Title: Walking the Amazon
Author: Stafford, Ed
Published by: Virgin Books
Year: 2012
First published: Virgin Books, 2011
Date reviewed: 01.16
ISBN: 9780753515648

“A wonderful, gritty expedition book”, writes Chris Bonington on the cover of Andrew Greig’s “Summit Fever”. Much as I like that book I don’t agree with Sir Chris’s use of ‘gritty’ to describe it. But “Walking the Amazon” is a wonderful, gritty expedition book. It’s gobsmackingly, mindblowingly, jawdroppingly gritty. It’s an amazing, astonishing story of endurance, dogged persistence and determination. For Ed Stafford to call his journey a ‘walk’ is a massive understatement – it was a hack, slash, squelch, wade, swim, paddle, stagger, sweat, drop epic. He nearly starved. He could have drowned, or been eaten by a caiman, or killed by a snake, or died from any one of a myriad of tropical diseases, or been shot by indigenous tribes, drug runners, or illegal loggers.

But he didn’t, and he wasn’t. He survived. It took him two years and four months, over 8000 kilometres, and in doing it he achieved the first complete journey on foot from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the whole length of the Amazon river, much of it through jungle where almost certainly no human had been before. Whether you like walking or not you should read this book — it will open your eyes to a world you couldn’t have imagined.