British man becomes first to walk Amazon length

MARUDA BEACH, Brazil, (Reuters) – A former British  army captain became yesterday the first known person to walk  from the origin of the Amazon river to its mouth, after  enduring “50,000” mosquito bites, attacks by hostile Indians  and tropical disease in his nearly 2-1/2 year odyssey.   Ed Stafford, a 34-year-old from Leicestershire, England,  dived into the Atlantic Ocean after taking 859 days to walk the  length of the world’s second-longest river, starting at the  peak of Mount Mismi in Peru in April 2008.

“It’s just phenomenal to be here at the end of the journey  after 2-1/2 years slogging our way through the jungle,” he told  Reuters after arriving at the beach about 90 miles (150 km)  northeast of the Brazilian city of Belem.

“It was really difficult to envisage how this was going to  feel and I’m completely overwhelmed.”

Stafford briefly collapsed from exhaustion with only 52  miles (85 km) of the 6,000-mile (9,650 km) journey to go,  passing out by the roadside after breaking out in a rash.

“I feel slightly humbled that my system just decided to  shut down so close to the finish,” he wrote on his blog at  www.walkingtheamazon.com.

Stafford has aimed to use the walk to raise awareness about  the threats to the Amazon rain forest and its people, using a  portable satellite video to blog about his trek.

He had planned to complete the walk in about a year, but  the journey was prolonged by floods that forced him to walk a  roundabout route that was 2,000 miles (3,200 km) longer than  the 4,000-mile (6,400-km) length of the Amazon, which is  exceeded in length only by Africa’s Nile river.

He began the journey with fellow British adventurer Luke  Collyer, but the pair had a falling out early in the trek and  Stafford continued alone. He was joined in July 2008 by a  Peruvian forestry worker, Gadiel Cho Sanchez Rivera, who  pledged to walk with him for five days and has been with him on  the walk ever since.

A statement from Stafford’s media team said that the Briton  had been: “wrongly accused of murder on two separate occasions,  been imprisoned, had concrete stuffed in his mouth by hostile  tribes people, been chased by Ashaninka Indians with bows and  arrows, been stung by hundreds of wasps and watched as his  guide ‘Cho’ removed a botfly from Ed’s head with superglue and  a tree spine.”

It said he had endured “50,000” mosquito bites, lived on a  diet of piranha fish, rice and beans, and dodged a variety of  snakes, electric eels, scorpions, and ants, as well as  contracting a skin-disfiguring disease.