugs-trafficking route and very dangerous. The bottom line was that we had no option if we wanted to complete the expedition. Back at the border once more with a Colombian Ticuna guide from Nariño, we quietly re-entered Colombia on foot and unnoticed.

  Ticunas are the indigenous people of the south of Colombia and western Brazil. Senou, our guide, was quiet and clearly didn’t know the jungle at all. I ended up putting Boruga at the front with Senou following lamely behind. With no GPS to map the river, we were still walking fairly blind, unable to be too close to the river due to the floods, but we soon hit a series of Ticuna settlements interspersed with small trails.

  The remarkable thing about the Ticuna communities was that they were welcoming and friendly. We met nothing but broad smiles and waves as we came through and it was such a refreshing change from the looks of dazed confusion we’d encountered in much of Peru. The trails between the communities were all severely flooded and whenever the water got above head height we had to inflate the rafts and paddle through the varzea.

  We’d managed to convince a local man from the last Colombian village to show us where the ‘path’ went, but all the other people had said the only way to go was by river in a boat. We had explained, as we always did, that we couldn’t go by river because the aim of the expedition was to walk. The usual laughter and telling us we were mad ensued.

  Four hours in and I could see their point. In places the ‘path’ was perhaps 10 metres below the surface of the jet-black floodwater. I was deep in concentration trying to guide my inflatable raft through spaces, seemingly far too small to pass, that were covered in spines as sharp as needles. The raft was made from very thin rubber, specifically so that it packed up small and could be carried in a rucksack. Every part of my brain was focused on steering and stopping; the worry of a puncture wasn’t just swimming – it was swimming and trying to save the 35-kilogram rucksack that I was sitting on.

  Boruga was paddling the other raft and both our paddles kept getting caught in the vines all around us, knocking biting ants down the backs of our necks. It was near 100 per cent humidity and the mosquitoes were constantly whining in our ears. Conditions don’t get much more unpleasant and yet I was loving it. It was that odd type of enjoyment that’s so hard to explain. I suppose the task was enthralling because everything was focused on the present; there was no room for reflections or worries about the future because every action had an immediate effect. I couldn’t help but be entirely infected by the thrill of the challenge.

  Luckily we were right; we could and did follow the path through the flooded forest until we eventually reached a Ticuna village mid-afternoon.

  We were progressing well but my moods were erratic, to say the least, and my diary at the time reads as a string of curses at guides who I had hired and who didn’t know the way. I had not yet learned not to get upset by things that could not be remedied. The problem was that the locals weren’t prepared to walk further than the next village, which might only be two hours away, and I was having to pay them as much as I was paying Cho for an entire day. Embarrassingly, I stopped asking some of them their names at this point. It was as if they were all the same annoying man constantly reinvented in a slightly different body but retaining the same essential characteristic of being indecisive and navigationally retarded. I was unreasonable at this time, I know, but there was the germ of a reason for my irritation.

  On 2 April, Cho, Boruga, Jaime (a seventeen-year-old Ticuna boy), and I spilled into a small village called Santa Sofia. It was the first anniversary of the expedition and so I bought the guys some beers and we had a nice time sitting in a circle on plastic chairs talking rubbish. Cho and Boruga got drunk enough to keep telling me what a good leader I was. It was nice but surprising to hear as I felt far from a good leader at the time.

  Two more days and we walked down an asphalt road into Leticia. Leticia is in Colombia on the border with Brazil’s city of Tabatinga.

  It had taken just over a year to reach Brazil and, despite being exhausted, we were all elated to have Colombia and Peru both behind us. In the past twelve months I had crossed the entire Andes mountain range; found the
furthest source of the Amazon and descended the deepest canyon in the world. I had walked through the heart of the Red Zone; passed through countless defensive indigenous tribes; been detained at arrow point and accused of murder. I had met Cho, walked through flooded forest for weeks on end and crossed the infamous southern tip of Colombia – although we hadn’t seen any sign of drugs traffickers in the last month.

  We knew that we had to wait a couple of weeks for my mate Sam to arrive from the UK. That was fine by me, and by Cho, too; we felt that at this key point we deserved the rest. It was essential to recharge physically and mentally before setting out again. Boruga went back to Peru after spending all his wages on nights out in Leticia. I felt sorry for his wife and kids who would have had been waiting for his wealthy homecoming.

  Despite the epic saga behind us, Cho and I knew we were about to set out on the hardest part of the expedition: reportedly fierce tribes, a new language, worse maps, bigger floods and unfathomable distances between communities across stretches of rainforest where nobody was known to have ever walked. We were both more than a little intimidated by the 3,000 kilometres of Brazil that we still had to cross on foot.

  PART 4: BRAZIL

  Chapter Eleven

  Entering Brazil

  VISAS AND PERMITS are boring, I know. The problem is that they were also crucial to whether the expedition was successful or ended prematurely in embarrassment and shame. Kavos had had more than a year to sort out three things: a valid visa to enable me to enter Brazil and stay there for the duration of the expedition; permits to enter the indigenous reserves; and topographical maps of the Brazilian jungle. I had now arrived at the Brazilian border and it appeared as if he’d not actually started on any of them. He came highly recommended but I found dealing with him torturous. Despite being infuriated that these things weren’t ready (I had hoped they would be prepared a year ago, before I even left England), I was in a predicament with this man as I’d paid him a grand and a half and, because I’d opted to use him to sort the visas, I’d ended up snubbing the Brazilian Consulate in London which was no longer answering my emails. Without maps, visas or permits our journey would be over.