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

by Stafford, Ed

  Cho and I checked into a hotel and waited. The two towns of Tabatinga (Brazil) and Leticia (Colombia) merged into one and the border was open for people to come and go. On the other side of the river was Santa Rosa (Peru) and together the area was referred to as the triple frontier. Motorbikers from the stricter Colombia would cross the border and remove their helmets with one hand in the distinctly more relaxed Brazil. The towns received tourists, mostly backpackers, but had very little to offer us really. We turned down several opportunities from persistent touts to go on daytrips to see the jungle.

  On 9 April, to his credit, Kavos came good. He wrote to me saying that on 11 April the Ticuna tribal leaders would be gathering in a nearby town called Benjamin Constant and he had organised for my request to walk through the Ticuna reserves to be heard. He said that they had asked if I would film the event so that their opinions on public policy relating to indigenous people could be aired.

  This was a big step forward – if the tribal chiefs said I could pass that would be amazing. The meeting would allow them all to know me by face, too, before I arrived at their communities on foot. I was happy to film them but at the time I had no links with broadcasters who could publicise their plight.

  This was exactly the sort of thing that I’d paid Kavos to sort and for this I was grateful. I was apprehensive about the meeting and was told it would last all day. My Portuguese was very basic at the time as I had been speaking Spanish for the past year and so I hired a tourist guide from Tabatinga to act as a translator. Kavos himself and Dwight, his sidekick, had warned me that these tribes were fierce, ‘the fiercest in the whole Amazon,’ Dwight had said. I was very nervous.

  I genuinely believed that FUNAI, the organisation that oversees indigenous people in Brazil, had granted us permission at this stage but it turns out that Kavos had not gone through any official process with FUNAI, claiming it was far too difficult.

  The translator, Cho, Ursula (who had come to visit me from Peru) and I went to meet the tribal chiefs. We took the fast boat from Tabatinga to Benjamin Constant and in my naivety I envisaged a traditional Ticuna community with everyone wearing traditional indigenous dress.

  We arrived in the modern town and were shown to a concrete village hall where about a hundred Ticuna chiefs and members from various other communities had gathered on red plastic bucket seats.

  ‘As we all know,’ said the Ticuna chief of chiefs, ‘white men have different minds to us, but they no longer come here to kill us.’

  ‘A relatively positive start,’ I thought, as I looked out across the crowd. The chiefs, although in Western clothing, still had jaguar and caiman teeth strung around their necks. One chief had augmented this decoration with a USB pen-drive. Behind me a Ticuna scribe was entering the minutes into a Ticuna laptop.

  The meeting was not just for my benefit. The leaders from all the neighbouring reserves had come to talk about their various issues and plights. The Ticunas were very aware of past atrocities and so sensitivity as to how I presented myself seemed to be key.

  The main chief continued, recounting stories and reminding people about their history. I understood some of what he said and made an effort to look unthreatening, polite and interested. I glanced to my right and saw that Cho, who had been out drinking the night before, had his head slumped to one side. He was fast asleep.

  At two in the afternoon things came to a head and I was told that if I could help the communities then they would help me. I was still concerned that their ideas about what I could offer them would be beyond my relatively humble means. I addressed the crowd in broken Portuguese as they didn’t seem to like me talking through a translator. As the vast majority of this was in Ticuna dialect anyway, the translator hadn’t a clue what was going on.

  ‘We will let you pass through,’ said the main chief finally after long discussions with the community chiefs, ‘if you can pay for the cost of today’s lunch for everyone.’

  It came to about US$25 and the feeling of sheer elation that soared up through my body made my eyes water as I strode towards him, beaming from ear to ear, to shake his hand.

  I hadn’t realised quite how worked up I’d been about these permits until that point. Suddenly everything felt possible again and the meeting injected me with a new confidence.

  Kavos emailed three days later saying that I didn’t have official permission from FUNAI but that if the Ticuna chiefs were happy then that was all I needed. I knew this was a bit under the radar and that these reserves required entry permits, and that all entrants had to have medical screening prior to entry, but it was the best I could do at the moment and the chiefs would let me physically pass so we had a functional plan.

  The goal was now very simple: to make as much progress into Brazil as possible. Finances and time were big stresses and I needed to cut out the distractions and get some serious miles under the belt.

  On 6 May 2009 the CEO of my main sponsors sent me this email:

  Ed

  I hope this finds you well.

  Since we last spoke JBS Associates has been hit by the downturn in the global markets. We have encountered a number of clients not paying or unable to pay us for work completed.

  The upshot is that we are unable to make the payment to you this month.

  I hope to be able to rectify the situation in the coming weeks and will keep you posted on any changes from our side.

  I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news. We remain committed and appreciate this is a long-term investment for us. When we next speak I hope to have better news.

  If you have any questions or want to talk then give me a call on the mobile.

  Take care and all the best.

  Jonathan Stokes

  This was our only monthly income at the time and the news was catastrophic. The amount that they had been paying hadn’t covered all the costs and so I was at the limit of my £10,000 credit card and absolutely dependent on their £1,000 a month. The waiting in town was costing a small fortune and we just had to leave and get into the jungle where things were cheaper. Hopefully they would be OK to pay the following month.

  Just over a year into the expedition I still felt that the journey would be more fun if I had a friend join me. Keith had been great and had lifted me out of a dark couple of months of depression and so when my old school friend Sam Dyson offered to join me I had taken him up on it.

  The visas weren’t ready by the time Sam arrived but soon after we were granted three-month tourist visas that we could have organised ourselves. This meant that after three months in Brazil we would have to return by boat to Colombia to renew the visas. Far from ideal.

  I’d seen Sam three times in the fourteen years since leaving school, two of those in the months before departure. He’d spent much of his time since school training to be a martial artist and was in fact an ordained Shaolin ‘warrior’ monk. His keenness to come, our old friendship and his commitment to martial arts were all contributing factors to him coming out. He had never been to the jungle before but I thought he had the transferable skills to make it work. He’d told me stories about being trained to run up stone steps up a mountain behind the Shaolin temple in China until he passed out. That was the sort of strength of mind (and body) I wanted in a new partner.

  Sam is exactly the same height as me at six foot one. He arrived with his eighties flat-top haircut and an erect warrior stance, which made him look considerably taller than the hunched, weary explorer that I’d become. On his arrival, we talked incessantly about old times and what lay ahead in the jungle. It was good to have a friend around again.

  The first leg that Sam, Cho and I embarked on together was an eight-day crossing from Tabatinga to the town of Belém do Solimões. Upon entry to Brazil the Amazon’s name had changed to the Solimões and we would not be next to the river that went by that name again until Manaus – some 2,000 kilometres downstream. In return for Sam giving a self-defence class to the Indian Police Service we secured two Ticunan Indian Police Se
rvice guides who, despite not knowing the jungle, were happy to walk with us. Before we left, the chief, who had been at the meeting in Benjamin Constant and agreed to let me pass, said that we could do so only if we bought him a gas cooker for his house. We had no option, of course, and the chief knew it, so we paid the chief the money to buy a brand-new cooker.

  It was now May, pretty much as high as the floods would ever be, and so we had to head inland. Unlike Peru, there were no hills to speak of and we only just managed to find routes that were above the flood line. Antonio and Sanderley, the two Indian guides, were young and polite and happy to be out walking. Despite them not knowing a route (thus we were navigating off my compass bearing and the new GPS that Sam had brought out) I thought it was prudent to take the guides. According to advice it was an exceptionally dangerous reserve, and the Ticunan Indians might well be able to talk us out of trouble.

  One Saturday morning I woke up slightly groggy after a typically broken night’s sleep in my hammock. I wandered over to where the two guides were busily gutting fish. I smiled widely as I saw the size of the catch. We had two fish each and they were making a fish broth on the fire. They’d brought the fishing net back in and packed it away neatly. The camp was functioning automatically without me having to ask; it made me smile. Scents of garlic and onion hung in the air and everyone was eager to eat.

  I don’t know why but none of the locals ever liked dishing up so I lifted the pan with the shiny new metal handle we’d picked up in Tabatinga. In slow motion I then watched the pan fall into the side of the fire, having slipped clean off the handle. I saw the faces of the guides and they could not hide their disappointment – the fish was scraped up but the tasty broth was gone. Food takes on far greater significance in these circumstances and I felt furious about my clumsiness.

  Later that day, deep in the jungle and a good distance from the main channel of the river, we approached a community. Antonio and Sanderley suggested that Sam and I wait outside while they went in and asked the chief for permission for us to enter. The more remote settlements lived defensively and we had been told they would kill a white man on sight if surprised. We decided not to surprise them and nervously sat on a log in a yucca field, wondering how fierce these Ticuna would be. Would they be wearing Western clothing? Would they let us through?

  The guys returned with the good news that the community, Nosa Senora Parisida, had accepted us and would allow us to enter. Our first sight of the elderly chief was as he wobbled towards us from some thatched huts on a spanking-new Honda moped that he obviously did not know how to ride. The village had no roads and was about 200 metres long but the moped was clearly his status symbol as chief. He was warm and kind and allowed us to string up hammocks in his own wooden house.

  Cho, Antonio and Sanderley played football with the locals and Sam and I wearily dozed in our hammocks, relieved that everything had gone smoothly. I started to wonder just how dangerous this reserve really was. Could it be that Kavos and Dwight had been overplaying the dangers to discourage us? Perhaps they too were just regurgitating unsubstantiated myths. These people were friendly and welcoming.

  For most of the 80 kilometres we had to cut our own path through the jungle following a compass bearing and using the GPS. For Sam it was quite a shock to the system. He’d not imagined it to be so physically exhausting and, as a big man, he tired quickly. Much of each day was spent chest-deep in swamps following the leading man as he hacked his way through the branches avoiding snakes and large ants’ nests. The swamps were actually cool and refreshing to walk through and made a pleasant change from constant sweating on hard ground. Despite the fact that we were averaging less than a kilometre an hour in the floods, we reached a village called Piranha in eight days by mid-May and hired a boat to take us out to Belém do Solimões.

  Sam and I chatted about his introduction to the jungle and he identified a few things that I’d overlooked. It was good to have a fresh pair of eyes on our methodologies and an example of something we changed was upping the anti-venom to forty-eight hours’ worth so that we could stay in one place and self-administer. This was due to the fact that we knew that we were going to be many days away from medical help and so, if one of us was bitten, unless we had enough anti-venom to treat him until the toxins had worn off there was no point in carrying any at all.

  Filming was important to me in order to have a record of the journey but both our video cameras decided to die. We had no option but to return to the border to receive new units. Humidity in the jungle was such that the average lifespan of an HD video camera being used every day was about three months. We went through ten during the whole expedition. Ignoring the inconvenient truth that customs would be a nightmare, I requested two more to be sent out by DHL. I elected to have the cameras sent into Colombia as the border was open and we didn’t have a safe place to receive the cameras in Brazil. Rather than just signing for the cameras as in any normal country, I had to employ a Colombian solicitor draw up a power of attorney, a public notary to authenticate passport copies and a translator to write begging letters to customs explaining what we are doing. The process was mind-numbingly exasperating and took over a week. We used the week to brainstorm some ideas and, thanks largely to Sam’s advice, I decided to set up an account with a new social networking site I’d never heard of – Twitter. It would be a pain to have to get the satellite phone out on a daily basis, find a fallen tree (and a break in the canopy to get reception), but it suited perfectly the spirit of broadcasting the expedition live since we could now ‘tweet’ live from the jungle each day.

  He also suggested that I blog weekly and set a day and a time so that followers would know when to look for a new post. Each blog would have a video that I edited myself so that it was timely and relevant to the week’s entry. I have no doubt that this increased our online following greatly, which would have huge repercussions in future months when we came to call on our followers.

  It was the beginning of June by the time we were back in Belém do Solimões with new cameras. The dilapidated town didn’t look much like an indigenous settlement, with houses built from sawn timber with tin roofs, but the inhabitants were 100 per cent Ticuna.

  The chief was called Vilmar Luis Geraldo and he was clearly not happy with his lot.

  Belém had 5,320 inhabitants living in 772 thatched and tin-roofed houses. The two schools in the community held 545 and 1,320 pupils and were both very overcrowded. Class sizes rarely dropped below forty students. Like many Ticuna communities, Belém had had a lot of problems with violence. There had been seventy-two deaths related to domestic violence, alcohol and drugs in recent years. Chemical abuse has become so bad that Vilmar told me of kids even snorting petrol.

  Alcohol is prohibited in Indian reserves for a very good reason. It is well documented and understood that indigenous people have a low tolerance to drink. But the thing is, they don’t just get drunk and vomit or fall asleep – to quote Vilmar, they ‘go mad’. When people in these communities are left to drink uncontrolled they can become aggressive and aggression can escalate to a stabbing or shooting very rapidly.

  Vilmar had a stern, sad face when he was recounting this. He was a religious man and clearly wanted to rise out of this spiral of social decay. He felt that the problem was twofold.

  Firstly, there was not enough money for education. Not everyone could get a good schooling and virtually no one could go to university. Vilmar wanted the government to build a university in Belém; he explained to me that no one had the money to travel to Tabatinga and pay for accommodation to continue their education there.

  Secondly, there were no jobs. This was because the community stood in the middle of an Indian reserve and, as far as I knew, non-indigenous companies could not set up in the reserve. This was a law established to give the locals their own land and autonomy but it now meant that even if they got an education there was not a single paid job available in Belém for them to take up.

  The people earned
what little money they could by selling crops – yucca, rice and bananas in the main – but Vilmar explained that a year of hard work brought in about $R560 (less than £200) per capita. To exacerbate this problem even further, extreme flooding had destroyed many of the year’s crops. So the trickle of money for many had stopped completely.

  All the village’s water came straight from the Amazon. We were only 120 kilometres or so downstream from two big cities that pumped sewage directly into the river. The water was filthy.

  There was no doctor or hospital in Belém and the one nurse-manned clinic was sadly depleted of medical stock.

  The situation wasn’t good. It wasn’t difficult to see why so many Ticuna people saw their future as bleak and turned to drugs or alcohol to get their kicks. While we were there the local FUNAI representative had to leave to go and see four men who were practising what was described as black magic. In a Christian community this was considered desperate behaviour that had to be stopped. The story of a recent sacrifice of a child in such a ceremony was chilling to hear.

  The Indian Police Service did a good job controlling violence but the policemen were all volunteers and clearly they could not grow crops while they were working for the police.

  According to Vilmar, Belém do Solimões was in a downward spiral that had become impossible to get out of. Poor education, lack of jobs and extreme poverty were compounded by the regulations of the reserves. The people we interacted with showed great warmth and generosity and the young children were happy and smiley. These people were surviving but it seemed clear that they felt that they were being neglected.