A FORMER British army captain has become the first known person to walk the length of the Amazon river – a feat previously believed to be impossible.

Ed Stafford, a 34-year-old from Leicestershire, England, walked for 859 days through the Amazon jungle, tracking the length of the world’s second-longest river.

Stafford‘s feat has been called “truly extraordinary” by the famous British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who added that the achievement “puts Stafford’s endeavour in the top league of expeditions past and present”.

Rather than deterring him from the monumental challenge, Stafford says it was the fact that people told him it was impossible to walk the length of the river that encouraged him to try.

“A lot of people telling me that it was impossible to walk the entire length of the Amazon that spurred me on even more,” Stafford said, according to ABC news. “As soon as they said ‘that’s impossible,’ it made me want to prove them wrong.”

Watch Stafford speaking to ITV news before the adventure began:

In April 2008, Stafford began the odyssey that would take him took two-and-a-half years at Peru’s Mount Mismi.

The original estimate for the journey was about 12 months, however extreme flooding forced Stafford to tack an extra 3,200km onto his route.

Stafford says that he decided to walk to the length of the river, blogging and videotaping his experiences as he went, in order to bring attention to the suffering of the indigenous people of the Amazon and the destruction of the rainforest.

He had company during the journey, too. He started out the walk with another British adventurer, Luke Collyer but following a disagreement the men parted ways and Stafford carried on alone. A few months later, he was joined by Gadiel “Cho” Sanchez Rivera, a Peruvian forestry worker who agreed to walk with him for five days to help him negotiate with the tribes of a particular area – but ended up staying with him to the end.

The two men endured extreme conditions that pushed them to limit mentally and physically. They encountered deadly reptiles, like electric eels and pit vipers, and water-borne dangers like piranhas – which, it must be noted, they made short work of.

Stafford also had a botfly burrow into his head, which his friend helped him to remove (if you think you have the stomach for it, see here).

He recalled some dangerous encounters with indigenous tribespeople, who were fearful of the mens’ motive:

Locals believed white people would come and steal their babies and kill people in order to remove body parts and sell them. There were genuine looks of absolute terror when we arrived in communities… If we had acted aggressively I have no doubt they would have killed us.

However, he said that once they had shown that they could be trusted the local people warmed to them: “The chief ended up walking with us for 47 days… we became good mates,” Stafford said.

In between dodging poisonous snakes and staving off starvation, Stafford also fielded questions from curious schoolchildren across the world. In his Question of the Week video, he addressed a question sent via mobile satellite links, in an attempt to keep people engaged with his cause.

Stafford was forced to recuperate briefly just 85km from the finish line, as he was suffering from severe exhaustion. However, he walked the final stretch on Monday, arriving at the river’s mouth on the Atlantic Ocean Monday in Maruda, Brazil.

Proving his doubters wrong once and for all, Stafford wrote on his blog today:

Job done. 28 months and Cho and I have finished walking the Amazon. I always knew it was possible. :-)