Explorer Ed Stafford Takes You on a Journey Through the Amazon

Fifteen years ago, Ed Stafford became the first person to walk the entire length of the Amazon River—nearly 4,000 miles on foot. Now, via this exclusive package with The Vault, he invites you back to the jungle with him for a four-day survival adventure like no other, one that epitomizes his philosophy for living. “It’s about embracing life, rather than being scared of dying,” he explains.

“Before I walked the length of it, I had never been there, but the Amazon had always had a mystique surrounding it, to me,” says the British adventurer and TV host, currently based in Central America with his wife and four children. “Now I feel at home, and it’s my playground. It’s somewhere that makes me smile the moment I step into the jungle.”

This rare experience offers you the chance to live your version of Stafford’s adrenaline-boosting, boundary-pushing TV series, such as First Man Out, in which he competes head-to-head with other survival experts on near-impossible treks with minimal provisions. For this journey, Stafford is joined by British bushcraft specialist Steve Hanton, a key behind-the-scenes member of his shows and his expedition co-leader. Together, the pair will welcome you on the riverbank—after you leap from a helicopter into the caiman- and piranha-filled waters of the Amazon and swim to shore. “They won’t come and strip you to the bone, even with a cut on your leg,” Stafford assures.

Once on land again, the real immersion begins. Over the next three days, Stafford and Hanton will lead you through an intensive, interactive bushcraft school. “You could do an experience like this, and it could go from one lesson to the next in a sedate manner, but this will be a baptism of fire,” Stafford says. “We’re not going to just be there at the start to give you a welcome briefing but doing everything together.” You’ll learn to start fires without matches, forage for food in the dense jungle, and build a shelter solely from found materials. Expect a machete master class, fishing techniques, and jungle cooking that includes the aforementioned piranha and caiman. (Both are “white chunky meat,” he says.) You’ll also discover how to coax flames to life amid a torrential downpour.

Hanton, who apprenticed with bushcraft pioneer Ray Mears at just 16 years old, completed solo Arctic expeditions as a teen. “He has the skills because he’s lived it as well,” says Stafford, who freely admits how much he himself has learned from his partner over their years of working together: It was Hanton who showed him how to start a fire from scratch, using everything from bamboo to the bottom of a Coke can to concentrate the sun’s rays. The safety lessons are equally invaluable. Stafford points out that holding something between your thighs while whittling it with a knife is more risky than one might think. “Your femoral artery runs down the inside, and it’s all too easy to go through it. That’s the kind of bleeding you can hear,” he explains, making gushing noises with gusto. Instead, he says, place your elbows on your knees to protect against inadvertent injury.

It’s stories like these that will be shared around the campfire each night, before you sleep in hammocks strung between the trees, carefully avoiding any ant nests. (A lesson learned the hard way after leaf-cutter ants chewed a hammock to shreds.) Stafford will recount his past adventures and preview his upcoming Discovery Channel series, Rite of Passage, which debuts in January. For the show, he circled the globe to participate in traditional coming-of-age rituals that young men undergo in many Indigenous societies, from wrestling in Mongolia to bull jumping in Ethiopia. “The Western world has something lacking in the fact our leaders are somewhat immature, and part of me thinks that’s because we don’t have rituals that people go through to mature them into responsible community members,” he explains. One trial, in Brazil, involved donning a pair of gloves sewn with bullet ants, their stingers facing inward. Stafford danced for six minutes while wearing them but spent 14 hours in agony. “It was like having a boiling kettle poured over my hand, constantly, while someone also smashed it with a mallet,” he recalls.

As a guest on the Amazon adventure, you won’t be asked to endure bullet ants, but you will learn how to avoid them. By night three, you’ll sleep in a durable bivouac that you’ve built by hand. “It’s about digging deep to draw from that new knowledge and experiences and putting them all together at the end,” Stafford says. “I don’t learn survival skills because I think there’s going to be a zombie apocalypse, but so I can walk into an environment like that and have the skills and confidence that allows you to relax…. Suddenly all the things that look intimidating become useful and come alive.” And when you wake the next morning, you’ll get the ultimate reward: extraction and then accommodation at a luxury hotel in Manaus, Brazil, where hot showers and soft sheets await after days of sweat, rain, and discovery. From $300,000 (for two) to $500,000 (for six)