Walking the Amazon: 860 Days. One Step at a Time.
Ed Stafford
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0452298261
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the star of Discovery Channel's Naked and Marooned comes a a riveting, adventurous account of one man’s history-making journey along the entire length of the Amazon—and through the most bio-diverse habitat on Earth. Fans of Turn Right at Machu Piccu and readers of Jon Krakauer and Bill Bryson and will revel in Ed Stafford's extraordinary prose and lush descriptions.
In April 2008, Ed Stafford set off to become the first man ever to walk the entire length of the Amazon. He started on the Pacific coast of Peru, crossed the Andes Mountain range to find the official source of the river. His journey lead on through parts of Colombia and right across Brazil; all while outwitting dangerous animals, machete wielding indigenous people as well as negotiating injuries, weather and his own fears and doubts. Yet, Stafford was undeterred. On his grueling 860-day, 4,000-plus mile journey, Stafford witnessed the devastation of deforestation firsthand, the pressure on tribes due to loss of habitats as well as nature in its true-raw form. Jaw-dropping from start to finish, Walking the Amazon is the unforgettable and gripping story of an unprecedented adventure.
Walking the Amazon is also available as a Spanish edition entitled Caminado El Amazonas.
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And green wellies?’ Saul’s tone suggested they were standard items in every respectable gentleman’s wardrobe. ‘Of course I haven’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a hooded sweatshirt, ripped jeans and a pair of Nike trainers.’ ‘Well, borrow some then, and I’ll pick you up tomorrow at six.’ The phone went dead. Luckily, James had been in the army, too, but he was a conventional officer who, unlike me, had collected the full line of appropriate clothing for such occasions. He kindly lent me a tweed jacket,
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
satellite phones, Internet, GPS and modern weapons, the drugs industry is far better equipped than the Peruvian police, who don’t stand a chance of defeating them. The only successful operations against the narcos were conducted by the military – and these were apparently rare. After a 0530 start, sleeping in a ditch at the side of a road, we wandered into a small town called Villa Virgen at about breakfast time. The town was in the early stages of recovery following a huge party the night
with us for three weeks in return for his generous donations. He would bring in any new items of kit we needed with him and so his visit would be really valuable to us at a time when everything seemed to be falling apart. In hindsight, the period of time spent navigating with just an inaccurate map and a cheap compass from the UK that wasn’t even balanced for South America made the journey far more exciting. We simply had to make do and revert to methodologies used hundreds of years ago. We were
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
