by Stafford, Ed
I had no background knowledge of how many grants the indigenous people actually received from the Brazilian government and whether these claims were overstated or not. But the one clear, undeniable truth appeared to be that there was an incompatibility between a reserve, intended to protect a subsistence, indigenous way of life, and these people who lived in a medium-sized town where money was necessary to survive. If the people dispersed and went back to their historical way of life they wouldn’t need money as they would live hand to mouth, as we had seen numerous times in Peru. But here in Brazil the Ticunas wanted electricity, TVs, convenience food and 10-megapixel digital cameras and so they had to trade with the rest of Brazil to earn money. Vilmar’s crime statistics offered uncomfortable evidence that things were not working under the current system.
The poverty and despair reminded me of Peru. This was, I would learn, atypical of Brazil, a country that had recently invested huge sums in education across the Amazon. Under President Lula, parents were now given grants if their children attended school and, as a result, the young population of Brazil was educated and open-minded – even in the remotest settlements. But there were still serious issues that Lula didn’t want or seem able to confront with regard to the rainforest.
From reading an article on Mongabay.com at this time I knew that a change had started to come about in the way companies and the World Bank dealt with the cattle industry in Brazil. Cattle ranching accounted for 79.9 per cent of deforestation and the World Bank withdrew a $90 million loan to the Brazilian cattle giant Bertin. I was stunned that the loan had been agreed in the first place but the withdrawal was a positive step towards stopping global support of this devastating industry.
At the same time the three biggest supermarket chains in Brazil – Carrefour, Wal-Mart and Pão de Açúcar – said they would suspend all trade in cattle products from farms involved in deforestation in a key area of the Amazon.
President Lula was still passing laws that privatised huge areas of the Amazon – the Brazilian government didn’t seem to feel the need to hide its close relationship with the agribusiness. Barack Obama was to describe him as ‘the most popular politician on earth’ but with regard to the environment Lula appeared weak to me. He was talking the talk about climate change, and taking offence when foreign countries wanted to stick their noses into Brazil’s affairs, and yet in June 2009 he passed legislation that was originally intended to legalise the landholdings of small settlers, but was changed to include provisions that benefited large land grabbers and business interests. The law would privatise ownership of up to sixty-seven million hectares of the Amazon rainforest, land that had been occupied illegally. This was an area bigger than Norway and Germany combined and the legislation flew in the face of Lula’s talk of conservation.
We bade Vilmar goodbye and headed back to Piranha where we had left off walking. As the narrow motor boat turned into the smaller Calderón tributary from the vast Solimões, the sudden immersion in lush green jungle gave me the same excited tingling in my stomach as if I had just caught sight of a girl I liked but hadn’t seen in ages. The tangled gallery forest sagged over the river’s edges, a heavy fringe of lianas and bromeliads. A smile played on my lips and, as Cho and I exchanged glances, it felt as if we were back where we belonged. I was in love with the jungle again.
From the village of Piranha we plunged back into walking. The first few hours after a significant break were always uncomfortable and these were a real effort. Our bodies and minds had grown flabby and complained at the exertion we were imposing on them.
We were now moving through flooded forest perhaps 40 per cent of the walking day. We would attempt to push away from the river and hop from one patch of high ground to another but we no longer had maps with contour lines on them, so we were having to rely on local advice and guesswork. Progress was slow, on average five kilometres a day at this stage, but Cho and I had been through worse and so we were comfortable enough.
Sam, like Luke before him, had bought boots that were fractionally too small and as a result his toes rubbed and all his toenails became infected in the constant wet. This made his experience much more painful, and he found himself in an environment that was unpleasant and exhausting.
Sam’s toes were bad and I suggested that he take a break from the expedition and return to Tabatinga, a suggestion he took with both hands. Sitting it out for a few days with some strong antibiotics in him would do him no harm – he was covered with hundreds of bites, cuts and bruises and his ankles were swollen like an old woman’s.
It was interesting to me that neither Cho nor I had a single blemish on our bodies at this time. It was clearly a sign that we were adapting the way we were walking so that we didn’t fall, we didn’t get scratched, and we’d long ago stopped reacting to bites. I felt a stronger bond with Cho than ever before and we continued on our own with a feeling of calm, quiet efficiency.
We’d all left Tabatinga fat. All of us had been overeating in the way you do when food has been scarce before. But now we were facing a serious calorie deficit. One of Sam’s toys had been a heart-rate monitor and it was telling him that he was burning 6,000 calories during the walking day. As that didn’t include evenings, nights and mornings, you could have conservatively estimated that he and I were burning 7,000 calories a day as we were about the same weight. Cho would be burning slightly less as he was lighter, but our 3,000-calorie-a-day diet certainly left a huge deficit for all of us.
Cho and I left Vendeval, from where Sam had taken the boat, with Enrique and Paulo, our two new guides. They had an intelligent sparkle in their eyes that relaxed me from the outset and they turned out to be great companions. Like so many of our transient team, they knew the jungle because they were hunters and they used to walk deep into the forest with their shotguns looking for tapirs, large rodents such as agouti, or the skunk-like kinkajou.
Sam rejoined us on 16 June in a colonial town called Santa Rita. We’d not realised it but we’d spilled out of the other side of the first indigenous reserve. It angered me how fearful I’d been about entering that reserve based solely on the horror stories I’d been told. It meant that Cho and I were increasingly fearless of these reserves from this point on. We’d wasted so much energy on worrying, that we stopped bothering to listen when people told us about the dangers to come.
To say the route ahead looked ominous was an understatement. This region of Brazil holds the largest extent of varzea in the world. It was June and the waters were now at their highest in this part of the river; the highest water level months alter significantly as the river flows into Brazil. We looked ahead at the floods and at the seemingly impossible task of following the river and making any progress at all. The floods posed two main problems: there was nowhere to camp, put up hammocks or light a fire, and also the speed at which we could walk was slowed dramatically. The lack of speed meant that each leg took longer and therefore we needed more food and so our packs were heavier.
The nice thing was that I knew where most of the floods were. The NASA imagery and Google Earth both highlighted clearly that if we wanted to stay anywhere near the Amazon we had to cross over to the south side at this point. Enter these coordinates into Google Earth [–3.564115°, –69.366513°] to try to plan a route on the northern bank. The curved scars that you can see are cut by the water and show clearly the extent of the varzea. The north side was almost out of the question and would have involved cutting over 20 kilometres or more into the forest and handrailing the river at that distance around the outside of a meander.
We all agreed we had to cross the main channel of the river and as Cho and I hadn’t done this for months we were apprehensive about the paddling distance involved. We had three pack rafts at the time but the risk was that we could get separated and arrive at points on the other side that were too far apart for us to see each other in order to meet up. The waves were huge, as big as those found at sea, the river was stuffed with caiman and our rafts comprised just one c
hamber of air and a very thin lightweight PVC material. The prospect of crossing and having problems in the centre of the river was daunting. The solution was that we hired a wooden boat from Santa Rita, and paddled it like a Canadian canoe, all of us in one boat, to the other side. This worked perfectly and it took us a mere fifteen minutes to cover the kilometre and a half.
The community of Ticuna people on the far side of the river was very surprised to see us but the people weren’t at all aggressive. Some of the women were noticeably timid of us; the village was set back behind the floods on the high ground and therefore they had less contact with the main river’s traffic.
Their main artery of transport for the community was a small, straight 10-metre-wide river heading 40 kilometres north-east to the town of São Paulo de Olivença. Our plan was simple: we would stay on the higher ground to the east of this river all the way to São Paulo, which was back on the main channel of the Solimões. From here, as far as we could see, the south side of the Solimões looked walkable – although we had some huge tributaries to cross along the way that would have their associated flooded forest adjacent to them. The problem with navigation was that, although the Brazilians had great topographical 1:100,000 maps of the country, they would not give them to us. We had tried the military, we had tried private companies in the USA, but all we could get were navigational charts of the river. These were indeed 1:100,000, so that scale was navigable, but they had no elevation markings. The only thing we wanted to do was to stick to high ground to avoid the floods but the one thing we didn’t have on any of our maps or images was any sort of contour lines. Our ability to see high ground on the maps was therefore somewhat limited.
From the Ticuna village we made São Paulo in eight days. On the eighth day we heard music, which Cho advised knowingly was six kilometres away. After a kilometre, we came out by an out-of-town bar that served beer and where a giant oil-drum barbecue was churning out spicy chicken legs for the clients. We drank beer and ate huge plates of chicken and then Sam and I went swimming with some local children in the natural pool at the rear of the bar.
From the town the 100 kilometres eastwards towards Amatura looked relatively easy. The majority of the terrain was high and we picked our way along the raised ground, often following old cattle trails or hunters’ paths, passing small farms and cattle ranches.
My method of navigating with Cho was simple. We’d rotate every half an hour and whatever decision one of us made in our half-hour at the front, the other would follow to the letter. There were always several options and the truth was that it didn’t matter which one we took. So Cho and I had this unwritten rule that to avoid wasting energy, the navigator’s decision was final.
I don’t think Sam could help it but he couldn’t stop questioning our navigational decisions. ‘Is there a reason we’ve come through here?’ he would ask me. I would justify my decision and if he disagreed he would tell me. The thing was, by this stage Cho and I were on autopilot and we never verbalised our decisions, so to be challenged was the equivalent of being insulted. Worse, when Cho was navigating (and he never once got us lost), Sam would insist that I translate to Cho his queries about Cho’s navigation. This was doubly worse because it was coming through me, annoying me that I was having to translate unnecessary provocations and pissing Cho off that his decisions were being repeatedly challenged.
Two things were concerning me now: one (as usual) was money (or the lack of it) and the other was the time the expedition was taking. Our three-month Brazilian visas were shortly to expire and we had no option but to go all the way back to Leticia, in Colombia, to renew them. I was irritated by this wasted time and money and the fact that I’d put these logistics in the hands of a man (Kavos) who seemed not to care.
The positive side to this enforced break was that by now everyone was shattered. Tempers were fraying and even the legendary patience of Cho was faltering. One day he walked 150 metres behind Sam and me, refusing to speak. He was at the end of his tether and really not enjoying the dynamics of the team.
Back in Tabatinga, on the Brazilian side, when we re-entered Brazil with our new three-month visas the Federal Police told us that the only way we would be able to get a third three-month visa was to go back to the UK. We could not get one in Colombia again. I relayed this news to Kavos who told me he would try to sort something in Manaus when we next needed to renew. It wasn’t very reassuring and it still meant that in three months’ time we would have to stop the expedition yet again and this time travel ahead of ourselves to Manaus.
Then I received an email from Kavos which sparked a feud that never died. He wrote to me with a suggested filming schedule for my time in Manaus. It involved filming in the opera house and other stuff irrelevant to me and, as I was stressed about money and visas at the time, I wrote the following stroppy reply:
OK Kavos,
I think you misunderstand the expedition. I do not have filming schedules or a crew. I am a one-man band who is essentially recording the hardships of walking for two years for a gritty documentary. I have no need to film Manaus. I’m not Bruce Parry! I still have no commission from any broadcaster and therefore no money.
The visas are my concern and are the ONLY thing that I need you to help me on …
The short-term 3 months is not useful as we will be in the middle of the jungle when we need to renew them. Also, when I entered Brazil the man said that after I had renewed once I would not be able to do so again as I can only be in Brazil for 6 months of the year! I really need the full-length visa to be in the country the whole of the expedition. I expect to arrive in Manaus by Christmas and Belém do Para in July 2010. I cannot afford for the expedition to fall apart because of the visas not being sorted. I have paid you $1,500 for this – and need you to sort it once and for all.
Getting through FUNAI areas was done in a fairly underhand way and I never had proper authorisation from FUNAI. But we got through by paying people bribes and buying chiefs cookers! This is not good enough really, Kavos. We hoped that by using a professional like you we could be completely legitimate.
What I need from you is the visas sorting properly once and for all. I have no more FUNAI areas to pass so they are not a problem any more. Just the visas for Gadiel [Cho] and for me.
Thanks,
Ed
On 4 July I got this reply from Kavos:
Ed,
The email was for not for you. I’m working on another production and the person is also Ed.
Please stop treating me as dog and anti occupation. I trigger my lawyer against you.
Kavos
The threat of legal action made me despair of Kavos. The expedition had become so stagnant because of this toing and froing to renew visas and he wasn’t helping in the way I had hoped he could. The vast stretches of jungle looming ahead of us before we reached Manaus were daunting and I didn’t want this negativity any more.
Back at the border and with access to airports, Sam received the news that his martial arts schools were suffering at the hands of the people he had left them in charge of. He’d spent a few years building them up and so felt obligated to return to England to sort them out. We both also recognised that a three-man team was one man too many and that Cho and I would progress better by ourselves from now on. My Spanish had improved enough for Cho and me to be able to chat freely about any subject, which meant the need for a friend from outside had diminished. Although Sam and I talked of him returning at some future point, I think I knew this wouldn’t happen.
No discredit to Sam though – he had come in with new ideas and energy at a time when I had still been struggling to hold everything together. He had done his bit and the expedition had evolved accordingly.
Somehow Cho and I had a system that worked but it was a delicate one, easily upset by a new member. From then on I never looked further than Cho for a jungle companion – he completely understood my cause. We didn’t celebrate Sam’s departure at all, but we were quietly content with
the far simpler dynamic provided by the two of us on our own.
Chapter Twelve
Starvation
IN PERU LOCAL Amazonians who hadn’t had much access to education or the outside world thought I was a pela cara and that we were human body organ traffickers. They would indicate this as we came through by running an index finger around their startled faces. In Brazil there appeared to be another myth attached to gringos – they feared I was a ‘corta cabeza’ (literally ‘head cutter’), and the Ticunan people had started making the throat-slitting sign with their index finger across the front of the throat.
The stories varied but many included people telling of bright lights in the sky and unaccountable deaths involving heads being removed. There was an ingrained fear and distrust of white men that made the walk more unsettling again.
For the first time on the expedition I almost lost my temper at an indigenous woman when she started shouting at us, saying that we shouldn’t be there and that I was a corta cabeza. I think it was the horrid recognition that we were going to have to go through another period of having people fear us until we proved otherwise – coupled with the lack of patience for such ignorance because of experiencing so much of it in Peru – that almost made me snap. The months of paranoia in Peru were a dark memory that I wanted to forget.
It broke Cho and my newfound positivity for a day or so. It’s hard to explain how happy we had been to wave goodbye to such ignorant fear in Peru. To be welcomed in Colombia with warm smiles was nothing short of wonderful. To see the problems recurring punched us both hard in the stomachs. We could deal with it – and it was no doubt somewhat linked to the way indigenous peoples have been treated in the past by colonial setters – but it was sad that such fear still existed in these people’s lives.