Inside the Amazon: A Photographer’s Story | Nat Geo Live

(Instrumental music)

One of the things I like to do when I'm in the Amazon is just bust all the myths. I don't want all this nonsense, this romantic image we have of indigenous people. They're just people. You know, the reason I like these pictures is because we've... we always go and look at these places to see how different we are and what I... gets me about those two pictures is actually we realize how similar we are. You know, my kids do stuff like this.

(Audience applause)

Manú National Park is in the Peruvian Amazon, okay. It's the far west side of the Amazon, alright. At the bottom of the Andes. As national parks go, it's pretty big. It's 17,000 square kilometers. It's twice the size of Yellowstone National Park. What makes Manú special is it has the highest diversity of life of anywhere in the world. You're dealing with a place with 1,307 (laughs) known species of butterfly. That's six percent of the world's total. It has 15 species of monkey. Ten percent of all the bird species in the world live in Manú National Park. There's more tree species in a single hectare than the whole of North America. You know, this is just, it's just nuts, the diversity here. There's an undescribed species of Poison Dart frogs called SP3. It hasn't got a name yet. It's only just been discovered. A friend of mine, a Peruvian Herpetologist found it. Who knows how many species. Manú has got more reptiles and amphibians than anywhere else in the world. There's a giant otter. A six foot long, eats eight pounds of fish a day. Eats Piranhas. You know, how bad-ass have you gotta be to eat Piranhas? - I've eaten Piranhas, you know. - (Audience laughter) So, that doesn't mean I'm badass because I've eaten Piranhas. But they are.

Now, people say to me, "Oh, you know, I don't wanna go to the rainforest. I'm scared of snakes and like, biting flies." And I always lie to them and say, "Oh, you don't need to be." Um... these things scare the crap out of me. - (Charlie laughs) - (Audience laughter) This is a Two Striped Forest Pit Viper. It's perfectly camouflaged, as you can see from the color of the background. It's highly hemotoxic and cytotoxic and it hangs at around neck height. (Charlie laughs) What have you got to worry about? (Audience laughter) And I saw... I photographed this snake. I'd been walking within 18 inches of that snake for about half an hour, setting a camera trap up backwards and forwards, back... And then, my friend Lex just suddenly freaked and just shouted. And they call them 'loro machaco', it's the local name. Alright, and our hearts were going crazy because we'd just been-- And then, so every time we went near it it would contract, ready to strike. And it can almost strike its body length. You know, if that thing gets you you're gonna be dead in 25 minutes.

This is called a Cock-of-the-rock. This is a supercool bird. I love these birds. If you can't work it out... (Audience laughter) You can, look, you can just see the bottom of its beak poking out. Yeah? Maybe not. Okay. (Laughter) So these... so, one of the reasons Manú is so diverse is a bit of a cheat because it actually starts at high altitude. So, the Park starts right up in the Andes and it goes right down to lowland rainforest. And this, and in that process it goes through Cloud Forest which is really diverse and, you know one of the least studied regions of the tropics, actually. That is an Ocelot, one of seven species of cat in Manú. I think I took nine camera traps for three months and got one photo. (Charlie laughs) I'm not... clearly not doing very well.

Anyway, so, these are, I guess what you imagine when you think of people of the forest. These are, I guess what, slightly mis-correctly termed 'Uncontacted Mashco-Piro Indians.' Uncontacted in the sense that they have almost no contact with modern western civilization. I took this image, traveling up through the southern southern part of Manú on a boat one day and a group of these women were washing a baby in the river. Most of them vanished into the forest and you know, we... You're not allowed to stop, so we carried the boat on. You're not allowed to communicate with them you're certainly not allowed to go and talk to them or... or, you know, get close to them. Because we could very easily give them a flu virus and it could wipe out their entire population. This particular group are one of-- They think, around 800 uncontacted people living in Manú at the moment. They've been more visible and... since about 2011, coming out onto the... you know an area on the southern end of Manú. They've killed two people. So, there's a slow process to come into contact with them.

Last summer, I went into Manú to shoot a story for the magazine. I went to live with the Machiguenga people. And they're the most, sort of numerous of indigenous people that live in Manú. These people are hunter-gatherers still. I took this photo from a plane. This is what you'd call a first contact hut. These people are living in the early stages of contact with the outside world. So, they're very remote. I think this was 23 miles by plane from the nearest village. These people are, they're really going to only see people from that village, maybe once a year. Maybe, do a bit of trading. And then I went to stay in a very remote community in the middle of Manú which no one's allowed into, really. You have to get special permissions. I met this family. These people were about two weeks in contact. They'd come down from the head waters of the Manú River. And these people have always just lived very isolated in a tiny community. They've never been to the big community village called Yomibato, where I was. This was their first trip there. So, the villagers always... they, you know referred to them as the uncontacted people. And they'd come there and they'd get... machetes. You know, stone, uh, sorry, metal tools which is the most important thing in the world to them. So, it was really interesting meeting them and photographing them. And as a photographer, you wanna go and hang out and shoot people as they are, shoot them relaxing and really-- You wanna be invisible.

But, with these guys, that was impossible. I said to them, "Have you ever seen a white guy before?" They said, "We've never seen a non-Machiguenga Indian before." They didn't change their expression at all for the entire time I was there. They just stared and... (Charlie grunting) They were totally underwhelmed by the entire experience as well. Here I was thinking, "Oh, this is amazing!" (Charlie grunting) (Audience laughter) So I posed them. You know, arrange them and try and photograph them. Because it was all I could do with them. But, I kind of like the portraits we were getting and I lived in the community. One of the things I like to do when I'm in the Amazon is just bust all the myths. I don't want all this nonsense. This romantic image we have of indigenous people. They're just people. And their culture is fascinating and everything else... But, they are just people and we tend to overblow that a bit.

I went on the school swimming lesson. And the teacher took all the kids, she put like, 30 kids in a boat. She directed everyone with this enormous carving knife. She crossed the river, got out of the boat and then just buggered off into the forest on her own to cut guavas or something and all the kids just went swimming. That was the swimming lesson. I thought, this is the way to live, isn't it? This is Yoina. Every day, she would walk past our camp with her Saddleback Tamarin which is that gremlin on her head. And that was her toy, and she'd take it swimming and it... it just absolutely hated water. (Audience laughter) It was just this protracted awful experience for it going in the water. And all it wants to do is get onto her head. So, I said, "Can I take your picture?" "If you want." She was so like... you know, whatever. So for three days, I just... I took every day that Yoina went swimming, I'd take this picture of her with this thing on her head. This is eventually what happened. You know, and her story is very sad. I don't wanna bring a downer on it, but I'll tell you her story. After this picture was taken the monkey died when a pot of boiling water fell on it. Her mum died in childbirth. She now wanders around with her sister who is called Grace Kelly. I have no idea why. And she's... you can see in this picture she's got so many head lice so she shaved all her head off. So, you know, just in a few months since I took this picture her entire life and world has completely changed.

-(Audience laughter) - (Charlie laughs) I wanted to photograph the education system. You know, this was a story about how an indigenous group of people live in a national park. Well, they have healthcare, education, everything they should have. So, I wanted to photograph that. And this photo and this picture as well. You know, the reason I like these pictures is because we've... we always kind of look at these places to see how different we are. And what gets me about those two pictures is actually, you realize how similar we are. You know my kids do stuff like this. This is the wisest man I've ever met. He's called Don Alberto. He's a shaman and he blew my head off with the most powerful hallucinogen known to man. Which is probably why I'm grinning so much in that picture. (Audience laughter) What I didn't have is any form of spiritual connection with the rainforest because I don't have a spiritual connection with anything. I'm the least spiritual person in the world. So, I thought, alright, I'll be open-minded. Blow my head off, let's see where we go with this. And he did.

Charlie: According to western science, Ayahuasca activates parahippocampal areas of the brain that are involved in processing emotion and memory. Don Alberto describes how forest spirits will talk to Charlie in a dream and show him his true path.

(Don Alberto chanting)

Charlie: Snakes, wasps, spiders, crocodiles. There were a lot of animals in the visions. But the only ones giving me messages were actually the rainforest animals.

(Don Alberto chanting)

Charlie: Whatever he did, it worked. It really worked. What I wanted to do was go on a journey to discover more about the forest. And irritatingly, it was about me.

(Don Alberto chanting)

Charlie: The understanding of myself and being given this understanding by the creatures of the forest was the most enlightening and profound experience I've ever had. It absolutely blew me away. So then, you know, a few years later, do I feel the same? No, I just feel more confused about spirituality than I was before. But, I did see the forest spirits... in my... in my visions. You know, I was out for three hours. I saw a world made of toffee Lego, at one point. I saw all kinds of, I had a whole world of nice frogs on that side and nasty frogs on that side.

(Audience laughter)

I was kind of rolling a bit and then I was... They were filming me, as you saw and they'd talk to me like... because you're sort of... you have a conscious level as well. So, I was talking and I was watching these blue words coming out of my mouth and going into the lens. And at one point, I was flying over the Shetland Islands looking down on it. It was crazy. One thing about Ayahuasca, that drug, I gotta tell you, right. It's made out of a vine. They pound this vine and they mix it with a leaf. Right, and if you just... and you boil it for like, a day, this pounded vine. And if you drink it, it does nothing. You have to mix it with a specific species of leaf in order for your body to really metabolize and for it to do its thing. Well, that's great, isn't it! There's 17,000 species of wooded plant there. Now, how did they figure that out? That always just blows my mind. How did they figure it? Pound that up, boil it for a day... You know, they didn't have Jamie Oliver or the Barefoot Contessa, do they? Put those leaves in it, mix it up, it's gonna blow your head off. Mind-blowing.