by Stafford, Ed
In early August 2009 Cho and I reached Amatura on foot and the remarkable thing was how much the water had dropped. The town sat aloft huge mudflats with many moored boats now stranded above the waterline. Cho and I grinned at the evidence of our first Amazonian flood season being behind us – and what an exceptional flood season it had been, one of the worst in years. The ground would now be harder, the rivers lower, and we had to take advantage of these advantageous conditions while we had them. We just needed to make as much ground as possible before the waters started rising again in November and December.
Cho and I went for a very quiet beer, spread the map out over the table and calmly considered the route ahead. There was a huge, sweeping meander in the Solimões River ahead of us that curved north from Amatura up to Fonte Boa like a giant rollercoaster and then curved back down south to the town of Tefé. The problem was that this route passed many populated areas and we now had no money at all. We could not afford food, lodging or local guides. As Cho and I were alone again and we had renewed confidence in each other’s abilities, we made the bold decision that had been playing on my mind for a while. My idea was to cut straight across the meander from Amatura to Tefé. It would be some 350 kilometres as the crow flies and I estimated we could do the leg in two months. That would be two whole months until we saw the main channel of the river again. It meant a number of things: we would be avoiding the towns and villages to the north that flanked the river, and we would be pretty much alone in the jungle for the next two months which was – importantly – dirt cheap.
It actually meant so much more than that: we would be starting a whole different level of expedition. Rather than merely passing from settlement to settlement with the safety of the main river just a stone’s throw away as an evacuation route, we would be completely isolated in the middle of the rainforest and we would just have to cope by ourselves. There were no boat or helicopter rescue or medic teams here. There is no emergency call-out number to the jungle. We did have our insurance package that had four Ex-Med medics in Hereford on sixteen hours’ notice to move, to fly out to wherever we had sent the distress message from, but the insurance was about to lapse (because of the time we had taken) and we had no money to renew it.
If we got into trouble we just had to deal with it. There was no other way round it. The plan was simple: an evacuation would be to walk or carry the casualty to the nearest big river that was navigable in our little inflatable rafts and paddle downstream, towing the casualty’s raft if necessary, until we came to a community with a boat and a motor. We would then pay whatever was necessary to get us to the nearest hospital, possibly upgrading to a faster boat as we went. Once in a hospital, the Brazilians would treat us for free. We’d tested this. So as long as we could get ourselves there we were fine.
The danger was in the remoteness, however. At times we would be five days’ walk from the last navigable river and five days from the next. If one of us was seriously ill or injured then that five days could take much longer. If one of us couldn’t walk, it could be impossible. We deliberately spoke about this. If we needed medical treatment urgently when we were remote we would die. Were we prepared to take that seemingly unacceptable risk? ‘Of course,’ said Cho without flinching. ‘Me, too,’ I smiled.
The idea was to carry huge amounts of food but ration it strictly. Limit ourselves to a specific quantity of farine per day and we could push the distances that we could cover. We would stop carrying tins of tuna, cured meat or sardines and we would save yet more weight. We simply had to catch fish if we wanted animal protein.
We kept hearing stories of the fierce tribes that lived further away from the river and we weren’t sure what to expect if we came across communities. Would they be civilised like those tribes next to the river? Would they let us pass? By this point Cho and I had a lot of confidence in people who had been less contacted. We’d heard so many exaggerated stories that we were sure we would cope; we had to.
We were entering territory where encounters with the big Amazonian creatures became far more of a possibility: the bushmaster – the largest pit viper in the world; the black caiman – the largest carnivorous reptile in South America; herds of hundreds of fierce, defensive peccaries with their dangerous tusks; elusive pumas and certainly majestic jaguars.
A surge of adrenaline shot through me as I fantasised about what we were about to attempt. We would have to draw upon all our knowledge and experience to date and we would soon see if we were as competent in the jungle as we now thought we were.
We sourced permits from a local FUNAI outpost to enter the local Ticuna reserve. We then hired a canoe and travelled into the reserve to the village of Bon Pastur to look for a guide. Our gift to the chief was our old dry-cell motorcycle battery. This might seem an odd present but we knew it would be handy for running electric lights at night when the generator was turned off and no gift ever seemed to be patronising. I had often seen Cho give a half-bottle of warm Inca Kola as a present to tribal chiefs in Peru. Two Ticuna men from the community, Wilson and Valdir, agreed to walk with us all the way to Tefé. Wilson was chubbier and more Westernised, with a kind smile and a chatty manner. Valdir looked every bit the wild, indigenous Amazonian man. He was stern, with much darker skin and a lean, uncompromising body without a gram of fat on him. Valdir rarely spoke to us, but I was pleased to have such a tough-looking individual walking with us. The two of them agreed to meet us the following day in Amatura, and Cho and I went back to the town to get ready.
The battery was the one we’d been using to charge the laptop. The system was inefficient and just too heavy so we gave the battery away and put the solar rolls and the inverter in our spares bag that we left back in Tabatinga. This meant that we were now reliant on generators in communities to charge everything and, in between, we just had to make the batteries last by being very prudent with use of all electronic kit.
In an expedition through the jungle when you are on the move every day I would advise against solar charging. We had four six-foot solar rolls resembling silver foil scrolls that we would lay out in the all-too-rare clearings. But the few patches of direct sunlight made us chase them round the forest floor as the day progressed and the shadows shifted. As a result things charged at a painfully slow speed – if we could get them to power up at all. With hindsight, I would have chosen a computer less power-hungry and lighter than my two-kilogram Macbook. With the advances in technology since I’d set off, the expedition now could be blogged, including edited videos, with palm-held devices that ran direct from 12v – but our planning had been done in pre-iPad days.
Cho and I chatted about the cost of the two Ticuna guides. If they walked with us all the way to Tefé we would have to pay for their boat journeys home. We couldn’t afford this and so we asked them if they could just accompany us for the first ten days to the village of Porto Seguro. It was not ideal but, anyway, there was something about attempting the most remote section of the expedition without local guides that appealed to us. We were beginning to find a working relationship that was very complementary and anyone who came in might upset that.
Cho bought supplies for us but this time only after a very thorough list was drawn up and analysed meticulously by both of us. We calculated everything to reduce weight and keep us walking longer. We couldn’t afford any luxury food (chocolate, oats, peanuts etc.) and we couldn’t afford to take any boat trips ahead to conduct reconnaissance – even if we found tributaries.
Cho and I didn’t feel sorry for ourselves; our financial situation simply meant that we were going to experience one hell of an adventure. Clearly, I had the worry of my house being taken away if my mortgage payments weren’t met but, as far as the expedition was concerned, we would make it work. We would have to be permanently based in our hammocks for the foreseeable future and rely far more on fishing and foraging to stay healthy. If, in the next two months, we came across settlements big enough to have basic hostels we would have to move straight on; we couldn
’t afford to stay in them.
Before we set out I had to do something to rectify the financial situation. Even though we had enough to cover the next two months I had to recognise that JBS Associates might never be able to pay again – and, quite apart from the effects of the recession on them, they had already been more than generous, expending £35,000 in total. I needed to find alternative sponsors or donors to help the expedition otherwise in Tefé we would probably have to admit defeat and go home due to lack of funds.
I put out a plea online asking people to ask their companies if they would sponsor us. I put a PayPal donate button on the website and asked readers if they could possibly donate to keep the expedition going. My lifelong friend from school, George, and my mum, Ba, did huge amounts of work behind the scenes talking to people and writing letters to try to bring in some much-needed funds. Every family friend was asked and as many grants/sponsorships as they could think of were applied for.
I left Amatura with Cho and the Ticunas on 7 August thinking I’d done as much as I could to set right our financial difficulties. I just had to hope things worked and recognised that I needed to focus on the 350 kilometres of jungle that lay ahead until we saw the main river again.
Wilson and Valdir, the Ticuna men from Bon Pastur, settled into a pace and we progressed well, although I could tell the guys weren’t enjoying it that much.
Our first target, Porto Seguro, was about 80 kilometres from Amatura, but it wasn’t marked on our 1:1 million aeronautical map. We found it on somebody else’s map in the FUNAI office in Amatura and so we drew it on our white featureless chart in pencil. Then we found it somewhere else on another map in a school, so we drew that on to our map, too. The two pencil points for Porto Seguro on our map were, comically, 30 kilometres (three or four days’ jungle walking) apart and we hoped that one of them would be correct.
We were walking through the Amazon with no idea where the next river would come, with water in our camera bags (deliberately) acting as a reserve, looking for a community that might be anywhere within an area the size of central London.
Of far greater concern was an email from an old sergeant major of mine, Mark Hale, by this time commissioned, who told me that my old regiment (now 2nd Battalion The Rifles) was only halfway through its tour of Afghanistan and had had thirteen men killed and ninety injured. They still had three months of their tour to push. This was a huge loss for any unit to absorb and continue fighting, and it made me realise that my journey was child’s play in comparison.
On 20 August, after walking about nine kilometres a day, we broke out into an old agricultural field. Our eyes jolted at the shock of being able to focus at distance and our pupils contracted in the blaze of sunlight. We’d not seen any signs of human life for seven days – no paths, no cut foliage, nothing, so when we saw a huge clump of sugar cane we sat down on the baked earth and, in my rush to chew the sweet sticks, I snapped off my false tooth. I sat considering how far away from a dentist I was with sugary dribble running down my stubbly chin.
While replenishing the glycogen stores in our muscles with the sugar cane, we heard the vibration of small motor boat and knew we were close to humanity. Wiping our mouths, we searched for the exit from this cleared plot of land and soon found a wide path heading east. The path became wider as we followed it with the Ticuna men up front so that they would be the first to meet anyone we encountered. We crossed a small log bridge and in the distance I could see a thatched house. We walked straight into a community smiling and offering ‘Boa tarde!’ to the surprised villagers. Their surprise didn’t last long and their welcome was universally accepting and kind. These people weren’t Ticunas; they were caboclos – mixed-race Brazilians – who were living a very simple life away from the Solimões in a fishing village deep in the forest on a small river. They told us we were in Porto Seguro.
I plotted our position on the map and chuckled at our blind luck. We had headed east, sometimes using a compass and sometimes just the sun, and we had, after eight days, walked straight into the settlement that we’d been aiming for. The funny bit was that the two pencil marks on my map were still 20 and 26 kilometres away in opposite directions. The chance of being this accurate if we’d known where we were going would have been slight – but to walk straight in down the main path without having any idea that the community was here was astonishing. As on many other occasions I felt as if we were being looked after and, even though I’m not religious, I could not help but ponder on our continuing incredible fortune.
Valdir and Wilson hadn’t enjoyed the walking, however. They were exhausted, found the weight too much and wanted to go home. This suited us anyway as we couldn’t afford to keep them on and so we organised to hire a boat from the village to take them back. I’m not sure why Cho and I then asked around the village for more guides – perhaps it was habit – but no one wanted to walk. These were fishermen and didn’t ever enter the jungle at all. I was surprised at this as they lived in a more remote location than Cho or I had visited to date and yet they never went into the trees. It worked for us, anyway, and made the acceptance of the fact that from here we were walking on our own easier to accept.
Porto Seguro was good to us and we were shown the school, given food and talked through what little the inhabitants knew about what lay ahead for us. After eight days’ walking we were tired and decided to take the following day off. I lazed in my hammock and sewed a hem into my cut-off shorts while Cho was invited to go fishing.
The Porto Seguro villagers waved us off with friendly jibes that we would be eaten by jaguars. Our next target was the Riozinho, a smaller tributary that we expected to be six days’ walk away. We knew there were settlements on the river but had no idea where.
The forest floor as we left Porto Seguro was saturated mud that had very recently been underwater. Imagine a place that has twisted, gnarled roots, thick, razor wire-like thorns and mud that sucks you down into it, weighing - every - laboured - step - down. Then imagine not having any idea when it will end. In an hour? Four hours? Four days?
I had what could almost be described as a panic attack on day two of this leg. I had an intense feeling of claustrophobia; not only could I not get out from the dark walls of green vegetation that closed in all around us but I had no idea when the terrain would change. It was the closest, most difficult and unpleasant forest to cut through that we’d encountered so far. We found patches of high ground, islands really, to camp on at night but fishing was impossible as there were no rivers, just mud, thorns, mosquitoes and horseflies.
It took five days to leave the area that the river flooded during the wet season. That’s not five days to the next river and community; it was five days just to leave the riverine jungle that surrounded Porto Seguro.
Cho and I were getting on better than ever before. I would give him basic English lessons and we would chat in Spanish far longer and in more depth than we had done to date. After having spoken to Cho solely in Spanish for 11 months, his first official lesson made me smile: ‘Ed, when there is more than one of something, add an “s”.’ We’d seen so many people come and go – guides, photographers, journalists, friends – but the one constant and reliable presence we had was each other, and we started to appreciate that.
Cho and I feigned nonchalance but we were both shocked by the weight we were now carrying as a two-man team. My pack at this stage was up to about 38 kilograms and Cho’s just under, at about 35 kilograms; when working hard with a machete through the dense jungle those were considerable weights to deal with. Cho weighed only 60 kilograms himself and so he was carrying well over 50 per cent of his bodyweight, but we needed to ensure we had enough food to last us until we found another settlement.
The weight ultimately proved too much for Cho and he sprained his ankle quite badly, a nuisance in most circumstances, potentially life-threatening in ours. I took some of the weight off him and he was brave about carrying on; but the shock of just how serious an injury could be to both of us a
t this point made us much more careful about how we walked and jumped down from huge fallen trees. If either of us could not walk we were in big trouble. Neither of us had ever been so remote.
We passed the next river, the Riozinho, on 27 August and again we were unbelievably lucky and walked straight into a village. Despite having no shop, the confused villagers sold us eight kilos of farine, two of salt and three heads of garlic. The total cost was seventeen reais (under £4) and we hoped it would last us eight days. That was all we needed to keep going – carbohydrates and salt. As long as we could find some big enough rivers to fish, Cho and I were OK. We stopped for only twenty minutes on the Riozinho; neither of us wanted to stay any longer. More than ever we felt part of the jungle now and increasingly we shied away from people.
One day beyond the Riozinho we found an oxbow lake and decided to have an admin day. We could fish, Cho could rest his ankle and we would both benefit from not walking for a day.
The lake was stunning, a completely isolated bean shape that was curtained on all sides by lianas and vines hanging down into the brown water. Our camp was comfortably above the water level and, as the water was dropping, the fish were highly concentrated in the lake. Cho took one of the rafts out with a hook and line and peacefully caught one fish after another. I took the other boat and set the gill net close to the bank among the shaded shallow areas. These nets are so efficient that they are illegal in the UK; the fish swim into the holes and get stuck – it is that simple. Even before leaving the net I retrieved several piranhas and it was clear that the lake was abundant enough to mean we would have more fish than we could eat in one day. I made a drying rack above the fire; nothing complicated, just four ‘Y’-shaped uprights, a couple of crossbars and then lots of thin green sticks to act as the grill. It was about a metre high so that the fish would be smoked rather than cooked. I was experimenting really, having watched this process before in different places, but never having had to rely on it for our sole source of protein. I then spent the afternoon in a factory-like process of retrieving fish from the net, taking the ones that Cho had caught, too, scaling, gutting, salting and generally kippering them. My hands stung where the scratches had salt rubbed into them and my shorts were plastered in fish scales and blood.