by Stafford, Ed
We were simmering at each other, but as yet nothing had been said.
‘How old are you, Cho?’
‘Thirty.’
‘More like thirteen,’ I jabbed.
‘I thought you were in a rush,’ he countered.
We glared at each other. This was the closest we’d ever come to actually having an argument and we held each other’s furious stares.
‘Are you all right, Ed?’
‘Fine. You, Cho?’ And then it broke. I can’t explain why but at the same time we both saw our folly and started laughing at ourselves. The tension lifted instantly and it was almost like a high from the exertion of the hardest twenty-five minutes of walking we ever did in the expedition. Veins still throbbing, leg muscles pumped, we shook hands and that was that.
The incident was unusual because, although we both occasionally slipped into bad moods, normally we just ignored each other, said nothing and waited for it to pass. This had been the first time ever that we’d taken on each other head-to-head and it was lucky that it was manifested in a hill climb rather than a fist fight, but a battle it was nonetheless. No one had lost so neither of us had a problem with it. It was just us learning even more about each other and how we could walk together.
The day was topped off by Cho finding four wildfowl eggs at the base of a palm and we celebrated by having fried eggs and coffee for supper.
We tracked our progress on the A4 Google Earth printouts each evening by plotting the GPS coordinates. Slowly we edged east.
At 10 a.m. on 18 March we rested at the top of a huge hill that Cho had led us up. After our regimented ten minutes it was my turn to lead and, rather than descend the steep slope in our desired direction, I decided to gamble and veered to our right and continued up the ridge line. The trouble with such speculative navigation was that I couldn’t see further than 15 metres because of the trees and I didn’t know if the speculative direction would help us or not. I had a hunch that the valley was in fact amphitheatre-shaped and that the spur would start to veer back towards our direction of travel. Walking up the ridge, the light flowed in much more and, where we walked, the ground was almost flat, falling off sharply to our left. Sure enough, after a while the drop off to our left started to change and we were bending round in our desired direction again. The leaves underfoot might have come straight out of an autumnal English woodland and instead of a hellish descent and then a further climb we had just skirted around and were maintaining altitude in the most pleasant forest.
I started to smile as, below us, we could see the huge valley that we’d avoided, but all the time I was sure our luck would change and that the spur would start to descend. For a whole hour we maintained this height along the most elegant of ridges that soared through the roof of the rainforest. A fresh breeze blew in from the open side and cooled our left cheeks.
Troops of squirrel monkeys sprang through the trees overhead and we knew that very few people ever came through here. We were five days’ walk in any direction from a navigable river and hunters just wouldn’t walk this far. The combination of my hunch paying off and the beautiful forest made it the most pleasurable section of walking of the journey for me. I dreamed of milk biscuits.
Our camp routine was by now so slick that the evenings were luxury. Chloë had brought out new Hex Flies (lightweight hexagonal rain tarpaulins) for our hammocks (and paid for them, bless her) and so we were using Cho’s old one as the fire shelter. To have perhaps nine square metres of dry space to cook, eat, store firewood and dry clothes was a luxury that made carrying one extra fly easily worth it. We attached a cord that hung lengthways under the fly and that was our washing line to hang our day clothes that we’d just washed in the river. Every morning we had dry, clean clothes. That wasn’t just good for hygiene, it was amazing for morale. They were even warm as if they’d just come out of the airing cupboard.
We would cut long ‘Y’ poles that would lift the fly high from the fire while we were cooking and eating so that the smoke didn’t get in our eyes. Even if it was raining when we set up camp, and continued raining overnight, we would always have dry clothes in the morning and dry wood to start the fire.
My cheap Casio watchstrap broke and I replaced it with an ice-axe strap from my pack. It wasn’t pretty but it worked fine right to the finish.
Then the jungle got closer and slower. I allowed my painful feet to get to me. I cut through four wasps’ nests in one day and at the last two I roared out loud with anger pathetically. It was an ugly day; I was out of control mentally. I wanted to go home.
Two days short of the River Nhamundá I woke to my phone alarm at 0545 and 0555 and ignored them both. When I woke again naturally at 0640, I looked out of my hammock to the pleasant sight of Cho having got the fire ready and breakfast on. We set off in good time and walked well together for six hours but then I faltered again and Cho, seeing the onset of a crash from me, suggested that we stop and make camp.
It was nice to hear. Usually I made most of the decisions but Cho and I understood each other so well now that we could tell how far to push each other and when we needed to rest.
We suppered on half a kilo of rice and two Lock & Lock boxes of hot, sweet milk made from powder. It was like nectar to drink and I could feel the sugar running into my muscles and brain, recharging the depleted batteries. We had three days’ of food left to last two days and so were on luxury rationing and were very appreciative of it.
Diary entry from 22 March 2010:
I will miss this life. I know I have low days and it’s not easy all the time, but I will miss the nights of just Cho and me in the trees cooking basic food and feeling in control of our walk and relaxed.
We dug out the Stanfords map tonight and it looks like we will finish in mid-August. We’ll have to cross the ‘neck’ of the Amazon delta in mid-June (peak flood season) but we need some excitement to keep us going.
This astronaut pen is amazing as it writes upside-down. Great for hammock diary writing – and for astronauts I suppose.
Our time pressure across this stretch of forest was a liaison with a reporter from ABC News in the States. The GPS wouldn’t turn on and I had trouble knowing how far from the river we still were. Luckily he cancelled and the pressure was off – we would have stood him up anyway. Following ridges to maintain height meant that it was harder to be sure if we’d stayed on our bearing and we could only estimate how far we had walked.
March 24 was our final day and we made nine and a half kilometres, finally reaching the Rio Nhamundá. I had never been as thin as I was at this point of the journey and as Cho and I wandered down the sandy river beach looking out across the striking black-water river, I had to hold my shorts up with my hand the whole way.
We had to find people in order to resupply so we paddled upstream which was surprisingly easy as the black-water river flowed so slowly. We arrived at a house where a family immediately invited us in for lunch. The husband was called Ciro and he grew watermelons in his fields behind the house. We ate one after another, the fresh, sweet juices dribbling down our smiling faces. The family were heading downriver to Nhamundá City the following day and we saw this as a great opportunity to (a) buy a new GPS, (b) charge all our electrical kit, (c) buy food, (d) buy new boots to avoid the blisters, and (e) rest.
It was now the end of March and it had taken eleven months to walk from the Colombian border to where Cho and I were now. We had crossed over 2,000 kilometres of rainforest that nobody in history had ever before crossed on foot. The river was two kilometres wide, almost lake-like, and the boat chugged over the flat surface like an ocean liner. The river represented the border between the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Pará and I decided we could to do the entire state of Pará, to finish the expedition, in a little under five months.
The two things we couldn’t procure were larger boots and a GPS. We were told we would have to go to Manaus to find the latter and I wasn’t prepared to do that. After spending so much time trying to
fix the BGAN in Coari I now knew the unit really well and knew it had a very crude GPS inside. It gave degrees and whole minutes only, meaning that we couldn’t pinpoint exactly where we were but we were able to say we were somewhere within a circle two kilometres in diameter. That was accurate enough for me – we would push on with the BGAN as our main form of navigational aid and my feet crammed into the same small rubber boots.
We headed back upriver and were dropped off on the west side where we had last finished walking. We inflated the little rafts and slowly paddled across the vast black mirror. We unknowingly arrived straight into a small village that had been hidden from the water by an island and I was at first worried about how welcome we would be.
I needn’t have been. Within an hour we were sitting with the entire village outside their church playing bingo in Portuguese. I won a big bunch of pifayos (savoury orange fruits) and a young couple cooked them for Cho and me for supper.
From the village I had identified some mines 50 kilometres away on a bearing of 62° magnetic through the jungle. They were huge scars that were easily visible on Google Earth and from them led a road that could help us. The 50 kilometres were, according to the village, unwalkable, but we set off with eight days’ of food, quite content in our madness.
On 29 March, after our first day walking, I plotted our first two-kilometre circle on the map using data from the BGAN and determined that we had walked between 8 and 12 kilometres. This was amazing news: as we’d been wading through swamps, floods and thick bramble bushes all day, if we really had made around 10 kilometres that was outstanding.
We’d been cutting all day long and had no momentum. At one point I almost fainted with dehydration. I made a conscious effort to stop cleaning my leishmaniasis wound with my tongue as I thought that would increase the likelihood of it mutating or migrating to my mouth.
As the BGAN was out for navigating I also checked emails. Incredibly, an individual whom I had never heard of, Barry McCarthy, had donated £6,000 to the expedition. Cho and I actually danced around at this news – it was an incredible bit of generosity to receive.
The one new ingredient that Cho and I had decided to carry this time round was flour. We’d always had a few spices and we’d always carried some salt and cooking oil, and we decided the addition of a little flour would liven up mealtimes. As I write this I can tell this would actually be of interest only to Cho and to me but suffice it to say that Cho’s sardines en croute were made with such attention to detail and so much care taken over kneading the dough that I swear I have never enjoyed pastry more anywhere. Evenings were so much more fun as a result of this silly addition and it really did lift us both.
The terrain was less hilly than on the Amazonas side of the Rio Nhamundá but there were lots of fallen trees that kept the pace slower. On day four we hit a dirt road that had been built recently and decided to follow it despite it not going our way. In the end it led us to a house whose occupants took us in for the night and fed us steaming plates of cow’s liver stew.
When we talked to the middle-aged couple they advised us that we should present our passports to the Federal Police in Trombetas when we arrived. I was surprised to hear that Trombetas had an outpost and Cho and I looked at each other without speaking; we both knew we would not be going anywhere near the place.
The family told us about the new road and informed us that it led all the way to the mine. They didn’t mention that the road was private and we didn’t ask. It was just an unpaved road.
So we changed our plan. We would walk along the road, past the mining area, but before we reached Trombetas we would leave the road (avoiding the Feds) and head through the jungle. It was just as well that we weren’t meeting the ABC reporter any more because Trombetas had been our rendezvous. It would have been a complete farce if we’d arrived to meet him and promptly been arrested.
On 2 April we left early and made good progress on the road. Mid-morning we passed an IBAMA outpost and, as we were illegal, we waved from a distance, shouted, ‘Nice monkey!’ in a jokey way at the park warden’s monkey, and walked on on the far side of the road without stopping. He hadn’t stopped us. We had successfully entered the protected national forest south of the mining area.
As it grew dark we decided that, as we were illegals and we were going to camp in a protected forest without permits, we needed to be a safe distance from the road. We went perhaps 100 metres into the trees along a stream and made camp with minimum cutting and noise, ensuring that our smoke would not drift on to the road.
The next morning we approached the mining area from the south. It was an amazing sight: an open-cast bauxite mine that was removing the rainforest completely, in huge areas, and digging out the aluminium bauxite in vast quantities. There were enormous industrial conveyor belts and the mining company had its own train track to ship out the trailers of unprocessed earth. I had not seen an example of such dramatic change to the rainforest apart from the city of Manaus itself. The scars are very visible on Google Earth; search for Trombetas and look to the south.
I have since learned that the mine has a 100 per cent replanting scheme and that they replant 100 different indigenous species. It was still a completely different forest afterwards but at least it wasn’t then cleared into cattle ranches.
We were almost out of the other side of the mine when a man in a booth hailed us. We went over to him and he told us firmly to wait where we were while he called his boss. Did we know we were on private land? Apparently the IBAMA outpost with the pet monkey had called through and they had waited two days to detain us further up the road.
The company was called Mineracão Rio do Norte (MRN) and they flatly refused us permission to walk through their land. The manager of this area of mine came in a shiny black pick-up truck with blacked-out windows and told us immediately that we could not walk down this road as it was private and that he was personally going to drive us to the Federal Police in Trombetas. This was one of those moments when you feel like you are in serious trouble and there is no escape. Then I decided upon a whopping lie to get us out of the situation. I explained our journey and I pretended that in addition to walking every step of the way (true) that we had never set foot in a motor vehicle for the entire journey (completely untrue) and that if he made us go in his vehicle we would have walked for over two years for nothing.
As self-important as he was, he was not heartless and I promised that Cho and I would walk all the way back along the road the way we had come and we would cross the Amazon and we would walk on the other side. It would take us weeks longer but we had to do it right – we could not get in a car.
The man accepted this, his sidekick took a photo of us and they let us go. They warned us to be careful of jaguars and we both laughed. ‘I am deadly serious,’ he called after us. ‘They are abundant here and often walk out on to the roads.’ I did believe that the place was teeming with jaguars. We’d seen two red-rumped agoutis and a peccary already that day and howler monkeys seemed to be calling constantly all around us. Despite the mining, the wildlife was varied and abundant.
As soon as we were out of sight we slipped straight into the trees, on to their private property and headed east as we’d originally planned. No time lost, no backtracking, and they would never find us in the jungle. Out of sight, out of mind and yet again we’d narrowly avoided the Feds. After that I received a couple of warnings from Brazilians online that the people I would meet in Pará were more dangerous than any of the indigenous people that I’d encountered so far. Agribusiness, logging and mining were huge here and people who got in the way didn’t last long. I was determined not to be worried by such threats.
Due east from here to the River Trombetas was 46 kilometres and we had five days’ of food. The problem was that we were further south than we’d wanted to be and therefore closer to the main channel of the Amazon.
The inevitable happened the very next morning. We hit floods that were knee-height, then waist-, then chest-, and w
e were hopping from one piece of dry land to another. Progress, as always in the flooded forest, dropped right down to a couple of hundred metres an hour and we knew if it continued that our food wouldn’t last until the River Trombetas.
Then I had an idea. It had just started to rain and we were on an island of land perhaps three metres by four but I needed to use the computer, so we erected my flysheet over the island. I needed to know if the flooding would continue and so I got out the laptop and dug out the old flooded forest data image from NASA that I’d been sent prior to the expedition starting. It was a large eight megabyte jpeg image without any form of grid laid over it. I then got a two-kilometre-diameter circle from the BGAN and plotted it on the Google Earth printout that had a latitude and longitude grid, and looked at the two maps side by side. I could use the shape of the river to roughly transpose the circle that denoted our approximate position on to the computer-screen jpeg image of the floods. I instantly saw that there was a slender hairline of the colour that represented flooding going straight through the area. This meant that the area was generally dry and that, if we kept going, we should be out of the narrow band of floods in less than a couple of hours.
We packed away the electronics and tarpaulin and pushed on through the floods. Within the hour the water levels started to drop and we were back to our waists, then to our knees and then we were back on hard ground. It was another example of ridiculous navigation techniques working and it had saved us from the need to turn back for days until we could have bought more food or chosen another route. The only map or chart in the world that could have given us the information we needed was that jpeg image from NASA.
I sat down, took my wellies off and poured out the water, twigs and leaves from the floods and wrung out my socks. From here to the River Trombetas was all dry ground. I was sure of it and we could escape this unfriendly mining area without being noticed.