Man vs. Wild: Ed Stafford Set to Be First to Walk the Amazon

May 21, 2010 — -- With every machete whack and every soggy step, Ed Stafford gets a little closer to joining the ranks of the explorer elite; hearty souls throughout history who sailed over uncharted horizons or walked into wilderness to fill in maps for king, God and glory.

Sure, the great ones relied on the stars while Ed has Google Earth. But even in 2010, the Amazon is a steaming, stinging, slithering test of will, and his will to press on is inspiring school kids around the globe.

The Amazon starts with a trickle high in the Andes, getting fatter with every rainfall until 4,000 miles later, it roars into the sea at 58 million gallons a second. The first Europeans sailed it in the 16th century, but in all the years since no one has ever been brave and/or crazy enough to walk it. Because the world's biggest jungle contains a long and creative list of ways it can kill you.

Anaconda and piranha, jaguars and electric eels, assassin bugs and vampire fish and sharp-toothed caiman. The mosquitoes carry diseases; the drug smugglers, guns; and savage tribes carry both poison arrows and deep suspicion.

It is, hands down, THE worst place to take a long walk. But for Stafford, those were perfect reasons to come.

"It was in fact, a lot of people telling me that it was impossible to walk the entire length of the Amazon that spurred me on even more," Stafford told me. "As soon as they said 'that's impossible,' it made me want to prove them wrong."

He set aside an entire year to hike and hack his way down the Amazon. But when I found him in eastern Brazil, he'd been walking for more than 2 years, and he was still months away from the finish line.

As we hiked, he told his story. The son of London lawyers, Stafford was raised in posh boarding schools, until wanderlust led him into the military, and then to a job leading jungle expeditions. Rainforest conservation became his passion.

He has seen huge parcels of rainforest that have been ruined by deforestation. "Every Brazilian you meet will quote the "lungs of the planet" comment at you, so people here do understand how precious the rainforest is," Stafford said. "But there's no doubt it's still going on, and it's going on at a rate that still isn't sustainable. If this expedition it wasn't adventurous, if it wasn't slightly gung-ho and if there wasn't an element of danger people wouldn't be interested in coming to the blog and then finding out more about the Amazon, so I think so the event seems like the reckless side of it, it's actually crucial to draw people into the Amazon and in order to make the whole thing exciting."For more on Stafford's journey CLICK HERE.