Cho and I have just started the most exciting part of our expedition. Cho is my Peruvian friend who has walked with me for the past year. He is laughing all the time and is a fantastic person to walk with because he is not scared of anything! We are currently in Brazil walking towards a jungle town which is 350 kilometres away.  Everything that lies between here and there is thick green Amazon rainforest.

For the past five months, Cho and I have walked through the Amazon’s flood season. This is the time when the water level is very high after all the rain has come down from the mountains adds to the rain that has fallen in the jungle. This year the Amazon has had record level floods and many people think this is because of climate change. We have had weeks of walking up to our chests in dark, smelly water. When we take our boots off our feet are wrinkled and white - we have to powder them in our hammocks to dry them out. One night we had to put our hammocks up over the water because we could not find any dry land – we had to make do without a fire that night and ate cold tinned tuna.

The Amazon basin is very flat and when the waters rise, the river overflows into the forest on each side. These flooded forests are what Cho and I have been walking through for the last few months. They are mysterious, enchanted places with leaves the size of car tyres hanging over the water. We make no noise as we wade slowly through the still waters with the reflection of the tangled trees and blue sky below us.

Last week, we were crossing an area of flooded forest when we saw a creature just below the surface with a large flat head and a snake-like body. It was longer than I am tall - about two metres long. It was not scared of us and just waited eerily in front of us. It was an electric eel, one of the most dangerous creatures that live in these waters. They can knock a man out with their electricity and have been reported to strike several times until a person drowns. We had no option but to continue – both of us praying that the eel was not aggressive. Luckily we passed without any problems!

One problem we are having though, is that walking in water is really slow. We have decided that from here we will go faster if we look for higher ground. To find this we need to go further away from the river.

The fun bit of the next part of our journey is that there are not many people there. This means we expect to find huge trees that haven’t been cut down by men and lots of animals and birds -  if we do find people, they are likely to be people whose families have lived in the jungle for centuries. These people are called “indigenous” because they are originally from the rainforest and have always lived there – in Brazil they are often referred to as Indians.

Will we see a jaguar, a spider monkey or an anaconda? Will the Indians let us pass through their land? Will we have enough food or will we be getting very thin? Will we catch any diseases? No one knows because this is a real expedition happening right now. Find out by joining Cho and me on our adventure as we see what the Amazon has in store for us.

For more about Ed and his Amazon adventure, visit www.walkingtheamazon.com.