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

by Stafford, Ed

  I had been happy to be back in contact with Mark. He was an inspirational man who was looked up to by many and he had a big influence on me as a young officer after my dad died. He was a very fit and strong man, a rugby player, and he had gained a masters degree in psychology while serving in the army and eventually became a captain. When I struggled to hold it together in the jungle at times, I thought of Mark and how he would deal with situations with composure, humour and wisdom. I couldn’t believe he was dead; then, as it sank in, I felt honoured to have had that small bit of contact with him before he died.

  Death does seem to be amazing at cutting through what does and doesn’t matter. Suddenly being a bit low on food and having some scratches on my body from thorny bushes seemed the most trivial thing in the world. As I stared at his photo on the screen I took a long, deep breath, held it, and then slowly let it out. I was going to take strength from Mark; I was going to make sure that the exemplary impact he had had on me lasted even beyond his death.

  On 24 September Cho and I struggled even to put our packs on as we clomped out of Juruá City. With nine kilograms of food each – enough to last us two weeks – my pack was an absurd 40 kilograms and Cho’s close behind at 36 kilograms. We had not carried this much since Luke and I left Camaná in April 2008 but our map ahead was blank – there was nowhere to resupply.

  The immediate jungle was a mess. Tangled thorns grew where old agricultural fields had been and in three hours we were scratched, frustrated and had barely gone three kilometres. It was 3.30 p.m.

  Concurrently we found water and a wide path that led back to Juruá. In theory we should have made camp but the mosquitoes were bad and we were fed up with the pathetic start we had made.

  Then a cheeky idea came into my head. ‘Why don’t we hide our packs here, Cho, and nip back to Juruá for one last night in a bed?’ I said. I wanted a good sleep but I certainly didn’t fancy carrying this huge weight all the way back to the town. The plan was hatched and we buried our packs under lots of foliage and used the wide path to reach the town again in a mere forty minutes. We took with us nothing more than our water bottles and my wallet.

  A few hours later, back in the same hotel room, Cho called through the closed door: ‘Ed, the police are here and would like to speak to you.’ I went outside to where two policemen were sitting in a shiny new police car. I smiled and asked the officers if there was a problem.

  ‘We’ve had reports that you and your friend have been acting suspiciously on the outskirts of the town and we need to see your passports,’ said the police chief in Portuguese.

  ‘Of course, no problem,’ I replied. ‘The only slight hiccup is that we’ve hidden our passports in the bushes three kilometres out of town.’

  Not surprisingly, that didn’t go down as unsuspicious behaviour and they arrested us on suspicion of drugs running.

  The police chief was not a nice man and he took great pleasure in locking us up. There was no space in the single male cell that had about six men living on top of each other in hammocks, so we were told to sleep on the concrete floor in the corridor between the male and female cells.

  There was no bed, let alone bedding, and the iron door was locked on us from the outside. Through the letterbox window we could look out at the policemen sitting around a table playing cards and laughing. We might have been in a spaghetti western.

  The next morning we were accompanied by four armed police to the place where we’d hidden the packs and then ordered to carry them back to the police station in town. At the station we first showed our passports and then had to empty all the contents of our packs and explain every item. It was funny how these policemen were as suspicious of us as the Asheninka tribe in Peru had been more than a year ago and that we were now being asked to do the same thing. On this occasion, though, I reckoned the police were offended that we hadn’t presented ourselves to them on arrival and explained ourselves. They seemed to me to be demonstrating their power.

  By mid-afternoon, proceedings were over and we checked into the hotel once again. Cho and I went to get something to eat as we were starving and we met a family – American husband, Brazilian wife – who worked for IBAMA, the agency that looks after Brazil’s national parks. When we explained what we were doing, the wife announced that the area we were about to walk through was a reserve and that we didn’t have permits to do so.

  Ever conscious of wasting time and therefore money, I kept calm and polite on the outside while I considered the additional bureaucracy that we would need to overcome to get permits. She arranged a meeting at her offices and said we would need to apply through her for a permit. We would also have to hire a trusted guide from her department to ensure that we complied with the rules of the reserve. Obviously I was fine with that but it was frustrating to be delayed by yet another problem.

  In the meantime, one positive was that we had received quite a few donations through PayPal so that we had money for the next leg after Tefé.

  Soon we were off again, permit in hand and very expensive obligatory guide in tow. We scooted down the clearly defined network of paths and cleared the reserve in two easy days. We said goodbye to the guide who, in the short time he was with us, considerably enhanced our fishing skills, and headed into a part of the country which there seemed to be no record of anyone having entered before.

  Imagine a forest designed for the training of soldiers to fight trench warfare. Mazes of tunnels under logs and channels running off in every direction. Each trench is four foot deep, dry as a bone, and is barricaded with fallen trees, thorns the size of four-inch nails and brambles that cut your skin like a cheese grater.

  This was the jungle we had entered. I had never seen anything like it. The dry ditches were clearly natural drainage channels in the wet season but now they were nothing but obstacles in our path. The fact that they reminded me of military training meant that the whole thing seemed like some elaborate test of our bottle. We shared the machete work – half an hour each up front – our hands increasingly wounded on the spines. We slid down the mud into the ditches full of matted thorns and hauled ourselves up and out the far side on our muddy knees. After finding a log bridge to cross one trench, Cho turned to me. ‘In life there are many obstacles, Ed, you must learn to find solutions.’ ‘What a golden nugget of wisdom, Cho. Christ,’ I thought silently, rolling my eyes.

  Over the days my hopes of being strengthened by Mark Hale’s splendid example faded and I found it hard to stop feeling sorry for myself. Every step was tiring and slow, and after falling through a rotten log into a trench and slicing a chunk out of my calf I could see the pity on Cho’s face. I was also annoyed with myself for failing to raise my game.

  In Cho’s look I caught a glimpse of what it was like to view myself from the outside. So, after we made camp and had a reinvigorating sweet coffee and the last of the fried salted beef, I fell to thinking. I concluded that all my weakness was in my head and that I would turn things into a game. I did just that and, for now at least, it worked.

  I would start the day positive and upbeat and then, as each negative experience cropped up, I would set myself the challenge of laughing at it and not allowing it to bring me down. Each time I succeeded I would give myself a pat on the back and it boosted my morale further to think I was gaining control over the way I reacted to external influences. Each cut, fall or sting became an excuse to reaffirm how in control I was – and I started thoroughly to enjoy walking again and we began to flow through the jungle. The slog became a thrill – our speed increased and it was almost like playing a computer game as snakes, wasps’ nests or log bridges became hurdles to be overcome efficiently and nonchalantly as we cruised along. I felt like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix – the point at which he becomes so powerful that he can fight with just one arm working at super-speed while the rest of his body is still and relaxed.

  The unexpected trenches had slowed us down, however, and so in early October we had to halve our farine rations again so that w
e didn’t run out. If we didn’t catch fish we were on a thousand calories a day; we soon got used to what seemed a luxury compared to the 450 daily calories before Juruá.

  On 5 October we left the small puddle in which we’d camped and set out with our muddy two litres of sodium-hydroxide-treated water. The bizarre trench forest now looked hurricane-damaged, with every large tree splintered and horizontal. As the sunlight poured in, the undergrowth spread over it as if it had been put on a course of anabolic steroids. Our progress slowed to two kilometres in the whole eight-hour day. We had to take our packs off to hack through the dense wall, one cutting, the resting man bringing both packs forward.

  The combination of the ripped-up jungle and start of the dry season meant that at 5 p.m. we were very dehydrated and still sipping the brown water dregs from the previous night’s puddle. The water table was too low here, so no point in digging a well, and we started to become concerned that we wouldn’t find water. We would have nothing to drink or cook with, and an unpleasant night of grimy, unwashed sleep lay ahead.

  As if on cue, thunder started to rumble, deep and long over the canopy. The light dimmed markedly and Cho and I exchanged a knowing look through the deepening gloom.

  Quick as a flash, we changed our plan. Cho smashed ahead without his pack to look for trees that were still upright so that we could erect our flysheets. I dragged the two rucksacks up from behind, getting caught up on every thorny branch.

  As the first spots of rain filtered through the branches, we were tying the last truckers’ hitch to our canopies, a waterproof camera bag under one side of my tarpaulin and my backpack liner under the other. As the cloud properly burst the fresh water flowed from our flysheets into our makeshift reservoirs like garden hoses filling kids’ paddling pools.

  The tropical downpour lasted only six minutes but we collected thirty-five litres of water: thirty-five pure, clear litres that needed no chemical treatment.

  We bathed, drank coffee by the bucket-load, Cho said a quick thank you to God, and then we retired to our hammocks, and slept like the fallen logs that lay around us.

  By mid-October we were again even more remote than I’d ever been in my life. Granted, this was not in terms of distance; it was in terms of the number of days it would take us to get back to civilisation. My second GPS broke and so we had to convert to using map and compass bearings. I had two maps with me, the 1:1 million navigational chart for aeroplanes and a 1:4 million Stanfords map of the whole of the top half of South America. Neither had contours, neither was designed for navigating at this micro scale. I was estimating the distance that we’d travelled since the last time the GPS had worked and I was trying to keep us walking in as straight a line as possible through the dense trees. Each day, though, the margin for error grew and there was no way of crosschecking where we really were.

  We would often have to redraw the rivers on the navigational chart in pencil because it was so inaccurate and the rivers were only rough indications of where there might be a watercourse on the ground. In fact, we started using the more accurate but less detailed 1:4 million map instead. I had only brought it along to show interested locals the walk in its entirety; it covered nine countries. One millimetre on this Stanfords map represented four whole kilometres on the ground. We would rarely move position by more than three millimetres a day and to take bearings when distances were so small left massive scope for inaccuracies. It was a navigational joke; if it hadn’t been life-threatening it would have been hilarious.

  We were carrying an EPIRB but, as our medical insurance had long since lapsed, if we had pulled the plug then nothing would have happened. No evacuation would have been initiated. We were on our own.

  The remoteness from mankind was reflected in the wildlife here, too. For the first time ever we’d caught two baby caiman in the fishing net. Babies weren’t our worry, however; it was the adults that we were more concerned about as we retrieved the fish.

  There was something reassuring about the fact that the pair of us seldom got ill. Cho had been sick once but on the whole we seemed to have strong constitutions and perhaps a lot of luck. We took pride in it and so, when Cho started to complain of headaches and dark, obscured vision, it was a serious concern.

  Cho was in severe pain and was being sick as well. I had no real idea what it was and gave him painkillers. The battery on our thermometer had run out and I remembered the conversation with Luke in Hereford during our medical training when we had both agreed we needed to carry a mercury one.

  By evening, after agreeing that Cho struggle through the walking day until we at least found water, we came upon a shallow puddle that I knew I could excavate and allowed Cho to collapse. He did just that. The man who took huge pride in his strength of mind and spirit simply allowed his pack to fall to the floor and he immediately followed it.

  I decided that a hot, sweet cup of coffee and a good meal would do Cho good and so set about making camp while he lay motionless. I dug out the puddle so that I could get a plastic Lock & Lock container (lunchbox) in it to bail water into the reservoir I had made from my rucksack liner. I collected firewood, lit a fire and put water on to make coffee. While the water was heating, I put up Cho’s hammock and instructed him firmly to use the water reservoir to wash and put on his dry evening clothes. He then got into his hammock and fell fast asleep while I put up my own hammock and made coffee and supper.

  I became aware just how we reliant we were on each other that night. The evening was a busy one as I had to do all the jobs that the two of us normally shared. I woke Cho up just as it was getting dark and gave him supper. He was looking better already and ate his food and kept it down. The moment he finished it, he went straight back to sleep while I washed by torchlight.

  There is a purity of mind that only really comes about when you forget about yourself and have to go into overdrive to help someone else. One of us getting seriously ill here would be fatal. There was no evacuation apart from me dragging or carrying Cho. If he couldn’t walk he was dead and he knew it.

  In the morning, though, he was better. This was partly due to his mental strength and I could tell he felt he’d let himself down the day before. He got up that morning in a state of mind that said he would be better.

  I posted a video blog of the day online and, ironically, the diagnosis of Cho’s illness came from one of the blog readers. A number of people told me it sounded like severe migraine and that seemed to make sense.

  While online, I read that Sir Ranulph Fiennes’s expedition trust had come good again and given us yet more money. This time I got two emails, too, one from Sir Ranulph himself, the other from Anton, a trustee of the Transglobe Expedition Trust.

  Dear Ed [wrote Sir Ranulph]

  Congratulations on your progress to date.

  I think things will get increasingly difficult for you. Over forty years I must have been involved with over thirty big journeys, at least half of which have failed. It is always a matter for the traveller to decide in his/her own head when to turn back and when to continue.

  Sometimes to continue is plain daft and irresponsible, at other times there is a chance that pushing on over a particular obstacle or series of obstacles may make things look a whole lot better in which case it’s well worth fighting off ‘weak thoughts’ which occur when the morale is down. Only you can be your own final arbiter.

  Whatever you may decide over the weeks/months ahead, know that you have already done fantastically well and we at the Transglobe Expedition Trust are proud of you.

  Very best wishes,

  Ran

  I was over the moon just to receive the email but surprised by the ‘get out clause’ that he seemed to be offering. I had too much time to think while walking and I began to wonder about the dangers he was referring to. Was I cracking up? Was it obvious from my blogs? Was I being irresponsible?

  Cho and I sat down and talked it through. As Sir Ranulph said, ‘only you can be your own final arbiter’. Were we going to giv
e up?

  Were we fuck.

  Anton’s email was a more straightforward morale booster:

  Dear Ed,

  I have seen a copy of Ran’s email to you and it has prompted me to join in!

  At the Transglobe Expedition Trust, we get many applications for funding. One of our criteria for offering support is that the project should be sufficiently ambitious to make a significant impact in the evolution of human achievement. We get hardly any applications that fully meet these terms. We aim to support expeditions that match our ‘mad but marvellous’ criteria. When we asked one of Britain’s leading authorities on the Amazon region for his view of your proposed expedition, he thought it was an impossible journey. However, he pointed out that although it was a ‘mad’ idea, it would be truly ‘marvellous’ if you succeeded. It was therefore, the perfect expedition for us to support. As Ran says, not all expeditions succeed and we, at the Transglobe Expedition Trust, fully understand when the going gets too tough. However, if you press on and confound the pundits by travelling where no one else thought it possible, you will be in the very front line of human achievement.

  You have a growing audience in the UK and further afield who are gunning for you all the way. None of us can fully appreciate how grim it must get for you. Good luck in these difficult times. If you can hack it, you both will have done something truly amazing and worthwhile which has already gained you enormous admiration from far and wide.

  With very best wishes,

  Anton

  That was the one that brought tears to my eyes. What an amazing email to receive in the middle of the jungle. I did indeed have some incredible support behind me and I used it to bolster my determination.

  It was now late October and the dry season was sucking every drop of moisture from the jungle. Dried-up riverbeds had Cho and me pathetically waiting under the puniest of jungle vines for a few drops of life-giving liquid. We resorted to digging down in the dried-up beds trying to hit the water table, often to no effect.