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

by Stafford, Ed

  As the day wore on the sun set on the far side of the lake, casting a warm, orange glow upon me as I stood in my shorts and Crocs preparing fish. Cho stopped after a while as we had so many fish we weren’t sure we could carry any more. Once they were on the green-stick grill we covered the kippered fish with fresh leaves to keep the heat and smoke circling around them as they cured.

  We cooked on the fire below the rack and ate a hearty fish broth with farine. It had been an important day for us in terms of resting and building up our protein stock but, probably more importantly, it showed that we were so far surviving very well without indigenous guides. As we went to bed we checked the smoked piranhas and tasted them. They were just fantastic, really salty and dry like beef jerky. They would make fantastic snacks over the next few days.

  In the morning I carefully lifted off the foliage that was now dry and crisp to reveal thirty of the best-looking kippered fish I had ever seen. It would have been such a boost for morale but for one accident. My boat, which I had left tied up but inflated in the water overnight, had an eight-inch tear in it. I never discovered the culprit but I suspected a caiman. We had eight to ten days’ walk to the next river that we thought might have settlements on it and my boat was completely unserviceable. These boats were not just for crossing rivers; with only two of us we could ferry each other across the rivers using just one of them. More dramatically and to the point, they were our emergency evacuation mode of transport, and now, with no medical insurance and just one boat, we were walking a tightrope.

  After a week of walking and living well on kippered fish and plentiful farine, Cho and I had started to run out of luck. We reached the river that had been our next target, the Minerazinho, on 3 September. This time, however, we’d not come out at a settlement and so we had to go searching.

  We patched the boat using thirteen bicycle inner tube patches from our boat repair kit so that they slightly overlapped each other. These held enough for me to paddle gently but I had to top up the air by mouth every ten minutes or so. As we paddled downstream at one point I heard what I thought was barking, only to see two giant river otters perched on a log. They soon plunged into the water but I could see there were more. I counted six in total; we had split the group, some above us and some downriver, and they were calling angrily to each other, rising high out of the water as they barked. The fact that they were not running away made me doubt there were any settlements around this area. The otters seemed to be completely undeterred by our presence.

  After two days of paddling, we had made only 9.32 kilometres’ direct line of sight and my boat had started leaking badly again. We had no idea if there were further communities downriver and we were 150 kilometres from the mouth of this river where it joined the Solimões as the crow flies. There could be a month of paddling at this speed.

  There was only one thing for it. We had to deflate the boats, walk back to where we had arrived on foot two days before, and push on without resupplying. The boat search had added three days to our journey already and I checked our farine supply to reveal that we had four cups left – 1,800 grams. I looked at the map and found a settlement marked: this was Maruá, 65 kilometres to our east. I estimated we could reach Maruá in eight days and we split the farine into eight portions so that we wouldn’t run out. That left us 225 grams a day between the two of us – some 450 calories per man per day – not much more calories than a single bagel each all day for eight days.

  We had another admin day and tried to catch as many fish as possible but unlike the oxbow lake, the river wasn’t as easy to harvest. We had lost our wire leaders that were necessary to stop the piranhas biting the hooks clean off the line. Never one to admit defeat, Cho ingeniously forged a daisy chain of sewing needles together in the fire using my Leatherman, and now he could fish again for piranhas with a hook and line. We ate river rushes for lunch and Cho managed to get quite badly bitten by a piranha in the afternoon; it took a good flap of skin off his index finger. He’d been too casual and, rather than carefully grabbing the fish from behind the head, he had somehow managed to allow his finger to be in the vicinity of the piranha’s mouth. You don’t make that mistake twice and the razor-sharp teeth had sliced clean through the tip of his finger. Cho wasn’t bothered by the bite; we were already far more worried about our stomachs. Even before we set off we were both really low on energy and we’d simply not got enough food in us to continue operating in the same way.

  We left the Minerazinho with perhaps twelve kippered piranhas and our now seven days of rationed farine. We were constantly on the lookout for fruit and nuts on the forest floor. Occasionally we would find nutrient-dense Brazil nuts and spend ten minutes eating them and then pocket the remainder for supper and move on. On the best foraging days I would say we got our daily calorie count up to 2,000 a day with seasonal fruit and nuts, but we knew we were burning in excess of 5,000 calories a day. Most days we had the ration of a quarter of a cup of farine and nothing else.

  Weight was dropping off us both fast and neither of us could think for long about anything other than food. I couldn’t sleep at night, lying in my hammock dreaming of Mr Kipling French Fancies and stodgy flapjack. We would get up in the morning like zombies and laugh at our withering bodies. When it came to eating the small ration of farine we treated it with reverence; our meal became almost a ceremony and the most important part of the day. In texture farine is quite similar to soy protein; it’s a yellow, grainy, pellet-like substance. Each one of these small pellets became a nugget of gold to us. We savoured every spoonful with a bit of salt.

  On day five of this extreme rationing we came across a beautiful small brook at about two in the afternoon and we both saw the opportunity to try to fish, despite it not being the end of the walking day. I laid the gill net across the three-metre-wide stream and within seconds I had caught six decent-sized fish. We could not pass up this dream river and so decided to stop for the day and make camp. Cho used a rod and line while I just harvested with the net. Both of us brought in big catches that were all for the pot. We had eaten three pots of fish broth by the time we were full. The sensation was phenomenal; the fats in the fish floated on the surface of the broth and as the food entered our stomachs they started to groan, as if they were coming back to life. The fats were absorbed immediately and our brains started to function again. We had highs purely from eating food. We were so hungry that we didn’t even consider smoking any of these fish; we just wanted a full recharge. That said, we did save some fish for the morning and slept soundly with full bellies.

  On the eighth and last day of rationing we ate all our farine at breakfast knowing that we needed to walk a long twelve-kilometre day to reach Maruá. The jungle had become swampy and gnarled again as it was the flooded forest of the upcoming River Juruá. This meant the going should have been slow but as we had no food in our packs now, and because the end was in sight, we crashed through the stunted black trees at a phenomenal pace.

  At 7 p.m. we’d gone straight through the coordinates that the map had given us and we were a full kilometre beyond. Our heads dropped as we realised there was no settlement, and we’d punished ourselves all day to arrive before nightfall. It was now completely dark and we hadn’t seen water for hours so we just decided to put up our hammocks and sleep. Without even clearing a space in the undergrowth we each found two trees quickly and hung our hammocks. Unfed and unwashed, we went to bed. The grimy layer of sweat and dirt on our skin made the night unpleasant as well as dispiriting. We took tiny sips from our almost empty water bottles and tried to sleep.

  In the morning, with sleep our mood had lifted and nearby we found some aguaje fruits, a nut with a soft, orange flesh with a vague smell of vomit, to complement the last of a single dried piranha. We sipped the dregs of our water, which was brown as it had come from a puddle rather than a river, and had no option but to continue. All we had by way of edible provisions was a half-kilo of salt.

  To us, unwashed, exhausted and starving,
that morning represented everything that, deep down, I wanted from the expedition. We were 150 kilometres from the main channel of the Solimões (Amazon), about 25 kilometres away from the next big tributary, the Juruá. We had had a deficit of over 3,000 calories a day for the past eight days and we had no option but to put the facts to one side and continue as normal. No words would make any difference, no blame, no analysis. We just had to go on and deep down we expected to be OK.

  There were no rivers so we ate only palm hearts all day. Our first trial at sourcing all our carbohydrates from the jungle worked but you have to eat a lot of these salad vegetables to fill you up. Palmitos, or heart of palm, in fact became our salvation. Normally we wouldn’t have cut these down because, in order to get to the soft, white palm heart in the centre at the top of the tree, you cannot avoid killing the whole palm. In our feeble state, each palm was quite an effort to fell with our machetes but the white flesh inside was the best salad vegetable I have ever tasted. These patches of palmitos were sporadic at best, however, and so we kept our eyes peeled for the tops of the trees, looking for the distinctive red stems.

  Cho looked like a featherweight boxer now and I, too, had never lost so much weight. My normal weight is about 92 kilograms. I had dropped to about 88 kilograms before I set out on this leg of the expedition and by the time I arrived at the banks of the Solimões again I would be 81 kilograms. As we walked we stumbled frequently and snapped in and out of blood sugar crashes as we impaled ourselves on spiky vegetation in our half-aware state.

  The following day everything came good. Cho walked straight into a huge tortoise weighing in at around 10 kilograms. It was morning and so we couldn’t lose time by stopping and preparing the animal. We would just have to carry it. We took turns to pack the lead-weight live animal into the tops of our packs.

  Eventually we came to a large river, the first we’d seen in a week or so, and I set about cutting up the tortoise. I’d watched Boruga and the Asheninka men do this before and so I knew how to do it; but I never expected it to be quite such a horrific task. If you are not used to killing animals a tortoise is not the best to start with. You have to turn it on its back, hack at the exoskeleton shell between the foot holes until the bottom is loose and then peel it back like the lid of a tin of beans. Except that the bottom is clearly attached to the tortoise still inside and needs to be sliced off with the machete. The underside of the shell has to be off before you can kill the animal and so I grabbed the now defenceless head and cut it off to kill the creature as quickly as I could. The body then kept twitching for the whole time that it took to cut out the rest of the meat and remove the intestines. I washed everything and used the upturned shell as a bowl and cut the tortoise up into small strips which I then salted. Cho made a drying rack and we had a huge amount of meat cured and smoking over the fire. Our morale was flooding back and we were elated by the prospect of food.

  I realise that some people might be shocked and distressed about the killing of tortoises, but I think it has to be put into the context of where we were and how long we had travelled with so little food. In our natural state we humans are designed to be omnivores and the jungle is a place where we could survive if we took advantage of what nature had to offer. Although the physical process of killing the animal was quite an ordeal I won’t pretend I was sad – this was a natural way of living and the tortoise was part of our food chain. I had begun to see animals in the forest as the locals did – rather than exotic beasts that needed to be preserved, I saw food.

  In the morning we crossed the river simply by walking through it. It was perhaps 40 metres wide, but it was shallow and the small part that we had to cross was easy. We strode out on the far side and could immediately tell that people had been in the area. Small paths turned into what appeared to be a dirt logging road which we followed in the hope that it would lead us to people. We ate only our tortoise-meat jerky throughout the morning and had not eaten any carbohydrates, save the limp palm hearts, for over three days.

  At about 1 p.m. we saw a wooden shack with a tin roof on top of a hill and made straight for it. As we approached, a woman came to the door and I explained what we were doing. I have no idea what we must have looked like after thirty-seven straight days of jungle from Amatura. The woman called her husband who had been making farine and he came and spoke to us. They were amazed when we told them where we had come from; they said that, to their knowledge, no one had ever made that journey before. They were about to have lunch and invited us to eat.

  We dumped our packs outside in the blistering dry heat of the cleared hill and climbed a ladder to enter the cooler wooden hut on stilts. Inside there was no furniture, just a huge pan of fish broth in the middle of the floor, a plastic tub of fresh farine that was still warm, having just been made, and a stack of glass plates. The woman dished us out a plate of soup each as we sat on the floor among the family’s children. They watched us wolf down the first plate, then the second, then the third. I know we had eaten tortoise jerky earlier that morning, but the cumulative carbohydrate rationing and overall calorie deficit meant that our bodies had still felt starved and we ate and ate this glut of farine. Looking back, I doubt the farine was any different from farine elsewhere in Brazil, but at the time Cho and I could not stop eating it. It had the most wonderful warm texture and when eaten with the broth it was the best meal I had ever tasted. It is certainly true that the best way to appreciate food is to be truly hungry before you eat. I will never forget that meal as long as I live.

  The family waved goodbye to us at about 3 p.m. and pointed us in the direction of Juruá. We had 30 kilometres to cover and expected it to take four days. We bought farine from the family to last us over this time and we also bought coffee, milk powder and sugar, luxuries we hadn’t had for weeks.

  The next few days saw the worst jungle of the entire expedition: low, tangled rainforest, with a canopy no higher than six metres, with gnarled, black branches blocking our path. Every soggy step gave way and sank our feet up to our thighs; every branch we clung to was covered either in spines or ants. It was the height of dry season now and I dreaded to think what the forest would have been like at any other time of year; completely impassable I suspect. It bore out my decision to cut across the meander from Amaturá to Tefé.

  Our progress was painfully slow. One morning we advanced no more that 400 metres. After the false dawn of a house on the hill, I had thought we were home and dry and had pretty much reached Juruá City. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  That distance took us six of the toughest days I could remember. I hated every step of it. I was no longer thriving on the thrill of adventure and no longer in survival mode. I had had enough and I just allowed myself to be miserable and pissed off all day long.

  Eventually, after hearing motor boats for two days, we could see daylight ahead. The Juruá River itself was vast compared to anything we’d seen since leaving the Solimões and carved out an impressive gorge through the forest, ripping palms and hardwoods from the ground ruthlessly as it constantly altered its course.

  Despite our lack of money, I asked for the best hotel in Juruá City. It wasn’t luxurious by Western standards but the fact that Cho and I had a double bed each and air conditioning meant that we were in a palace after more than forty days of walking through what must have been some of the most difficult rainforest anywhere in the world.

  The Juruá River marked the halfway point to Tefé. Juruá ‘City’ was a humid, sweaty jungle town with wood-built shops that sat perched on a rare mound of high ground overlooking the low, green sprawl of the Amazon Basin. If a man in a Stetson with low-slung six-shooters had trotted into town on a horse named Silver he would have fitted in perfectly. As long as he spoke a bit of Portuguese.

  The contrast between stepping out of the famine of our expedition into the excess of civilisation was remarkable. I spotted one local girl who was not overweight but the rest of the town seemed like personifications of sloth and greed.

/>   We indulged in both those sins. My inbuilt regulator that should have stopped me eating had broken down. I was riding a rollercoaster that was flipping me back and forth between hunger and sickening overeating. Our bodies wanted to build up some fat stores again as we ploughed through cream cakes and egg sandwiches as if we had just been let out of a concentration camp.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Cuando hay – hay. Cuando no

  hay – no hay’

  I MADE A little hole in the mosquito net in my room in Juruá and fed the LAN cable through it. Outside I balanced the plastic BGAN on a nearby wall and pointed it at the invisible geostationary Inmarsat satellite in the sky to my west. Once connected up, I had the fastest Internet in the whole of the Amazon in a town that had never heard of Google. I decided as I was in a town that I could afford a few precious megabytes of bandwidth to check the news and brought up the BBC website. I trawled through the last month of news.

  ‘Soldiers died helping colleague’ I read. Then I went cold. No way. Mark Hale, my first sergeant major in the army, who had written to me about the casualties that the regiment had taken in Afghanistan, had been killed. Just four days after his email on 9 August he had been caught in an explosion while helping an injured soldier to safety near Sangin.

  I knew he had a wife, Brenda, and two daughters, although I’d never met them, and I just sat on my bed absorbing the sad truth. Like most blokes, we hadn’t kept in contact but I’d sponsored him online for a charity event he’d done recently and we’d exchanged a couple of emails since.