The Narco Trail to Columbia......
Morale - 8/10
RHR - 67
Weight - no idea, but dropping
Guides: Cho, Juan, Moses
Ed Stafford aims to be the first man to walk the length of the Amazon river, from source to sea, from Peru to Brazil. No man has ever achieved this daring and dangerous feat before. Ed's hungry, tired and his laptop has died.
This blog was dictated over satellite phone. The laptop is dead.
'If you’ve seen the map lately you’ll see that we’ve headed north of the river channel into the hills. Two kms a day was getting us down a bit and we wanted to arrive at the Atlantic Ocean this side of 2020.
From Pebas we heard a rumour that there was a drugs trafficking trail that ran all the way to Columbia over the hills. All we had to do was to find a drugs runner or ex-drugs runner that would take us. After some approaches we met with Juan de Silva Rodriguez, undeniably the strongest Peruvian I have ever met, I am decidedly skinny next to him. He said he was a forestry worker and he knew the trail. We were in business.
I made two schoolboy errors prior to departure:
1. I took Juan’s timimgs at face value. He said the route would take 20 days - and as it was such good news and I wanted to believe him - I did. I should have done a timings estimate with the maps.
2. I let Cho and Juan by food for 20 days. After 7 days of walking this route we now have 3 days of food left. I estimate we have 15 to 20 days left to walk before we reach the Columbian border.
So we’ve already started cutting the rations and scavenging from the forest. Juan’s friend, Moses, has come with us too and is an excellant fisherman. On Thursday we feasted on catfish, trout and crab. On Friday Cho turned round to me as we entered a likely camp site and said “God provides!”. “Yeah right” I thought, only to then see what he was talking about. We had a large tortoise ready to be supper for four.
The tortoise is sold on markets here as a typical local dish. The liver fried in garlic and oil was nothing short of wonderful.
Incredibly yesterday we found another tortoise, wild tomatoes, various nuts and wild bananas. We are doing ok and morale is high. But we have 3 days of food to last us over two weeks. We have:
4 kg of rice
2 kg of salt
13 packets of Ramen instant noodles
3 tins of tuna
I sachet of monosodium glutimate
No farine
No coffee
No sugar….
…and there isn’t a community or logging camp in site. Lets hope that we encounter some camps that are occupied soon.
We are constantly spilling out into logging camps that are used by the drugs runners too. They are all empty. So far we have not encountered anybody at all in 6 days but yesterday we saw fresh footprints so there are some people here.'
Two days later......
'We followed fresh footprints into a logging camp. Lots of very well built men were eating breakfast and joking loudly. We were immediately given plates of spaghetti and ham and cups of sweet coffee. Loggers have a great code of looking after each other and we were treated very well.
My moods have been erratic and extreme lately and I’m not sure if this is due to fatigue, or frustration with progress; but my ecstasy over breakfast turned to complete frustration when the loggers told us that the path we had been following stops here.
To put this into context, we left my 1:100,000 map of Peru about a week ago and the 1:1 million map that we were using had next to no useful detail for navigation. We were over a 100 km from the Colombian border and 100 km from the Amazon River when our guides decided to inform us “we don’t know this bit”.
The river we were following was the Apicuari, and as we didn’t know the river’s shape, to follow the meanders would turn the 100 kilometers into well over 200.
ETA Columbia 13 days.
www.walkingtheamazon.com
Ed is walking the Amazon to raise awareness of climate change and is raising money for the ME Association and Cancer Research.
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