Men's Journal

After 859 days in the jungle, Ed Stafford completes one of the last great firsts on Earth.

Interview by Matthew Power

On August 9, after 4,000 miles and more than 50,000 mosquito bites, 34-year-old British adventurer Ed Stafford reached the Atlantic Ocean, the first man to trek the entire length of the Amazon River on foot. On the way he and his Peruvian trekking partner encountered snakes, electric eels, swarming wasps, hostile natives, and endless miles of flooded forest. Last year Men’s Journal’s Matthew Power spent two weeks trekking with Stafford in the Peruvian Amazon [“Lost in the Amazon,” June 2009]. Power spoke to Stafford a few days ——————————————————after his return to England.

Last we talked you were 100 miles from the Colombia-Brazil border and a little nervous about crossing over to Brazil.
Yeah, our permits hadn’t come through, so we were illegally going through the indigenous reserves. I sort of had to bribe my way through. I had to buy a cooker for one tribal chief and a digital camera for another. But we had so many headaches going through Peru, with all the indigenous people being very scared of us. Because Brazil is a little more wealthy and the populations a bit more educated, everyone was just lovely. You’d enter a community and have a nice hot plate of food put straight in front of you. No one would ever ask for money. It was the exact antithesis of Peru, really. All of the hostility from the people evaporated completely.

What was the biggest difficulty of the trip?
Keeping our calories up. There were times when we meant to resupply at communities on the map, but because the maps were outdated, the communities didn’t exist anymore. So we had to start cutting down palm trees to get the palm hearts out, foraging for fruits on the floor, and fishing for piranha. At one point we had to kill and eat tortoises. I felt quite guilty about that.

I saw the video of you entering the village and eating ocelot.
It’s annoying actually, because it’s been played a little bit out of context on the BBC. There was an ocelot who was taking the villager’s chickens, and they killed it. We never went down the line of hunting. Apart from fishing, the only thing we did, when we were bloody hungry, was kill the tortoises.

What were some of the environmental issues you observed during your trek?
Especially in eastern Brazil, the Amazon has been logged to death. The whole place is just horrible secondary jungle — quite difficult to walk through, because it was all very tangled. The whole mouth of the Amazon is demolished. No one’s doing anything about controlling the logging there.

Did you ever think you would quit?
No, but basically it was from not wanting the embarrassment of coming home after having shouted about it for so long. It was that sort of mentality that kept me going. There wasn’t one single incident that was so horrendous that we needed to give up.

Even when you had a botfly larva burrowed in your head?
That was just a minor irritant. Nothing more.

(Check out this video of Stafford getting the botfly removed from his noggin.)

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Were there long stretches of road near the end once you got to more populated areas?
One hundred fifty kilometers west of the city, we cruised down the road into Manaus, crossed the Amazon, and walked on the northern side of the river maybe 400 kilometers. I found, bizarrely, that was one of the toughest parts of the expedition: it was physically quite demanding, but it was also fucking boring. It wasn’t dangerous, and yet it was very strenuous, and quite difficult mentally.

You walked for 20 straight hours at the end of the journey, right?
We had to do 85 kilometers. And on a couple hours of sleep. And I collapsed the night before.

What happened?
I told [my expedition partner] Cho, “I’m really tired. I need 20 minutes beside the road.” He looked at me like I was being pathetic. I lay down to recuperate, and then I thought I’d been bitten, and started scratching like mad. I had a rash all over my body, like this metal rash. Itching everywhere. Absolutely maddening. Unlike any itching I’ve ever had before. I was just writhing on the side of the road. I had to take my clothes off to scratch. Joe was unable to do anything. I inched myself into a state of delirium and completely passed out. When I woke up 20 minutes later, I was in a slightly more normal state, and Keith [a photographer who had come on for the expedition’s end] said, “Man, you’re gonna go to a hotel and have three hours of forced sleep.” And I did that. Then I went back to the point where I collapsed, and we pushed out the final 85 kilometers. But yeah, slightly dramatic final day. Because I was completely helpless.

Do you feel like this Amazon walk was the last, great first thing left to be done?
It annoys me when people say that. I think there’s loads of firsts still to be done. I’ve got lots of ideas, two amazing expeditions that I’ve got in my head, and so I don’t agree with that at all. I think it’s just a case of people not thinking outside the box and not going for it.

What did you miss the most that you’re getting back to now?
Well, good beer. And women, to be honest. It’s been a very male-dominated environment for the last two-and-a-half years. Not that any girls have materialized yet. But they will.

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This article originally appeared in the October 2010 issue of Men’s Journal.