Ed Stafford, the first man to walk the entire length of the Amazon, talks about starvation, machete-wielding tribesmen and flesh-eating parasites.
By Amy Willis
For a 6ft 1 in man, there is a lot less of Ed Stafford than you'd expect. His trousers hang around his hips slightly and although he is bigger now than he was nine months ago, he is still rebuilding the muscle he lost during his incredible 6,000 mile journey from the source of the Amazon in the Peruvian Andes to its mouth in eastern Brazil.
Ed was warned that his two-and-a-half-year trip on foot across South America, which he documented online in a series of blogs and video diary entries, would end in failure and possibly death. But the explorer attempted it anyway, and nine million-odd steps and around 200,000 mosquito and ant bites later he proved his critics wrong.
“I was in my early 30s didn't have any kids, no wife, I wanted to do something incredibly challenging and I was in a lucky position to be experienced enough to do something big and not have those responsibilities,” he says.
Perhaps surprisingly, the 35-year-old former British Army captain wasn’t that fit when he landed at his starting point in Camaná, Perú. He had decided that given all the walking he was about to embark on he would just get fit as he went. But as the months went by and the miles under foot hit their thousands, instead of becoming an Adonis, he found that his muscle mass started to break down and he got weaker and weaker.
"We were slightly malnourished for the whole time,” he says, “We didn't have enough food to actually maintain our own body weight. When we came into each town we were so hungry we over ate and we sort of entered starvation mode."
Lack of food drove him to break their no-hunting policy. Ed recalls one time after two days on low rations when he and his Peruvian walking companion Cho spotted a red-footed tortoise nestling in the leaf litter. They wasted no time worrying about ethics and butchered the tortoise there and then, before roasted it over a woodchip fire in garlic and oil to make tortoise jerky.
They also scavenged for palm hearts, wild tomatoes, nuts, wild bananas and later fished for piranha, narrowly missing a run in with a two-metre electric eel capable of producing a potentially lethal 500 watt shock."I think it can always look out of context and in fact I just adapted to life in the jungle," he says. “We tried to deliberately not hunt but we needed to survive."
Cho joined the expedition six months into the trip, just before heavy flooding pushed them onto the drug-trafficking route through a lawless region of Colombia. Ed had fallen out with his original walking companion Luke Collyer after just 68 days; something the pair had not anticipated.
Everyone in the drugs trafficking region was involved in cocaine production, from the local peasant who grew cocoa leaves, to the people managing the town.
"In the town plaza there is a huge concrete coca leaf, which is the plant they make cocaine out of, and it is not very subtle, they don't try to hide the fact that that is where all the money comes from," he says.
The Colombian drugs trail included "The Red Zone" in Peru where petrified locals believed the "gringos" – including Ed – were trying to kill them to harvest their organs; something which understandably led to some hostile encounters. "As I looked over my shoulder there were no fewer than five dugout canoes heading in our direction – all full of armed Ashaninkas. Many of the men were standing up in these narrow vessels and were armed with either shotguns or bows and arrows. The women among them had machetes," he recalls in his book.
Ed and Cho were marched at arrow point to the village where they had to apologise to the chief for not having sought permission to enter their land. They were lucky; had they been carrying weapons the outcome may have been different.
Other people in the region called him a corta cabeza or "head cutter", running an index finger along their throats as he passed. “It was no doubt linked to the way indigenous peoples have been treated in the past by colonial settlers – but it was sad that such fear existed in these people’s lives,” he says.
But despite the dangers, Ed made it through the drug trafficking zone without too much trouble.
In April 2009, one year into his expedition, he reached the hardest part of the journey: the Brazilian rainforest. With worse flooding, poor maps, and parts of the Amazon rainforest which had never been walked, the threat of failure was overwhelming. Not to mention reports of fierce tribes that had, in the past, killed other British explorers.
Insects were also a concern: at one point Ed found himself with a botfly larvae growing in his head. “It was like a little pin prick and it can keep you awake at night," he says. "But you can't squeeze them out if they are alive and you have to block off their air hole so I did that, I used a bit of super glue actually and killed it and then squeezed it out."
“Botflies are flies that lay eggs on the underside of mosquitoes," he adds. "The mosquito bites you and the eggs feel the heat of the mammal, or in my case my head, and the eggs drop into the bite and then a small larvae starts growing inside the flesh. It is not serious at all but it is just eating away at the flesh in order to grow."
Progress was slow through the dense jungle but in August 2010, Ed Stafford and Cho finally emerged from the rainforest to attempt the final leg of the journey to the Atlantic Ocean.
Dozens of journalists were waiting for them, having followed their progress through the hundreds of blogs and video diary entries he had uploaded onto his website throughout the journey.
Nine million-odd steps, more than 200,000 mosquito and ant bites each, about 600 wasp stings, six pairs of boots and a dozen scorpion stings later Ed Stafford became the first man to walk the Amazon rainforest. It was, he admits, the best day of his life.
Ed plans on doing another world first in September next year. He is keeping the plan under wraps but says it will be a challenge outside the Amazon. Follow his progress on his website.
Ed has just released his first book Walking the Amazon, which is on sale now.
