<p><br /> A 34-year-old British explorer has become the first man to walk the entire length of the Amazon river.<br /> </p><p><br /> Former British Army captain Ed Stafford, from Leicestershire, England, took 859 days to walk the length of the world's greatest river, starting at the peak of Mount Mismi in Peru in April 2008.<br /> </p><p><br /> He arrived at an Atlantic Ocean beach about 90 miles northeast of the Brazilian city of Belem on Monday, despite collapsing from exhaustion with only 52 miles of the 6,000-mile journey to go.<br /> </p><p><br /> He had planned to complete the walk in about a year, but the journey was prolonged by floods that forced him to walk a roundabout route 2,000 miles longer than the 4,000-mile length of the Amazon.<br /> </p><p><br /> He began the journey with fellow British adventurer Luke Collyer, but the pair had a bust-up early in the trek and Stafford continued alone. He was joined in July 2008 by a Peruvian forestry worker, Gadiel "Cho" Sanchez Rivera, who pledged to walk with him for five days and has been with him on the walk ever since.<br /> </p><p><br /> A statement from Stafford's media team said that the Briton had been "wrongly accused of murder on two separate occasions, been imprisoned, had concrete stuffed in his mouth by hostile tribespeople, been chased by Ashaninka Indians with bows and arrows, been stung by hundreds of wasps and watched as his guide Cho removed a botfly from Ed's head with superglue and a tree spine."<br /> </p><p><br /> It said he had endured "50,000" mosquito bites, lived on a diet of piranha fish, rice and beans, and dodged a variety of snakes, electric eels, scorpions, and ants, and contracted a skin disfiguring disease.<br /> </p><p><br /> Stafford said: "It's just phenomenal to be here at the end of the journey after two and a half years, slogging our way through the jungle. It was really difficult to envisage how this was going to feel, and I am completely overwhelmed by the whole day. It's just unbelievable for me."<br /> </p><p><br /> Stafford used a portable satellite video to blog about his trek and the footage will be turned into a documentary.<br /> </p>
