Circumreading the World - Walking the Amazon

I finished my first book for my Circumreading the World project already (mostly because I started before November. . .). One of the reasons I love travel narratives is that I get to learn about the places described. So rather than reviews, I'm going to post a list of fun facts that I learned from each book I read.

The premise of Walking the Amazon by Ed Stafford is that he literally walked the path of the Amazon River, through Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. It took him 860 days and was a physically demanding and often dangerous journey. He was the first person to do so.

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• Length of the Amazon River - 4,345 miles. He often couldn't walk right next to the river, however, because it was flood season. Which meant his path was even longer.
• Peru has some of the deepest canyons in the world, such as Colca Canyon, more than twice as deep as the U.S.'s Grand Canyon.
• There are four "official" sources of the Amazon River, since no one can quite agree on which is the right one.
• The colorful dresses and hats worn by Quechua women today originated in Spanish landowners using the different patterns to tell their workers apart from others'.
• Howler monkeys are the second loudest mammal in the world (blue whales are the first, in case you're curious).
• Yucca, rice, and bananas are some of the main crops sold in Brazil by the Indian tribes.
• Animals that live in the Amazon region include the bushmaster (largest pit viper in the world) and black caimans (largest carnivorous reptile in South America). Just the sort of traveling companions you'd like to discover.
• The mouth of the Amazon River is the same distance wide as the distance between London and Paris. It enters the Atlantic Ocean at 200,000 cubic meters per second.

General thoughts on the book: Ed Stafford completed a remarkable feat. However, I think his book would have been better if it focused less on his day-to-day moods and more on the area he was traveling through.