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

by Stafford, Ed

  I took out the computer and entered our latitude and longitude from the new GPS into Google Earth. Immediately I could see where we were and I could see the exact shape of the river ahead. I could see, too, that the apex of one of the huge meanders of the river came close to us if we walked off to our right and so I took that point on the meander from Google Earth, entered the coordinates into our GPS, retrieved a bearing from it that we all three entered into our compasses, and suddenly we had a new direction and the shortest possible distance to the river.

  The direction was hard right and we never once had to enter the bamboo. It was a combination of technologies that enabled me to plot the new course and I was quite chuffed with how it worked. Just over a kilometre later we broke out on to the wide river and congratulated ourselves. Almost zero effort and we’d avoided a hellish afternoon. From that point on Google Earth, rather than the inaccurate, large-scale maps, became my primary aid for navigating. For the remainder of this leg we would use it directly on the Macbook, but when we set off from the next big town we would print off screenshots of the route ahead with the grid overlaid. That’s how we navigated for the nine months and more than 2,000 kilometres that lay ahead.

  Even Google had its limitations, however. I misinterpreted a white line that I was adamant was a road that would help our advance to the town of Coari. The line was indeed a man-made cutting through the trees but it was not a road, it was an oil pipeline. This was a double knock-back: we were not only losing out on what I thought would be a few days of easy walking by road – but the jungle in the area was recent grow-back from cutting in the pipeline. Our progress was gruellingly slow in the burning equatorial sunlight, and, with no upper canopy to control regeneration, vegetation had grown furiously to fill the void.

  We nervously approached a camp full of men wearing orange overalls, as we were fairly sure that the oil company wouldn’t be too happy that we were passing through their area without permission. We needn’t have worried; the pipeline workers force-fed us pork, coffee and ice-cold juice and then, incredibly, gave us a standing ovation as we left their camp. Touches of human kindness like this after three weeks non-stop in the jungle were impossible not to get emotional about. It meant so much to us that people understood what we were doing and showed their support. As in many places in Brazil, the workers wouldn’t accept a penny in return for their food. They just wanted us to leave them happy.

  In Coari we said goodbye to Pete who’d lost six kilograms in three weeks but had stuck with it and done himself credit. Despite his dogged toughness, it was his humility and kindness to Cho that made his visit work for me.

  I hung out of hotel windows with my BGAN and eventually was remotely talked through a ‘remote factory reset’ to get it running by the techies at AST. Easy when you know how but it took forty-eight hours of trying everything until the AST techies at last came up with the simple solution.

  Cho and I used the kitchen at the hotel to make ‘dog biscuits’, a calorie-packed energy snack made from flour, sugar, oats, butter and dulce de leche, a South American variant on golden syrup. With cinnamon and ginger to flavour them, these were gorgeously delicious; they cost a fraction of the price of the cereal bars. Finally, we bought two cheap Santa hats from the market and set off into the trees once again.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Dedication’

  ON 10 DECEMBER 2009, having walked for twenty-one months, but still with seven months left to push, I sat down on my pack and said to Cho that I was bored. Not exhausted, shattered or fatigued – just bored.

  I could see by the look on Cho’s face that he understood me completely. We were only three days into a nine-day leg and we had rested well. Our current hurdle wasn’t physical – it was mental.

  We knew that ahead of us we’d another Christmas away from our families. We knew that it would be spent in the jungle eating farine with salt. We knew that we would try to make over seven kilometres that day and would then look for a place to put the fishing net if the river was big enough. Everything was frighteningly familiar.

  It wasn’t a question of would we give up – that never entered our heads. Melodramatic or not: we would both have died before coming home as failures. What we were trying to look for now was a way to reinvigorate the walk which had become, at times, something close to a self-inflicted prison sentence.

  Blog entry from 17 December 2009:

  Ten years ago yesterday I was sleeping in the spare room at my mum and dad’s house in the small rural village of Mowsley in Leicestershire. I had recently graduated from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and, as a young second lieutenant without a place of my own, was staying with my parents whilst on military leave until my first reporting date with the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment.

  It was still dark and I was half asleep when Mum burst into the room and, failing to keep the earth-shattering grief out of her voice, said, ‘Your father’s dead.’

  Mum and I had driven him to the Royal Infirmary the night before. A place he hated and did not want to go to. A place where the drugs that they put him on made him hallucinate and ask me whether I really did love him at all. A place where we left him alone that night and drove home via the pub.

  Mum and I sat on the floor at the top of the stairs hugging each other with tears streaming down our faces and I could not stop saying out loud, ‘I love you Dad, I love you Dad, I love you Dad.’ I needed him to know – I needed the message to get to through to him somehow.

  The last time I ever saw him was a few hours later when we went to the hospital. Unmade up, and with his mouth hanging half open, his body lay there with no life in it. The strongest part of our family – the strength that held us all together – had gone. I asked one of the nurses to take the gold signet ring off his finger and I put it on. I wore it from that day on until it attracted too much attention with the Ashaninka Indians in Peru and I had to ask Marlene to look after it in Lima where it is now.

  Dad was tall for his generation at six foot three inches; he was a man of few words and had a dry sense of humour. He had fought off cancer twice previously and was physically in pretty poor shape for much of his adult life as a result of the chemotherapy and archaic radiotherapy that he’d received since his early twenties. Mentally and morally he was one of the strongest men I have ever known and the love he had for my mum, my sister and me was unquestionable.

  Whatever the weather he would always show up and stand on the touchline with a drip on the end of his nose in his flat cap, Barber and wellies to watch me play rugby. Even when he was very ill and his blood platelet count was so low that had he been hit by the ball he would have died – would have haemorrhaged uncontrollably to death – he still came and watched. That’s not a show of support a son forgets.

  While I wrote that I had tears pouring down my face. It was a channel that allowed me to release so much tension, worry and loneliness. It wasn’t that I hadn’t dealt with Dad’s death; it was that I needed to get in touch with my emotions again after months of suppressing fear and anxiety. While I couldn’t go on without allowing myself this short period of weakness, it enabled me to move on and be stronger, with a calmer, more balanced outlook.

  The Amazon is not a normal river, like the Thames, for instance – it is the focal point of a huge sheet of water that surges through the forest when the waters are high. This deluge of water can be more than 100 kilometres wide in places; it is the same distance as London to Paris at its mouth where it gushes out at over 200,000 cubic metres per second into the Atlantic Ocean. It is not where two rather small, insignificant and helpless ramblers wanted to get caught. Overnight flash floods would reportedly sweep away complete camps, killing everybody and leaving no trace.

  The rains had begun. Cho and I hadn’t lit a fire with dry wood in days but luckily we knew how to start one with wet wood – we’d had rather a lot of practice by now. We ate our food naked after having washed – there was no point putting on our dry clothes (they would just g
et wet again) – and we were long past the embarrassment stage by now.

  On Christmas Eve we were too close to the main channel of the Solimões to be safe from the flooded forests. We were in annually flooded forest now and the muddy forest floor was getting soggier and harder to walk on by the day.

  We needed to escape from the varzea and a search for high ground before the floods came for real. High ground would be the best Christmas present we could wish for.

  On Christmas Day it hardly stopped raining. We had a wet day walking and then recorded some silly video messages for the website and posed as two men in Santa hats in a hammock for a daft photo for the website. As we set up camp, the heavy rain was relentless. I made a fire from sodden wood and Cho went to see if he could catch fish in a river. I was sure he would have no luck.

  Cho was ages and I sat in the rain thinking about the lonely, isolated Christmas I was having; but then, just as it was getting dark, Cho returned with a catch of seven or eight fish speared through the gills on a stick to carry them.

  ‘Nice one, Cho!’ I beamed and helped him scale and gut them in the stream nearby. We fried some garlic in oil, and added the fish chunks and water. It was a perfect bumper catch and a great Christmas present. We laughed and joked and Cho practised saying ‘Happy Christmas’ in English. ‘This time next year, Cho, we’ll be at home with our families,’ I said. We sat gazing into the orange flames and dreaming of the outside world.

  Each day Cho and I walked with our clothes painted to our bodies with sweat. We broke for ten minutes every hour and habitually wrung out our tops – that was as dry as they got all day. They were then used as rags to wipe the jungle grit and grime from the back of our necks and the crooks of our elbows. For those precious ten minutes we would sit on our packs and exchange exhausted glances.

  Raindrops were refreshing in the high humidity but the regular precipitation also meant that the rivers were now swollen and bloated. Their discharge was steadily seeping into the lower-lying varzea – but only so much as to give us wet boots at the moment. We were still making good progress.

  By 31 December we had just cut through a thick patch of thorny bamboo to get to a river’s edge and, up to our waists in water, were clearing the rushes to make space to inflate the pack rafts. We only had to cross the river at this point, but it was New Year’s Eve, we were tired, and we were inflating the rafts anyway …

  ‘Cho,’ I ventured, ‘we could just head downriver in the rafts to the fishing village of Paricatuba rather than spending the night in the jungle on our own …’ He smiled, acknowledged that he’d just been thinking the very same thing, and we had a new plan to bring in the New Year.

  We marked the spot with the GPS to return to the next day (or the day after, depending on how good our night was). Four hours later we were sitting on a wooden deck of a floating house at the front of the pretty village with a beer each. The cleared ground stretched up from the river behind us with a big, pink, concrete church at the top of the hill. The hot evening sun scorched my gringo neck as we toasted our new circumstances.

  The evening was comprised mostly of sitting in a circle watching a five-inch screen on which was playing Brazilian pop music in Portuguese. I had thought I was getting good at Portuguese – with its nasal words all running into each other – but trying to understand slurred, drunken Portuguese was seriously difficult. The night ended in a slight blur of very sincere old men hugging us and telling us we were their friends.

  Cho was keen for a rest day when we woke up and so I checked emails and did my accounts. We’d spent about £12 on New Year’s Eve between the two of us so I didn’t feel too guilty about the indulgence. The beer had had that cold, thirst-quenching quality that just made you smile with pleasure. It had been worth it.

  On 2 January we had to go back to where we’d left off walking so we hired a wooden boat and Amaral, a short, plump man with a big smile, steered us back upriver, his engine putt-putt-putting behind us. We had to return to exactly where we’d left off, and as we closed in on the GPS waypoint, I started to inflate the pack raft we’d used to travel downstream to Paricatuba. I was standing up in the bows of the narrow boat, puffing the last few breaths into the raft to make it as taut as a drum, when a gust of wind took the rubber canoe and me clean overboard. Unfazed by my premature dip, I turned round, grinning goofily, ready for a ribbing from Cho, when I saw that I’d overturned the entire canoe and the two slightly panicky crew were grabbing loose items of kit as the boat and its heavy engine disappeared below the murky surface.

  Cho grabbed the dry bag with my wallet and GPS in it while Amaral tried to free the outboard from the reeds on the riverbed three metres below. I dragged the submerged wooden boat to shallow water and managed to tip the water out quickly so that I could return to the still rather panic-stricken Amaral who then, still out of his depth, showed Hulk-like strength to haul the motor up the side and into the boat. We regrouped and realised, much to our relief, that our only loss had been the single machete that we’d brought for the day. It could have been so much worse.

  Cho and I apologised for my clumsiness – and for the fact that Amaral would now have to paddle back because his engine had water in it. We crossed the river and had the most pleasant day walking through surprisingly dry, open, varzea without needing the now drowned machete once. We walked into Paricatuba at two in the afternoon to the news that the boat hadn’t returned and I had to hire another canoe to go on a search and rescue mission to find poor old Amaral.

  With a new boat driver, Alvaro, who looked amusingly similar to the actor who plays Chris Finch in The Office (British version), we covered the whole stretch of water searching thoroughly. Time drew on. No Amaral and no boat. Finchy and I exchanged silent glances. We were both coming to the conclusion that Amaral must have drowned in the perilous, choppy waves when we checked in the one floating house that we’d not passed en route to find a smiling Amaral sipping coffee and drying his engine out in the sun.

  The great thing about being in Paricatuba for real on foot was that at the top of the cleared riverbank behind the pink church was high ground all the way to the broad highway that led to Manaus. We’d escaped the floods, for now, and estimated we would arrive at the road in just ten days.

  Everything is relative and, when you’ve been walking for 639 days, a ten-day leg through unknown jungle that no one in the village could remember being walked in living history seemed nothing. We set off in search of Highway BR-319 with fresh supplies and high morale. We knew that in Manaus we would take a proper break and it felt like the holiday had started already after our warm welcome by the Paricatubans.

  But after four days of nasty jungle, Cho flatly told me, ‘Not many people in the world would follow you through this.’

  He had a point. There was nothing pleasurable about those ten days. No beautiful rivers, hardly any wildlife, just kilometres of secondary messy bush that required a lot of machete work to make any progress. Maybe because Manaus was in spitting distance we were counting the minutes in each hour and our brains often spiralled into near maddening despair. We’d let our guard down before the end of the fight and the negatives of how hard and slow this leg was had got to us.

  We had to change our approach and revert to working on taking back control of our minds. My solutions varied daily but I can remember singing ‘Dedication’, the theme tune to the old BBC children’s programme Record Breakers, sung, and trumpeted, by the late Roy Castle. I had not heard it in years – it was Cho’s behaviour that made it stick in my head.

  One morning he fell off a slippery log and, feeling the machete leave his hand, he instinctively grabbed it as he landed, pulling his fingers down the blade. I watched in slow motion as the panicked look on his face said it all and I prayed he’d not lost any fingers. Clutching his hand, he scrambled out of the far side and I ripped out the medical kit in seconds. The wound had seriously cut all four fingers on his left hand and the cut on the little finger was very deep. After w
ashing and adding iodine, we tightly bound his hand with duct tape to stop the bleeding. Brave as ever, Cho made to continue walking but I told him we were making camp where we were. Sometimes, pushing on was just not necessary and certainly not to anyone’s benefit. The river would make a great camp anyway.

  Cho was still in pain when he started fishing at 2.30 that afternoon. He was keen not to be hampered by his wound and so, when I made the fire, he found a slow pool in the meandering river and threw in his hook and line.

  I made supper, our small ration of rice and beans with black coffee, and called him to come but he asked me to put in his Lock & Lock box as he would eat it later. I went to bed when it got dark around 6.20, having eaten alone. I read in my cosy, dry hammock den. At eight o’clock I had just finished my book when I saw Cho’s head torch bobbing through the trees back towards the embers of the fading fire.

  ‘We have supper!’ he proclaimed and slapped down a big catfish with a grin that I could not see in the dark but I knew was there. It had taken him five and a half hours to land his prize. I got up and gutted and cooked the catfish while Cho bathed.

  As we ate I complimented Cho on his remarkable patience. It had given us both an injection of protein we had needed for several days. He brushed it off in his usual way. For him, fishing was a distraction from the monotony of the walk but this time I suspected such perseverance was his way of gaining control again over the jungle after his machete accident.

  I thought back to how Luke and I had clashed and how different my relationship with Cho was. With mutual respect and complementary skills, a two-man team could work very well indeed. I was so lucky to have Cho with me. So it was that his dedication set that song going round and round in my head. Cho learned the words and would sing ‘Dedication is what you need!’ at the top of his voice in English while walking.

  The BR-319 is a dead-straight, open wound across the face of the Amazon. It was mid-January 2010 by the time we broke out on to the crumbling road that marked the end of the vast stretch of jungle that we had crossed since Tabatinga. Once paved, it cut a scar through the Amazon rainforest from Manaus to Porto Velho in the south-west. The total traffic it saw was about two 4×4 trucks a day.