Mud, Sweat and Tears in the Amazon Rainforest

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.

“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 and adventure travel background – to be his journalist and dig into the issues of conservation and survival that currently surround the Amazon jungle.

When you’re cycling the length of a 4,000-kilometre road through the tropics, bust-ups are perhaps inevitable. “I probably didn’t do as much training as I should have,” Stewart confesses, with a slightly sheepish chuckle. “Which is why there might have been a few moments of conflict in our documentary!” It’s clear there was no lasting damage done though and she describes Pakravan as being like a “brother” and one of the closest people in her life.

Prior to departing for Brazil, Stewart trained with the same coach as Pakravan to get her speed and fitness up, went to the gym and already had the experience of cycling from Malaysia to London under her belt, but she confesses that the pace was particularly tough. “I cycle, but it’s more about stopping for cake,” she jokes. “I can go a long way, but slowly, and Reza is very much about speed.”

She reveals that the ensuing arguments were not something she was initially comfortable with, but that she gained something from Pakravan’s frankness. “I’d always hated conflict until this trip and I’d go to any length to avoid it – but Reza made me confront it head on. At first that was deeply uncomfortable and I hated it, but it was actually fine. That was a really nice learning for me, having always been very conflict averse.”

Stewart talks about the experience of cycling through the Amazon. “The Trans-Amazonian Highway was built in the 1970s as a way of opening up the region to development. And for a lot of the trip, I was like, ‘where the hell is the Amazon?’ I didn’t feel like I was in the jungle, because all you could see were burning trees being cleared for cattle ranching. It’s been so deforested, it didn’t feel like jungle. It was only really when we got off the Trans-Amazonian Highway and we got into parts of Peru that it felt like a different world. We were staying with tribes, close to the isolated people that live up there. That contrast between the road and the pure, pristine virgin rainforest was phenomenal.”

There were other surprises, too. “There were more hills than I’d thought in the Amazon,” Stewart laughs. “I’d just naively thought it was flat! And the roads were appalling. It was the sort of road where you get mud in your mouth. It was such a visceral journey because you just felt it. At the end of the day, you’d wipe your face and you’re covered in this red mud – in the eyes, in the ears, nose – it’s just everywhere.”

Was there a moment on the trip that she remembers as being particularly difficult? “I wouldn’t say it was a moment, it was more of a mindset. It’s when you’re covered in bites and your arse is sore and you have to get back on that bike again and you’ve had a massive argument because you’re being slow…they’re the tough moments.”

Stewart’s efforts were all in aid of drawing attention to the issues facing this sensitive region of the world. What brought the conservation problems home to Stewart during her trip? “I think it was meeting people,” she says after a pause. “We grow up reading that the Amazon’s in trouble and I think we can become a little bit desensitised to that. So, actually talking to families…for me it was meeting a woman called Diana Rios. Her father had been murdered by illegal loggers and just to see the pain in her eyes… you think ‘it’s such a distant place, it doesn’t affect me’, but actually we consume wood, we consume soya, we consume palm oil, we consume gold.”

Stewart wants people watching her documentary to understand the role we all play in the destruction of the rainforest. “I think Blood Diamond did a lot for the whole diamond industry, but I’d never thought about the gold mining industry,” she says. “So that’s something I’d definitely look a lot closer at as a consumer, asking where has it come from? Often, they put mercury in the water to bring out the gold. Obviously, that can poison the fish, fish that the local people eat. We interviewed a man whose wife had died from mercury poisoning and she was only 27. You think, is that worth my gold jewellery? It was horrible, because I came away with so much guilt.”

Tourism is the answer to much of the Amazon’s problems, Stewart believes. “We went to this ecolodge in the Amazon and what they’re trying to encourage people to do is to make the forest worth more alive than it is dead by bringing tourists to that area rather than chopping it down. If you consider that a tree is worth US$15,000 on average, you can understand why people are doing that [chopping down trees]. As consumers, we can choose to go there and spend our money – that’s where we have real power. Choosing operators who really care for the areas they’re going in to and who take a more responsible approach – that’s powerful as well.”

“Tourism is great,” she goes on. “Yes, my carbon footprint isn’t amazing, but it’s a balance. What I love about it is that you get the chance to meet people from other cultures and I do think the more conversations you can have with people who are different, then, ironically, you realise we’re all the same. Dialogue is never a bad thing.”

Stewart hopes viewers of Transamazonica will realise that “the Amazon is a magical place. The energy is phenomenal. I think if people get themselves out there, they will understand that these are the lungs of the planet.”

Trek the Inca Trail and journey into the Peruvian Amazon on a 12-day, eco-friendly adventure, from US$6,599 per person. For more information, contact travel designer Emily Opie (emily@jacadatravel.com).