Adventurer and journalist, Pip Stewart, cycled through the Amazon rainforest to show the world what’s happening to the planet’s largest tropical jungle and the tribes who live there. She talks to Heather Richardson about arguments and tears, meeting the people directly affected by deforestation and how tourism could save the rainforest.
Mud, Sweat And Tears in the Amazon Rainforest 44
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“What I love about adventure is it’s never all good,” Phillippa – or Pip, as she’s known – Stewart enthuses. “You are going to have moments where you need to dig deep, but you find the strength from yourself. I think that echoes life. We all have those highs and lows.” There were certainly highs and lows on Stewart’s most recent adventure: a two-and-a-halfmonth journey via bicycle, boat and plane through the vast Amazon rainforest, from the Atlantic shores of Brazil to Lima, on the Pacific coast of Peru. The trailer for the resulting documentary, Transamazonica (out later this year on Fox in the States and CBC in Canada), shows her in tears when confronted by her travelling partner, Reza Pakravan, a record-breaking cyclist, adventurer and filmmaker, about her speed. Pakravan has previously set a record cycling across the Sahara Desert, biked from Norway to South Africa in 102 days, carried his bike to the summit of Iran’s Mount Sabalan and cycled the Annapurna Circuit in the Nepalese Himalaya. It was Pakravan who planned the Amazon traverse and approached Stewart – with her broadcasting
