A Stroll By The River
11 August 2010Every evening before I have dinner I take a walk along the towpath of the River Dart, which is a few hundred metres from my house. It's a broad expanse of the river where the boating club and the Totnes Rowing Club enjoy the facilities that the river offers. There are a couple of wonderful things I love about this river: the joy it brings every time I see it curve away past the Sharpham Estate, the young and not-so-young sculling, and the fact that there are no piranhas lurking to eat the friendly locals. It was once used as a backdrop for the Onedin Line television series, making believe that the woods hugging the riverbank was the Amazon forest. And that's as far as it goes Amazon-wise. My leisurely perambulation is not quite the effort that Ed Stafford put in when he actually walked the length of the Amazon River - and then added a couple of thousand kilometres on for good measure - hacking through the jungle does tend to add some distance.
This remarkable man has just gone down in British history and how can any of us appreciate what he's achieved? There has to be a knighthood in there somewhere - arise Sir Edward Stafford - for heaven's sake he even sounds like a hero, the kind of man who'd have fought the armada. Giving up must have crossed his mind as many times as he had mosquito bites, but his dogged persistence, and that of his travelling companion Gadiel "Cho" Sanchez, kept them hacking.
When you're in survival mode the jungle feeds you, but I'm glad my pet tortoise, Horatio, wasn't out for his own evening stroll when "Sir" Ed passed by.
This is an amazing, and awe-inspiring story, and one can only applaud his heroic journey from the sidelines.
Here's his weblink where you can follow the full story.
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