Customer Reviews

Walking the Jungle: An Adventurer's Guide to the Amazon

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Walking The Jungle: An Adventurer's Guide To The Amazon by Brazilian novelist, teacher, and travel expert John Coningham is a practical, safety-conscious, and absolute "must-read" packed from cover to cover with vital information for anyone vacationing, visiting, or exploring the Amazon River country. Walking The Jungle: An Adventurer's Guide To The Amazon covers all of the necessary precautions to prevent and cope with a vast array of diseases, snakebite, food-borne illnesses, dangerous wildlife, and other indigenous hazards of the Amazon. A superb 250-page resource based upon the hard earned wisdom of personal experience, Walking The Jungle is an essential accompaniment for anyone planning on experiencing what the Amazon river has to offer the adventurous traveler!

A wonderful guide full of practical hints for travel in the Amazon, the Pantanal and the Neotropics in general. John Coningham is an experienced guide, wonderful naturalist, ex-soldier, firearms expert, horseman, boatman, etc., etc. and this book is the next best thing to going to the Pantanal and talking to him, While he has a wonderful knowledge of the flora and fauna of Brazil, this book is neither your typical natural history guide nor armchair adventure tale. Instead it tells you all of the things that you wished you knew before you
left and will answer many questions that you have upon return. It is really designed to accompany someone on a trip into the less-travelled areas of Brazil but will be fascinating to anyone interested in travel, the wilderness or natural history.
Highly recommended.

I have read through Johns book several times now. I've been to the Amazon 15 times now and each time I learn a new lesson the hard way. I think this book will save me much future grief. His practical experience and explanations of preparing for a trek through the jungle gave me lots of great tips on maintaining comfort and safety. I have enough experience in the Amazon to know what he writes here is solid advice, yet my experience in no way can compete with the authors. He was even nice enough to respond to an E-mail that I sent thanking him for his book. Great Guy! Read it even if you never plan on trekking trough the Amazon, its fascinating.......

So far, the cover art is the best part of this book. The author lost most credibility with me when on page 7 he referred to a machete as a "stupid tool". I don't think it takes a survival expert to realize the usefulness of having a machete while traipsing through the jungle.

Second gripe: in most of the animal descriptions, John uses the Spanish name followed by the scientific name - usually without ever giving the English translation. Well I don't speak Spanish and I don't read Latin so half the time I only have a rough idea of what animal he's talking about.

The third issue that further lends to the inaccuracy of this book, and brings to question whether any of it can be trusted, is the section on crocodiles and alligators. The title of the section should raise some flags for a few of you - there are no alligators in South America. So, every story John tells that includes an alligator in the jungle really challenges my resolve to continue reading. Furthermore, most of the "personal experiences" read like this: "I once new this guy and he got bit by a really big snake and couldn't get to the hospital, so he died."

So after only skimming a few sections and finding many faults, I can't in good conscience recommend this book to anyone (unless you can find it used for less than five bucks) because that is all it's worth. I don't know why the other readers gave this book 5 stars unless they're getting a little kick-back, or this is the first book they've ever read and are just astounded by the concept of reading and writing.

This book is amazing. Very detailed and informative. I'm still reading through it but I would recommend it to anyone that is planning a trip to South America.

I will keep this short. If you are considering going into this dynamic environment, take an expert guide and some realistic preparation - John Coningham has done a great job in conveying the essentials of surviving and thriving in the swamplands of the Brazilian Amazon. It is obvious that his advice is based upon hard earned personal experience and the quality and practicality of the information is excellent.