by Sam Dyson Hello all, Sam here, for those of you who don’t know I am a friend of Ed’s from the Uppinghan days of West Bank. I was only there for two years until I was fifteen and then left, and although often infuriating, Facebook did allow us to meet up for a few [...]

1. What changes in weather have you seen in the last 20 years? The temperature used to be much fresher in Leticia. Now every day is baking hot in the mornings and we have torrential rain in the afternoons. 2. How has this changed the way you live and work? It hasn’t – I work [...]

Sam arrived three days ago. He and I used to go to boarding school together and were best mates at the age of fourteen. Since then we’ve seen each other just twice – with a gap of nineteen years in the middle. We’ve been packing, organising and catching up. The filming visas will be issued [...]

Waiting for Sam to arrive has given me the opportunity to see that Olly Hicks, the man who has been attempting to row round Antarctica, has said he’s come to a very difficult decision and is going to stop his attempt in New Zealand after just 80 days. We live in an incomprehensible world of [...]

“As we all know,” said the Tikuna chief of chief’s, “white men have different minds to us, but they no longer come here to kill us.” A relatively positive start I thought, as I looked out across the hundred or so tribal chiefs and members from various communities that were packed into this concrete meeting [...]

I’m writing this ahead of the usual blog because tomorrow I’ve got a meeting with all the tribal leaders of the Brazilian Tikuna tribe. FUNAI, the national organisation that oversees indigenous affairs, have granted me a permit but the tribal leaders themselves can say “no”. I’m a tad vexed. These are the guys that have [...]

Four hours into an epic day of climbing through flooded forest on Friday I could not help but feel that what I was doing was incredibly stupid. We’d managed to convince a local man from the last Colombian village to show us where the “path” went, but all the other people had said the ONLY [...]

Its been a year, and it’s not quite time for a blog but Cho, Baruga, Jaimi and I arrived in Santa Louisa, Amazonas, Columbia at 3pm today and decided to have a couple of beers to celebrate the first year of crossing South America from Pacific to Atlantic. The boys are now fast asleep. Cho [...]