A WILD, WILD LIFE The story of the man that walked the length of the Amazon in two and a half years. Ed Stafford was born in 1975 in Leicestershire, in the UK. He started leading expeditions after he left his job as British Army’s captain. He also joined a team of the United Nations in Afghanistan and helped in the First Presidential Elections on planning, security, and logistics assistant.
After search in Google if anybody had made the Amazon length’s trip before, he decided to become the first man who did it by walking. Many people tried to discourage him but when he heard the words “It’s impossible”, his determination of achieved the goal grew up.
In 2010, Ed started walking the length of the Amazon River: it was 6.000 km from the mountains of Peru to the Atlantic Ocean and he achieved his goal after 895 days with the company of “Cho”. In reality, he started the journey with another person: Luke Collyer, who left after three months. During the journey, he wrote a diary and now, reading it back, he admitted there were some particular moments when he thought the journey was a complete madness. Sometimes he was scared to the point of paranoia and a native’s tribe tried to kill Cho and him. Ed’s Spanish wasn’t very good and he couldn’t talk with anyone. Apart from this, he met a lot of people and considered the journey as a great experience. Before walk the Amazon length, Stafford worked in a BBC production: “Lost Land of the Jaguar”. He also filmed his journey and named it “Walking the Amazon” on Discovery Channel and Channel 5; and he wrote a book with the same name In Amazon’s project, he raised about 9,000 pounds for the MEA’s Tissue Bank Appeal and donated about 83,000 pounds to an association that fight against cancer. Now, Ed Stafford aims to motivate others to believe they can achieve their dreams. His presentations are a mix of narrative and pictorial anecdotes with documentary footage filmed by Ed himself in the jungle. He takes the audience with him back to the jungle with his presentation and helps to inspire them to see life ahead as an adventure ready to begin.