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

by Stafford, Ed

  Thankfully, the dry season did not mean no rain – just lower water levels – so we were saved by an evening deluge on more than one occasion and were now slick operators with our improvised reservoirs.

  As fish live in rivers, our parched state was exacerbated by grumbling stomachs. For several weeks we didn’t catch enough fish to smoke and carry with us. We lived hand to mouth – a catch of fish would be wolfed down in seconds and neither of us wanted to think ahead and save food for the days that followed. We were content to eat as well as we could when we could and then use all our wits to ensure we found food again.

  Cho would always quote what seemed to me a blindingly obvious statement: ‘Cuando hay – hay. Cuando no hay – no hay.’ It translates pretty literally as ‘When you have – you have. When you don’t – you don’t.’

  This used to wind me up, a worthless homily that rubbed salt into an angry wound. But after hearing his tales of living in hiding in the mountainous forests of Peru at the height of the infamous Shining Path’s terrorist activities, I started to put his words into context.

  It was a way of saying that there is no point grumbling if there is no food – no point in dwelling on it either. If you accept that it is outside your control and move on regardless, you will learn to be content with less.

  As we reached the River Bauaná, which led down to Lago Tefé and then to Tefé itself, we finished off the last of our rations. With another 40 kilometres or so until the next big river that also ran down to Lago Tefé, we made the prudent decision to mark the spot and head downstream looking for people. We were still 100 kilometres from Tefé but we’d already made the decision to turn south so that we would never actually pass through Tefé on foot. There was just no need to take ourselves so close to the main Solimões River and there were huge lakes that we could avoid if we stayed about 100 kilometres from the main channel.

  I tied coloured plastic bags to the bow of a tree to mark the spot and we inflated the rafts so that we could set off to find food. In my head the similarity between this and the wasted time on the Minerazinho in September was haunting me but the difference was that we knew this led to Tefé, and so we suspected that this river might actually be populated.

  At 4 p.m. we decided to stop paddling and set up camp. With no food, we needed a couple of hours of fishing if we were to eat anything at all. I set the nets in the mouth of a small stream flowing into the river and Cho went digging for worms to use as bait. Half an hour passed – nothing in the net. Cho hadn’t managed to find any bait either. Another half an hour and still nothing. As I was checking the net I heard what I thought were voices coming from upriver.

  ‘Cho, hay personas!’ I called to him. We both listened intently and decided it must have been monkeys. I peered further and thought I could make out a blue tarpaulin covering part of a boat.

  ‘Hay gente pe,’ I confirmed. ‘There are people.’ Cho and I quickly forgot our failed fishing attempts and decided to go and introduce ourselves. Fishermen and hunters usually had loads of food and our stomachs groaned as we paddled towards the boat that was perhaps 100 metres away. As I was filming with one hand, Cho got there well before me and he introduced himself to the two men. Then he called out to me that they had invited us to eat with them. They had a fish broth made and a big white bucket full of farine.

  Our luck was once again unbelievable. We were still well over 100 kilometres from the city of Tefé, and only about eight hours after finishing the last of our supplies we’d found fishermen with food in abundance. We poured a generous pile of the golden farine pellets into our soup and took large, appreciative mouthfuls. It was amazing how deeply ingrained hospitality was in this part of the Amazon. The first thing people would often say to us was ‘Would you like some food? You must be hungry!’ Questions about where we were from came later.

  The men had finished fishing and were heading back downriver. If we wanted we could accompany them to the nearest village a few kilometres away. We jumped at the chance as we needed to buy food and we all piled into the small boat and chugged downriver to a small cluster of thatched buildings on a patch of high ground. The village actually comprised just a single family and they gave us an abandoned outhouse in which to string up our hammocks in the dark. The family then fed us as well again and we went to bed with stretched bellies and gurgling sounds coming from our bowels.

  The owner of the house, Antonio, didn’t have spare food for us to buy but he was going downriver to the shop the next day. If we didn’t mind waiting, he would take us there and back. Cho and I took the opportunity to have a rest day. We lazed about and helped the family make farine. Huge three-metre-diameter pans were perched on top of mud-oven walls that surrounded large, hot wood fires. The farine was being toasted and tossed around the bath-sized pans with a wooden canoe paddle. The smell of new farine was just wonderful, like morning wafts from a traditional bakery.

  Once we’d bought food the following day Antonio agreed to take us back to where I’d tied the plastic bags to the branch. We put our hammocks up and reflected on the luckiest, most efficient break and resupply imaginable. Forty-eight hours not walking and we’d got a complete stock of food: farine, salt, coffee, sugar, milk powder and a couple of heads of garlic and we’d rested and relaxed, too, having spent very little money.

  The BGAN, our Internet and telephone link to the outside world, then chose to die. It just wouldn’t power up. Aside from emergencies, it was essential so that we could continue our mission of broadcasting videos and blogs from the expedition live. When we got to Tefé, and Internet access, I would have to ask Marlene in Lima to send our spare unit to Iquitos. I would then send Cho back to Peru to get it. It sounded extravagant but when you start trying to mail things across international borders in South America you soon learn that it’s far safer just to go yourself and transport the thing as part of your luggage. Otherwise the paperwork takes weeks. Cho liked the idea anyway as he would have to fly from Tefé to Tabatinga. He’d never been on an aeroplane before.

  The response to my plea for financial help had been so resounding that by now we had enough money to reinsure the expedition and so I arranged that with our previous insurers, THB Clowes. Our kit was no longer insured but at least we had medical cover again. In hindsight, I’m not sure I would have bothered taking out such a specialist (and expensive) insurance as we’d pretty much accepted that we would have to self-evacuate anyway. The problem was that, because the journey was already under way and we couldn’t get standard British Mountaineering Council (BMC) insurance, we were forced to pay well over a thousand pounds again. At the same time I ordered a new GPS online and had it sent to one of our new sponsors, Pete Casey, who I had agreed could come and walk with us for three weeks in return for his generous donations. He would bring in any new items of kit we needed with him and so his visit would be really valuable to us at a time when everything seemed to be falling apart.

  In hindsight, the period of time spent navigating with just an inaccurate map and a cheap compass from the UK that wasn’t even balanced for South America made the journey far more exciting. We simply had to make do and revert to methodologies used hundreds of years ago. We were still moving forward; we just had to be that much more switched on and aware of our speed and our route planning: ‘Cuando hay – hay. Cuando no hay – no hay.’

  Cho and I arrived at a large inland lake and made camp. The lake level was low and we had to walk through ankle-deep mud to get to the water’s edge, but there was a great area of higher woodland overlooking the lake in which we could camp. In desperate need of protein, we waded into the lake with a gill net and two long poles each and set them across the thigh-deep water.

  Before we’d finished attaching the other ends of the nets to the poles we started catching fish. The presence of fish in the lake was so concentrated that the catch was abundant and we extracted one fish after another for the pot. None of the fish appeared to be piranhas here so we made the decision to leave the nets in overn
ight so that we would have a bumper catch in the morning. (Piranhas would have eaten the trapped fish and destroyed the nets in the process.)

  As the sun started to set, our camp felt homely and beautiful. The open space around the lake felt relaxing after so long in dense vegetation and we bumbled down to the water for a wash. When the sun set, we used our head torches in the gloom, and as we stripped off at the side of the lake, balancing on pieces of wood laid on the mud so as to keep our feet clean, I caught a glimpse of what looked like reflective dots all over the surface of the lake.

  ‘Concha su madre!’ I said to Cho. ‘Crikey. Look at the number of caiman in this lake!’ At first Cho didn’t think they were caiman, then he looked more closely and saw that I was right. The lake was stuffed, and the number of eyes reflected in our torchlight, just above the level of the water, confirmed our fears. The black caiman, a species of alligator, could grow to five metres. Due to their size they could attack and kill an adult human being in the water with ease. Any idea of retrieving a final catch from the nets vanished and we giggled like kids at the thought of how vulnerable we were standing on the edge of this lake washing ourselves in the presence of perhaps fifteen of these huge predators.

  As we walked up the hill the thrashing started and we realised that the caiman were feeding off fish that had been caught in our nets. The thrashing went on all night. I hardly slept a wink.

  The next morning I found my net detached from the poles and floating on the other side of the lake. Cho’s was tangled up in some bushes on our side of the bank. Both nets were seriously damaged and had large holes in them, yet another thing that we now needed to replace, yet another lesson learned.

  Within 200 metres of setting out we hit the River Tefé. This led down to Tefé itself and we had already decided that we were going to break here and travel the 90 kilometres downriver to the town as that was where we were meeting Pete, the sponsor. The lake was an obvious marker to return to and so we paddled downriver looking for a boat to hire to take us to Tefé.

  We soon found a community that allowed us to stay, that fed us and organised us to go on one of the canoes that was travelling to Tefé the following day. As usual in Brazil we were fed well, entertained impeccably and watched Brazilian soap operas on their satellite television in the evening.

  Tefé, formerly known as Ega, is the town in which the Leicester-born naturalist and explorer Henry Walter Bates based himself in the 1800s. During his time in the Amazon he sent home 14,000 species (mostly insects) of which 8,000 were new to science. His tales of exploration with indigenous Indians as guides were recorded in his book The Naturalist on the River Amazons, regarded as one of the finest reports of natural history travels.

  Tefé, like many towns on the Amazon, has no roads running into it. It is situated at the northern end of Lago Tefé, an enormous lake formed at the mouth of the River Tefé. Arriving from across the lake, Cho told me that, although he had never seen the sea, he now knew what it must look like. Large waves crashed over the bows of the small canoe and you could see 30 kilometres in both directions from the mid-point.

  The hotel we stayed in was the first since Juruá, forty-three days earlier, and, even though we knew people in the town, Cho and I hid away in our hotel for three whole days and slept. We surfaced for meals, but that was about it. We had about as much desire to socialise as an autistic maths professor.

  Slowly, we began to return to normality and I sent Cho off to Iquitos. This was really cutting things fine as our Brazilian visas were now good for only a few more days. If Cho was delayed there was a chance he wouldn’t be let back into the country. But we needed communication with the outside world and so back Cho went.

  As much as we wanted to stay legal in Brazil, we’d given up on that now. Kavos had told us that we could fly to Venezuela and try to re-enter through there but that he couldn’t guarantee us entry back into Brazil. Clearly, being stuck outside Brazil and not being allowed back in was a far worse prospect than staying in Brazil and risking being asked to leave. We still had nine and a half months left to walk and we had to avoid the Federal Police at all costs from this point, as we were now illegal immigrants.

  Cho returned with the spare BGAN and Pete arrived with a mountain of replacement kit, the most important of which was a GPS but also included a new Macpac rucksack for Cho and some new Altberg boots for us both.

  It was early November when we hired another small boat to take us back to the caiman-infested lake. After a long day’s travel we arrived and, as it was dark, the boat stayed with us and we all camped the night. I plugged the BGAN in to update the map with our new position now that we had a GPS. To my disgust the new BGAN didn’t work. I could make voice calls but the Internet wasn’t working. I spent a good two hours, and all the battery power that we had, on the phone to AST Satellite Communications in the UK and they couldn’t fix the problem without me being connected to the Internet. Apparently Inmarsat’s network had had a ‘critical satellite alteration’ and we needed to download new software for our unit that had been inactive for months sitting in Marlene’s flat in Lima. As frustrating as it was, we had no option but to continue without Internet access. The next three weeks of blogs would have to be phoned through on the satellite phone to Chloë, my ex-girlfriend, whose number was the only one in the world I knew off by heart, and she would post the blog from England using library images ripped from Google.

  We set out carrying more weight than ever before. I had estimated that this leg was twenty-four days without a single community and so we needed to have enough food. As Pete was walking with us I splashed out on cereal bars for lunch so that we could keep our energy levels up throughout the day. We bought 432 cereal bars, wiping out the entire stock in about five Tefé shops, and our bags were now phenomenally heavy. Cho had about 40 kilograms, I was up to 44 kilograms and Pete, who’d never walked in the jungle before, was on about 35 kilograms, more than Cho and I had been carrying for the vast majority of the expedition.

  The going was abominable. The first day we hit a field thick with razor grass but had no option but to push through. A paper cut doesn’t compare to the wounds you get from razor grass; it is like paper that has been dipped in glue and then finely crushed glass. Our hands became bloody and our clothes got ripped up. We managed only four hours that day before collapsing and deciding that we would have to camp.

  Pete was a builder from Crawley in the south of England. He was physically strong but had no idea what he had let himself in for.

  This is definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I didn’t realise it would be this tough. You have to experience this to believe it; words could not do it justice [said Pete after the first day].

  He had twenty-three more ahead of him.

  Pete immediately became covered in mosquito and sand-fly bites and I felt sorry for him. He reacted badly to everything and we had to give him large doses of antihistamines each night to allow him to get any sleep at all. I was used to washing in excavated holes in the mud now and eating dry farine and nothing else for supper when there was no river to fish in, but suddenly I saw what a basic, animalistic life we’d been living. Pete was visibly shocked by what was being expected of him physically and mentally, but luckily he had a fierce desire not to let himself or us down and so he just put up with the horrible conditions and brutally long days. He rarely complained.

  On 12 November 2009, while cutting at the front, machete in hand, I unknowingly stepped straight over a muscular, coiled pit viper. Pete saw a flicker of movement on the floor as the viper prepared to strike. The colouring of the brown and black snake was so similar to that of the forest floor that it was a miracle he saw it at all and he jerked back to avoid it.

  This wasn’t an uncommon incident. It happened to Cho and me regularly, but that one probably remains with me because I was seeing it through the eyes of an outsider for the first time. It was a reminder of how alone we were there; we had forty-eight hours of anti-venom with us and so coul
d keep one of us alive for that long. Evacuation through the vegetation we were covering was an absurd thought, and would have taken a week, absolute minimum, had it been possible to carry a stretcher through the tangled forest.

  It was sobering to think that, had Pete been bitten and envenomated, all we could have done was to make camp, immobilise his leg in a hammock and administer injections of anti-venom for the next two days. If after that the venom was still in his system, he would, of course, die. Even if he didn’t die, he would then have to walk out of there himself. It had been that way all along but seeing it through the eyes of a novice made me readdress the risks we were taking to complete this world-first expedition.

  Our insurance may have been valid again but, realistically, how quickly was our four-man team from Ex-Med in Hereford going to arrive? By the time they arrived incountry, procured maps, transport and local guides and then set out from the nearest navigable river to our location on foot, it would have been a minimum of several days.

  A week later Cho, Pete and I descended a muddy, forested slope. The horizon, normally obscured by the trees, appeared, signalling that a river was ahead. At the bottom of the slope we were confronted by the most depressing wall of tight bamboo cane interwoven with razor grass. Cho slumped noticeably and we cringed at the hours of effort we would have to put in to haul ourselves through the dense bamboo. We knew we would advance at snail’s pace; our knuckles would be raw and bleeding from the close machete work.

  Our maps had no detail on them for small-scale navigation but, for the first time in months, I remembered that Google Earth could help us. We still had no Internet connection but the images were cached in the memory and, as we’d not been using the Macbook, it still had plenty of battery power.