English explorer Ed Stafford says Palawan ‘almost like a cathedral’

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By Edwin P. Sallan (InterAksyon.com)

Ed Stafford has accomplished feats that no ordinary men would even consider attempting.

The 40-year-old English explorer holds the Guinness World Record for being the first human to ever walk the almost seven thousand-kilometer Amazon River. Three years after completing that remarkable achievement documented in the Discovery series, “Walking the Amazon,” Ed spent 60 days alone with only his camera on a desert island in another Discovery series, “Naked and Marooned.”

The series, now simply called “Marooned,” is now on its second season and follows the premise where Stafford journeys to remote destinations around the world for 10 days to see if he can survive all alone with no food, no clothes and no tools. Just he, an emergency satellite phone, and an emergency medical kit.

“I’ve done so many of these. A lot of the time, I am hungry or uncomfortable. In a jungle environment, I will be sweating and bitten and getting rained on. It isn’t particularly comfortable. If I find myself in a situation where it has quite a pleasing temperature and I’m not hungry and I’m quite enjoying it, then I am pleasantly surprised,” Stafford said in a recent interview.

If it’s mostly uncomfortable, why even do it, he was asked.

“If I stop putting myself in a situation where I’m constantly challenging myself, then I’ll stop growing as person,” he retorted. “To continually put yourself through the different experiences, different challenges that stretch you is a very healthy thing to try out your whole life. I don’t ever want to stop.”

And since he refuses to stop, Stafford eventually found himself traveling to a secluded beach in Coron, Palawan. Lying on his sick bed of palm leaves, Ed realized that if he didn’t push himself to find water and food quickly this survival mission was over. But hemmed in by towering granite cliffs he was concerned there might be no water to be found.

“Finding water was really tricky. It hadn’t rained for about three days or four days before I came in so there was no fresh water, I had to drink coconut for the first few days and eventually find a pool of stagnant rain water which I filtered with charcoal and sand and organic matter and eventually filtered and then boiled it in a rusty tin can that I found in the beach,” he recalled.

“I eventually got over that. Water was the initial challenge [as was] finding food to stay nourished in order to have enough energy to complete the project. I was just trying to put as many sea urchins and limpets and crabs in my mouth as I can.”

Other than the challenges he needed and managed to overcome, Stafford has fond memories of Palawan.

“It was the dramatic landscape. It was almost like a being inside a cathedral but obviously not. It’s like huge sort of limestone cliffs that just went straight out of the sea and it was almost eerie,” he shared.

“I think I was in an area where the local people go to pray and they consider it, if not a sacred place, certainly a sort of a spiritual place. You could feel that there was a certain energy in the place. I felt a very very pure, a very good energy there. That’s probably the essence that I will take away.”

For Stafford, Palawan and the many other islands that comprise the Philippines make the country “an explorer’s dream.”

“There are so many coves and beaches and caves and cliffs to explore that you can’t possibly know all but that’s the essence of it. It’s the ability to go to so many different places and just explore. The Philippines is unique like that.”

“Marooned with Ed Stafford Series 2” premiered on Discovery Asia last August 30 with the episode where he explored Coron Island in Palawan. The episode re-airs this Saturday, September 3, at 8:10PM.