Exhausted but elated after Amazon trek

A thousand kilometres, 859 days, 50,000 mosquito bites and dozens of death threats after he set off, an exhausted British former Army captain stumbled on to a Brazilian beach yesterday to become the first man to walk the length of the world's largest river.

Ed Stafford, 34, has taken almost 2 years to complete one of the world's last great adventures. "It's unbelievable to be here. It proves you can do anything - even if people say you cannot," he said as he soaked his blistered feet in the waves of the Atlantic Ocean at Maruda Beach.

In a journey so epic that renowned explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes called it "mad but marvellous", Stafford has cut his way through the green hell of razor-sharp grass and dense bamboo in one of the world's most inhospitable rainforests, dodging pit vipers, voracious ants, electric eels, anaconda and jaguars as he followed the Amazon from source to mouth.

He has incurred the wrath of drug gangs, loggers and angry tribes, been imprisoned and accused of murder twice, chased by Ashaninka Indians with shotguns, bows and arrows and had concrete stuffed in his mouth by angry locals who thought he was prospecting for oil.

Stafford has contracted skin infections, been bitten by two scorpions, stung by hundreds of wasps, had to pick as many as 42 ticks from his body a day and had a botfly removed from his skull with superglue and a tree spine.

But yesterday the explorer and his companion, Gadiel "Cho" Sanchez Rivera, 31, doused each other in champagne to celebrate their triumph.

Sanchez, a Peruvian forestry worker, had joined the British explorer for five days in August 2008 "to try to help this crazy man through a very dangerous area with drug traffickers and hostile tribes" but stayed for two years.

"I'm more tired and more elated than I've ever been in my life," Stafford said yesterday. "We've lived through some serious situations and there have been times when we genuinely feared for our lives, but we never thought of giving up."

Adding a modern twist to a classic tale of adventure, Stafford has become a "walking video blogger", sending reports back to a website for schoolchildren and updating followers on Facebook.

As he approached the final leg of his journey a few days ago he wrote on his blog: "We will miss the isolation ... we'll clearly miss the mutual reliance between Cho and me. And we'll miss the Amazon jungle itself."

- Independent