by Stafford, Ed
Cho put some sugar in the pastry that night and the height of the ecstasy bar was raised again. I would not have swapped this pastry for kobe beef or Peking duck – it was extraordinary.
On 8 April we hit a hunters’ trail that led down to the River Trombetas. We stayed with a mixed-race caboclo family who told us that there was an IBAMA path that led the whole way to the town of Oriximina and we could then just paddle straight across the River Trombetas into the town. It didn’t quite work out like that, however.
The path soon ran out and I have to admit I had reached a stage of tiredness where I was very short with Cho. We were both exhausted and needed to rest but we desperately wanted to reach Oriximina on foot to avoid having to come back to complete any walking. I was thoroughly unreasonable and it’s a credit to Cho that he put up with me on this leg. He, too, was tired but he didn’t have the worries that I had – about money, time pressures, clashes with members of the production company back home who were changing the goalposts, and just keeping the wheels from falling off this increasingly complex expedition. Cho just had to walk and I envied him the luxury. I felt as if I was running a business, and from a mobile Internet unit in a swamp. With no money for an operations manager in the UK, I dealt with every email and I was the person coordinating most aspects of the journey. All on a strict ration of battery hours and limited bandwidth per month. It was hard to feel in control of it all but I recognised it was rarely Cho’s fault and that I needed to stop taking frustrations out on him.
Walking along the edge of the river involved passing lots of agricultural fields and isolated houses with workers living in them. We would stay with families and I would often struggle with Portuguese in the evenings and feel like a social leper when I’d eaten because all I could think about was crawling into my hammock and falling asleep. Cho was fantastic in that he picked up Portuguese quicker than me and he had a real interest in these people. He would pick one of three subjects – religion, forestry or agriculture – and talk for hours. His laugh was ever-present and it was great to hear and made the peasant families relax in his company. I have to say I could not always see that things he laughed at were remotely funny but laugh he did and I am sure he played a huge part in making the people we met make us feel so welcome.
I would sometimes cringe when I heard the families say, ‘He doesn’t talk much, the gringo’, and I would think how hard it was to explain to them what an ordeal this whole journey had been for me and that I was struggling to hold it together at times, and that evenings were the worst because I couldn’t see people’s mouths in the dark and my brain was too tired to translate the Portugese.
In the mornings I would always make a special effort to chat to the families, with more energy and a night’s sleep behind me. But I would never advise anyone to travel as I did if they want to meet people and learn about different cultures. I was almost always too tired to care.
I booked my flight home on 13 April 2010. It was important to get this booked to keep the cost down but it was nerve-racking to put my cards down on the table with four and a half months to push. So much could still happen but the fact that we now had to get this expedition done in a finite time was good for our morale. I predicted I would arrive into Heathrow on 29 August.
On 22 April a pure white flash exploded before our eyes and an almighty snap ripped down through the warm, wet air. A telegraph pole, three metres from where Cho and I were standing in the driving tropical rain, had been struck by lightning. We could not stop smiling and laughing, completely charged with the adrenaline our bodies had pumped into us to deal with what they interpreted as a crisis. We almost floated down the street through the rain grinning and shouting, ‘No WAY, man!’, like Bill and Ted.
When confronted with an incident that was serious and had an element of danger to it, like most people we clicked into overdrive to deal with the problem. Our senses heightened and our perception of time slowed down. We all have a survival instinct and our bodies are programmed to give us all the help they can in dealing with an emergency. We became incredibly focused and capable whenever we were in this crisis stage.
People often asked how we dealt with the dangers: wading through waters inhabited by huge black caiman, stepping close to deadly pit vipers, or encountering fierce tribes. The honest answer was that these times were thrilling and exciting – time flew. They helped distract us from the far more destructive phenomena – monotony and boredom.
Increasingly now, Cho and I were not recovering when we rested. The day after breaking for two days we would be walking zombies again, showing no sign of having recovered at all.
The expedition was by now a prison sentence of repetitive activity. No matter what people said, it was impossible to stay positive all the time. Our minds screamed for new stimulus and were revolting against the placid, polite conversations we had daily with local people about how bonkers we were. There were times when I couldn’t give a toss about the fate of the Amazon – all I wanted was to see my friends, watch some sport, go to the pub. Chop the whole rainforest down – I just wanted to be at the birth of my first nephew. Chronic tiredness can sap one’s passion for anything and at times we passed majestic trees covered in orchids, walls of interwoven lianas and vines and sandy-bottomed streams of the purest crystal-clear water and paid them no attention whatsoever. Would it help us get through the day? No? Sod it then.
Deep down the passion, the drive, the belief were all still there. Cho and I laughed at people who asked us if we thought of giving up because it was just an absurd concept after all this time. Of course we wouldn’t – we hadn’t walked two years to give up – we both had a fierce determination to succeed that came from very deep within us.
It was the fickle, easily tired brain that gave us our problems, and my aim was to try to master it. Danger was easy – it was the mundane that we were finding hard to combat.
I tested positive for cutaneous leishmaniasis in Oriximina and convinced the doctor to give me the entire course of intravenous injections as I had a walk to get on with. He reluctantly agreed and for the next twenty days I had to find veins to get a needle into. I had done this in practice before but never for real (and never on myself ) and it was somewhat of an ordeal to get a needle into my veins. Some days it was easy, others I made a bloody mess of my arms and left myself feeling sick.
From Oriximina, Cho and I broke into a whole different type of Amazon. Here was the culture of the gaucho, and the cattle ranches stretched as far as the eye could see. Long, dusty roads connected all the small towns down this stretch of the northern shore of the Amazon and most of the rainforest had long since been removed.
Each town was more like a Texas backwater than the Amazon and there were next to no indigenous-looking people. This was the land of the colonial settler and it would appear that the whiter you were the more land and money you acquired. I recognised traits from Argentina here, too: the style of gaucho clothing was similar and the drinking of mate (pronounced mat-ay). Mate is a drink of hot water poured over dried leaves of yerba mate served with a metal straw from a shared hollowed-out gourd. I struggled to connect the wonderful relaxed Argentine culture with this agribusiness. Argentina’s cattle business made sense; they had thousands of hectares of pampas or natural grassland that produced the finest beef. Here every scrap of meat was from an area that had once been lush, diverse rainforest and as much as I warmed to the farmers’ generosity and Latin cowboy style, I knew that this was an industry I was opposed to.
Logistically, it was a dream for us: lots of places to buy food, and a big fat dusty road to walk down in our Crocs. We could have used this as a sort of dusty walking break from the jungle but neither of us wanted to hang about and so we put in long distances each day to get the barren agricultural section done and to get back into the jungle and closer to the finish.
At this time Vikki, my publicist, organised for ABC News to come out and film us for a couple of days. The cameraman/producer was a New Zealander cal
led Bart Price and he had tried to hire a speedboat to come to meet us. I offered to organise this for him and he concurrently tried to organise it through a fixer in Manaus. I had no idea what luck he had had with his fixer but, as I was walking on dusty roads and didn’t need Cho at the time, I sent him to the city of Santarém to source the best fast boat he could for the Americans. Cho loved the task and having to talk to as many people as possible to find the best boat. It took him three days but eventually he found a perfect craft that would suit the news team down to the ground.
I reported back to Bart that we had found a boat and he told us to go ahead and book it. I was happy for Cho as he’d come up with the goods and Bart was happy.
When Bart arrived in the early hours of the morning we immediately went for beers with him and, from the start, enjoyed his war-torn humour and cynical outlook. He was a big man, taller than me and overweight by quite a few kilograms and he had spent a lot of his time reporting on stories in various war zones across the world. He had lots of stories to tell but the conversation eventually came back to the boat and he told me that the fixer he had spoken to in Manaus was ‘a useless wanker’ who had said that finding a fast boat in Santarém was ‘impossible’. I smiled widely. I knew at once who he had spoken to. ‘Was he by any chance called Kavos?’ I asked, proud of the fact that Cho had managed to source the classiest of boats when Kavos hadn’t even bothered to try.
The filming with them worked well and Bart was joined by the ABC News presenter, Bill Weir, a couple of days later and we spent some time in the jungle together filming. It was time out from our schedule but I thought that the walk would be worth much less if no one knew about it and this was going to be made into news pieces for several different programmes on their network. The break from the norm was nice, too, and the two men went away happy.
Archie, my first nephew, was born soon after and it was yet another reminder of the life I was missing back at home. We walked on.
Diary entry from 14 May 2010:
Whenever I write the date I feel like I’m in the future. Are we really in 2010? Christ.
We finished the road section by mid-May and were ready to head back into the jungle. But as the road on our map finished the roads on the ground continued. Fresh logging roads had extended east within the last three years and Cho and I were told that they continued all the way to Almeirim, which is where we wanted to cross the Amazon for one last time. Ever conscious of not making our life harder than it needed to be, we decided to cache our heavy kit – boots, boats, paddles and fishing gear, everything that we didn’t need for the road – and we went light through the hills on the brand-new road. We would come back for the heavy gear by boat when we got to Almeirim and it meant our packs dropped from around 40 kilos each to around 10. Perfect.
Then, of course, the inevitable happened. The new road ran out at the Paru River and we had to walk through the jungle with our reduced road kit. It was nice to be under the canopy again after so many weeks of dust and cowshit but we were totally unprepared.
With Cho in Jesus sandals and me in Crocs we headed into the trees feeling somewhat naked and vulnerable. I would never advise anyone to enter the jungle in such footwear – we fell lots of times and got large thorns in our feet. Any river crossing would have to be swum now using our packs as flotation devices if there was nobody to borrow a canoe from. We had to make our two days’ of rations last for five days as our speed had dropped and as we had no means of catching fish.
Our half-ration suppers consisted of a shared Ramen noodle soup packet and one sardine. We were low on batteries and enthusiasm and felt as if we had been caught off guard somewhat.
The agricultural areas brought a new treat for us – ticks. We were covered in them and they were so small that if you didn’t look hard you could be mistaken in thinking you just had an itch. We both had throat infections, too, at this point and as Cho picked ticks off my back I managed to squeeze out a thick black thorn from my knee. Very satisfying.
Squatting in our small square of cleared earth under my rain fly, we were surrounded by walls of jungle on all sides. The high drone of insects pulsed like the heart of the rainforest. Thin shafts of evening light pierced the tall canopy, highlighting the bright green leaves against the darkness beyond.
The cumulative nature of the walk and the fact that we still had two months to go meant we were both slightly depressed. We were away from people we cared about and doing a repetitive task that we no longer enjoyed.
We emerged from the jungle and picked up a track that headed south down to the town of Almeirim and the Amazon River banks. As we crested the last hill and could see down across the rear of the town and the huge expanse of river in front of us, a police motorcycle with two men on it came towards us up the hill. It stopped and the man on the back stepped off, drew his pistol, and shouted, ‘Put your hands up!’
‘This is it,’ I thought. The Federal Police have caught up with us. We’ve been tracked down and we are about to be imprisoned and charged with being illegally in Brazil. We were ordered into a police car and as I went to pick up my bag the policeman with the pistol screamed at me to stay away from it.
Adrenaline was flowing and my mind was going through the options. We would just answer questions, be polite and try to downplay our illegality as much as possible. These police were local men rather than Feds – they might not know.
In the station we were searched – again. We were asked to remove everything in our packs – again. Then after our passports were scrutinised they were handed back to us and we were told we could leave the station. Confused, I asked them what we had been arrested for. It turned out that there had been a report that we were approaching the town from the north carrying weapons. Once they had established that we had no weapons they let us go and recommended a good hotel. I think it must have been the microphone boom on the video camera that the person had seen. Either way, the local police had completely missed the expired visas in our passports and yet again we were breathing huge sighs of relief.
From a hotel balcony in Almeirim I decided that I needed to professionalise how I dealt with the expedition mentally. Everyone who had carried out an expedition had advised me that it was the mental side of the expedition that would be the hardest but, strangely, this was the one thing that I’d never bothered to learn about or train in. I’d cobbled together things that worked for periods of time but I’d always lapsed into states of mind that were undesirable and negative. I wanted to learn more about the human brain and did some Internet research into basic human needs so that I could put my mental state in context in relation to the stress I was undergoing.
I was also given the number of an NLP (neuro linguistic programming) guru called Phil Parker to see if he could assist me in getting a better handle on my state of mind. I spoke to Phil three times for about half an hour on each occasion and he told me some remarkably simple tricks to help me to regain a perspective on my problems and to lift me out of the claustrophobic intensity that I had created by focusing so hard on one single task.
There was no magic solution but speaking to someone who understood the brain as well as Phil did was reassuring. I think the main thing I took from the conversations was that I was free to choose my reaction to any event. I was able to become far less reactive and to elect the state of mind that was best suited for the job in hand.
From Almeirim we would cross the main channel of the Amazon for the last time. It was 28 kilometres to the far side, about twice the width it was when we crossed at Manaus, and Cho and I were sufficiently cocky to do it in our little rubber pack rafts.
Chapter 16
The Sprint Finish
WITH THE AMAZON in front of us, our self-imposed rule that if we paddled across any river then we had to walk back to a point on the far bank perpendicular to where we had set out was taking on a whole new scale. I predicted that we could end up 50 kilometres downriver by the time we reached the far side and so we had to counter that d
istance advanced using the river’s flow by walking those 50 kilometres. The south side (walking back) was a non-starter due to the fact it was all low-lying, so I told Cho that, before we set out, we had to walk 50 kilometres further downriver on the northern bank.
Google Maps said there was a road, which would have meant two days of easy strolling. Despite Google Earth suggesting that there was no road, there was in fact a dirt track overhung with tall trees that was hidden from Google’s satellites. The road headed inland, away from the river, and past a huge old rice plantation called San Raimundo, where the track stopped. San Raimundo was a colonial settlement that had been started when an American came in and decided to grow rice in the flooded forest. He brought in local workers from all around, paying them a half-decent wage and housing them in a nearby village called Pesquisa. The experiment had failed but during its operations they cleared a massive area of rainforest still visible today on Google Earth.
San Raimundo is on a high escarpment that towers over the rice plantations looking out over the entire Amazon delta. It’s the last high ground of note before the sea and it was worrying to talk to the old man who seemed to be looking after the deserted buildings when he said that our chosen route was impossible. There just wasn’t enough hard ground between here and the sea, he said, to walk. The only way was in a boat. He’d lived and worked in this area for twenty years and laughed at us openly as being naive. I hope he reads this book one day.
Not wanting to stay with the prophet of doom in San Raimundo we made our way down the escarpment to the small workers’ village of Pesquisa. The inhabitants were the remnants of the rice plantation workers who had stayed on and were trying to survive by fishing and growing the usual manioc crops.
The welcome was one of the friendliest, not least because the entire village seemed to be half drunk in a happy way. We shuffled down a shabby street littered with rubbish and merry, semi-clad Brazilians. Within ten minutes the president told us we were ‘at home’ and a lady called Nazareth with a very suggestive smile was cooking us fried chicken.