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

by Stafford, Ed

  We used the road to advance north-east towards the vast city of Manaus. The first few days we walked in direct, blistering sunlight. I wore my silk sleeping-bag liner under my cap to protect my neck and face from the burning sun. With the increased distances that we had to put in on the road our bodies complained and we became scorched walking corpses. Cho was struggling more – there was something wrong with him and at the end of a long day we stopped in a disused road construction camp and he went straight to sleep. The next day at midday he could hardly walk. We had to stop in a house and ask for water for Cho. I think he had thought that, because he had dark skin, he couldn’t get sunstroke, but that was what it looked like to me. He’d not covered up at all and he was taking doxycycline as an anti-malarial so he would be hypersensitive to light anyway.

  For the first time in months I decided to leave Cho and continue alone. I was not worried about him. Cho could rest up and then catch up with me when he was well by getting a lift on the family’s motorbike. I felt very liberated walking alone for the first time and sang songs to myself. It rained hard for two hours and yet I felt strong and free. I spent a night in an abandoned palapa by the side of the road and was very aware that I was truly on my own for the first time in months.

  By the next day Cho was feeling better and met up with me a little further north and we continued walking together. The people we spoke to told us that the area adjacent to the road was in fact a forestry reserve and that you even had to have a permit to cut trees to build your house. This was good to hear but the same people said that the BR-319 would be completely resurfaced by 2014 and I couldn’t help but worry that the increased traffic to the area couldn’t be good for conservation of the area as a whole.

  I then had the idea to walk at night. We could clock up cool nighttime kilometres without the oppressive heat of the day. We set off at 5 p.m. and after two hours – just after dark – it started raining.

  Rain in the jungle is refreshing and cools you down. Rain in the pitch dark on an open road with a fierce wind ripping at our sodden T-shirts was another matter. With no warm or waterproof clothes to put on, by ten o’clock we were gibbering wrecks with a real risk of hypothermia.

  We were forced now to look for shelter but we could not find two trees close enough for us to erect our tarps. The adjacent forest had been cleared, there was no moon and, to top it all, there were floods on both sides of the road. The telegraph poles that carried an absurdly modern fibre-optic cable through the wilderness teased us as they were the only vertical columns to be seen – but clearly spaced far too far apart for us to make use of.

  We tried knocking on houses to ask for shelter as the rain bit into our faces. We didn’t need to have swallowed an English–Portuguese Collins Gem to understand when someone was telling us to piss off. Loud and clear, the same message came from inside their warm, safe houses.

  At 11.45 p.m. Cho was a walking zombie – he was prone to reacting badly to the cold, as we knew from the Peru floods – but he was colder than he had ever been.

  With no Plan B, we shivered on. A light a few hundred metres ahead of us attracted our attention and so we made for it. A man’s silhouette could be seen from a distance in his open-sided house and I somehow knew immediately that he would be different from the others. I marched ahead of Cho (who had by now lost the will to live) and forced a grin as I asked if we could use his surrounding trees to put up our tarpaulins.

  ‘Of course,’ smiled the man with unquestioning warmth. ‘And, please, have some fried fish and rice.’

  Our slightly biblical tale ended when, in dry clothes with a mouth full of succulent fish, I asked the man his name.

  ‘Messiah,’ he responded. I smiled and shook my head.

  For 95 per cent of the past seven or eight months in Brazil, Cho and I hadn’t seen roads. We hadn’t even seen many paths either. Our normal routine had had us enclosed by dense jungle, not able to see more than a few metres in any direction, rotating half-hour shifts at the front with machete in hand cutting openings through the line of least resistance in the trees.

  Most locals travel through the remote Amazon areas by boat – the vast network of rivers makes it the obvious choice of travel. Unfortunately, that didn’t work for our slightly absurd commitment to walk the entire river’s length. So, like the village hunters, but with twenty times as much weight on our backs, we had headed into the dense rainforest. Since the border with Colombia in May 2009 we had averaged seven kilometres a day like this.

  But the Amazon was changing as we drew closer to the mouth. For the next two weeks the lines of least resistance for Cho and me were the roads running in and out of Manaus. It felt odd walking in Crocs on smooth tarmac while we could still hear troops of howler monkeys roaring from the wild jungle roadsides.

  Some days we made 40 or 45 kilometres. The advantage of this surreal strip of civilisation was that we would make great progress towards the Atlantic – and home.

  On 16 February 2010 we arrived at the south side of the Solimões River and needed to cross over to the north side to Manaus to continue. From this point we knew we had around 1,800 kilometres to go until we reached the Atlantic. The worry was that there was a Federal Police checkpoint where the ferries departed from. We were now illegal and if the Feds checked our passports we were likely to be detained, locked up and possibly deported. The Feds had the power to stop anyone who entered Manaus and my heart was pounding as we walked past the stern-faced, uniformed men. They didn’t bat an eyelid.

  In front of us was the vast confluence of the River Solimões, which we had been following loosely since Colombia, and the River Negro, a huge black-water river that came down from the north from the Guiana Shield Mountains. The fast-flowing Solimões picks up sediment, which makes it muddy and brown, whereas the Negro is a black-water river which means it is slower and, because of the tannins leaching out of the vegetation at this slower speed, it is both acidic and as dark as tea. The Negro is noticeably warmer, too. Where the rivers meet their waters remain separate for several kilometres before mixing, and the two very distinct colours create a striking visual effect. Together the two rivers become the Amazon once more.

  Cho and I paddled without incident across to the northern side of the river where Manaus is situated. We proceeded to walk from the Kawasaki factory on the river through the busy backstreets of Manaus. As we dodged thunderous buses and gambled at amber pedestrian crossings, a long-forgotten world wrenched itself from my unconsciousness.

  Another part of my world to reopen was that of love. In Manaus my ex-girlfriend Chloë came from England to visit. We’d been in contact via Skype and email and despite the clear risks to both of us, we had decided it would be fun if she came over and we spent some time together. It was.

  When her visit was drawing to a close, however, I instinctively knew that I couldn’t commit to her as I felt she wanted me to. I still had six months of jungle walking ahead of me and I didn’t want the distraction of having someone outside who was expecting a phone call or worrying about me. I had to be selfish if I was to complete the journey – it invariably involved some sacrifice – so we both remained single when she went home.

  Chloë still remains the single most supportive person to me throughout the entire journey, apart, perhaps, from the ever-present Cho or my ever-loving mother. Chloë understood me completely and deserves a mention as being the person I could turn to most readily in my darkest moments. She also did a great deal of work sourcing and posting environmental issues to the website and keeping that side of our mission afloat when I was shattered and unable to do so. We are still, and I hope we will remain, the closest of friends.

  Chloë now gone, Cho and I went to acquire some supplies before setting out and we went to one of Manaus’s huge shopping malls. We mounted an escalator and Cho struggled to stay on his feet. As he looked around him in amazement at the stairs that were moving uphill all by themselves I realised he’d never seen such a thing before.

&nbs
p; In late February 2010 we left the city behind us and pushed on towards Itapiranga on the AM-010, and at kilometre 134 we stopped for the night in a dirty roadside village. Had we been hungry and tired this place would have been a welcome site: electricity to charge the laptop, running water and a lady to cook us a stodgy meal. But we weren’t particularly hungry, nor particularly tired; we’d come from the luxury of a break in Manaus so we saw things as they really were.

  The weathered, litter-strewn village looked as if no one there was particularly bothered about personal happiness. We spent the night in a shed that smelled like the outbuilding, just away from school, where boys used to go to smoke and urinate. When I turned on the tap I had a lifetime first of recoiling from the stench of the water I was about to wash in. Torn pages from a pornographic magazine were trodden into the scum under my hammock and, even after my ‘wash’, I felt distinctly grotty. I had the posh room – in Cho’s there was a pile of human shit in the corner.

  We had four walls and a roof and so I shouldn’t have grumbled, even to myself. But I did. Give us horrendous natural conditions in the jungle and we would make good and normally end up loving it. But there was something soul-destroying about that dump whose name, I have to admit, I never got round to asking.

  The one consolation was that just after we’d gone to bed I heard a smack as Cho’s hammock came undone and he hit the ground hard. Even though he was winded and in pain I couldn’t stop tears of laughter rolling down my face for minutes as curses, gasps and groans came from his room.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘He doesn’t talk much, the

  gringo’

  IN EARLY MARCH I was distracted by a small ulcer-like sore on my left biceps that wouldn’t go away. It came from a mere sand-fly bite on New Year’s Day and left a small, open lesion that had been wet (weepy) for nine weeks by this point. The ‘crater’ was only the size of a pea and the whole ‘volcano’ would fit on a ten-pence piece. It wasn’t painful but it had a defined, inflamed, circular edge and just wouldn’t heal.

  I thought it was a tropical ulcer and I treated it with an antiseptic powder and took courses of ampicillin and metronidazole antibiotics sequentially as flucloxacillin was impossible to get hold of. They had absolutely no effect and a small bit of me was annoyed that I hadn’t managed to shrug this off despite a full month out of the moist jungle and on dry, sterile roads.

  Public response from blogging, in particular from two doctors, John James and Caroline Baugh, let me know I most probably had leishmaniasis. In its present form I had nothing to worry about, but I had a 6 per cent chance of it mutating into mucocutaneous leishmaniasis which could be disfiguring, possibly eating away my soft palate (mouth and nose), leaving a permanent hole in my face. I was resigned to living with it for a few months as I wanted us to keep moving forward and didn’t want to stop the expedition.

  The end of the road network from Manaus was the town of Itapiranga where we took a break for one day before heading into the jungle again. From there we crossed low marshland that fortunately had once had a road running through it and the remaining embankment kept us out of most of the floods.

  Cho was walking up front when I saw him raise his machete to his shoulder, like a rifle, and mimic firing a shot at something he had seen ahead. I peered round him and thought I saw a two-metre-plus anaconda.

  Quick as a flash my pack was off and my camera out and I ran forward to film it. Rather than dart away from me, the brave snake seemed interested, spread its neck wide almost like a cobra, and headed towards me. I stopped and stepped back a pace. The snake stopped, too.

  The confusing thing was that I wasn’t quite sure whether it was dangerous or not. Although I’d initially thought it was a small anaconda (harmless to a human being), I was now confused by the lack of markings and the shape of its head.

  I sent some pictures to my mate Ash Holland in Guyana; it turned out to be a large false water cobra (Hydrodynastes gigas). Neither Cho nor I had ever seen a ‘hydro’ before. There are no real cobras in the Americas so the name came from their general similarity in appearance to Asian cobras and from their defensive shows of bravado, which include an expansion of the throat and neck – exactly what I’d seen.

  After a few seconds it disappeared into the undergrowth and we never saw one again. The new sighting made me take stock of all the incredible things around me that I didn’t yet know about. Retaining interest in what we were seeing daily was harder than you might think when we were exhausted. I realised that actively forcing myself to learn more would be a way of keeping my mind healthy.

  Even if I didn’t know what things were I could make the effort to look up and actually think about the rainforest again. I’d long ago switched off and treated the jungle like an obstacle course to be overcome. I rarely appreciated the beauty of the shafts of piercing light that cut down through the high, dark canopy. I seldom stopped to take in the sheer size of the trees or the beauty of their moss-covered buttress roots. I ignored the birds and I didn’t bother photographing troops of monkeys that screamed and shook branches overhead. Around me the wonders of nature might as well have been whitewashed walls and I recognised that I was being both ignorant and stupid. My mind could do with this sort of stimulation to stop it becoming bored and destructive.

  All I needed to do was to give my brain positive stimulus and the expedition was easy. All my problems now came from an isolated, bored, stagnant brain. A lazy, bored brain latches on to negativity and problems and exaggerates them until they become out of perspective and all-consuming. That happened to me a lot if I didn’t actively make the effort to keep myself positive.

  To enter São Sebastiao we had to cross a large tributary; the town looked pretty from the water with a steepled church and pastel-coloured houses. We were watched by about thirty men and women in the port as we paddled up, disembarked, deflated the boats and strapped them on to our packs, and walked up into the town to the nearest hotel. I felt like Sean Connery as James Bond in Goldfinger, when he peels off his wetsuit to reveal his tuxedo and red carnation. We then skirted 14 kilometres round to Urucará, always finding ground that was just firm enough to walk on. Occasionally we had small dips or swims but we were fortunate to be able to cross the lowland at some pace. From Urucará we headed north into the mountains behind. From here we knew that we had 100 kilometres to reach the River Nhamundá where we would next find settlements and people.

  My boots finally fell apart and I bought a pair of wellies from Urucará that were one full size too small. There weren’t many size 46 feet in the Amazon, it would seem. It was an interesting buy to live with over the following weeks. We bought fifteen days’ of food and set off with packs that weighed around 45 kilograms. I was aware that the last 800 kilometres had been on the road and that heading back into the trees with that weight was going to be a shock to our bodies. But because of the hills we didn’t expect to be able to fish and we had to carry as much as possible. As it was, 2,000 calories per man per day was all we could take with us.

  This far into the expedition I was also surprised at how mountainous the jungle could be, and we faced climbs that required us to haul ourselves up slopes through tangled thorns that just went up and up and up. Without contours on our Google Earth printouts, and unable to see more than 15 to 20 metres around us, it was like navigating in whiteout, polar conditions that make it impossible to determine your direction, and there was no chance of sensible route planning.

  At the top of a slope, with calves exploding and lungs burning, when all we wanted to see was a flat ridge that we could follow to maintain altitude, a crevasse-like chasm would loom below us that we had to throw ourselves down. Time after time after time.

  The trees were quite well spaced apart so the going would have been fast but for the hills. We barely used our machetes as we clambered up and down them. The first day we made three kilometres and stopped after five hours. We hardly had the spirit to collect firewood that day. But as the days went on
the packs lightened and our calves hardened.

  Both of my little toes had large blisters on them, as did the balls of both feet. No amount of tape could disguise the fact that the cheap boots were too small and the treads were hard and uncushioned. I could live with them, but every step made me wince and I had to clench my toes to stop them touching the ends of the boots.

  On 14 March, after five and a half hours’ walking, I stopped at a stream to fill up with water. Both Cho and I dumped our packs down and I filled up, added chlorine and put my pack back on. Cho had taken his pack and shirt off and was standing astride the stream bucketing water over his head with his water bottle.

  ‘Don’t you want to bathe?’ Cho asked me.

  ‘No, mate. I want to get to a camp and bath later,’ I replied.

  ‘I didn’t realise we were in a rush.’

  ‘We’re not, Cho, I’m just tired and I want to get there.’

  Cho took offence at me hurrying him and as it was his turn up front he decided he would teach me a lesson.

  He set off at rocket pace up the steep, forested slope. He would show me how fast we could walk if we were in a hurry. Rather than telling him to slow down and not be stupid, I decided to join in the childish game and beat him at it.

  Up and up through the trees we climbed. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Every time Cho turned round there I was right on his shoulder, trying to look as nonchalant and composed as I could. Sweat poured off both of us as neither wanted to slow down or give up. We went faster and faster up the hill until, after twenty-five minutes and at the summit, it was time for our hourly break. We took our packs off and Cho was clearly annoyed that he hadn’t left me for dead. When we’d started walking together in Peru he could easily have done so. I was breathing out of my arse but I’d stayed with him without too many problems.