Photographing the People, Plants, and Animals of the Amazon | National Geographic

What you've got is you've got the world's most biodiverse national park. In it, you have a population of indigenous people, which makes it quite unusual because often when you have a national park, all the people are forced out of it to live along the edges of it. Well, in Manu, it's different; everyone lives in it.

So, Manu is in Peru. Although lots of places claim to be the most biodiverse on Earth, Manu is officially the most biodiverse place on Earth. I mean, the statistics are just unbelievable. They re half a million species of insect, but they don't know because really most of them haven't been discovered yet.

Now, this place is vast; it's 177,000 square km. I mean, it's massive. And then the other thing is once you get there, you're not allowed into most of it. I mean, it really is just shut off, and the reason is that there are uncontacted people living in there. Not only is it dangerous to encounter them, both for them firing arrows at people coming into the park—which does happen—but I suppose more of a threat is us giving them diseases.

It's a highly inaccessible place to get to the remote communities where we went, a place called Yumi Bat. It was pushing boats up Amazonian rivers; it was the sort of stuff you get excited about when you're a kid. The reality of it is a real pain.

Yumi Bau was formed by missionaries, and it's now a sort of hub with hundreds of people living in it. It's also a place where people will form first contact, I guess, and they'll get given a name for the first time, and they'll get given t-shirts, and they'll slowly start integrating into this new, more modern society. Which, you know, from our perspective, is very different from our own society. But for them, you know, there's the first trappings of modernity there.

I have a love-hate relationship with Manu. I just spent a year there in the last four years, and I think it just kills me, but I can't for some reason keep going back there. I have no idea why; maybe it's because I love it secretly.

It's too cliché to say I want people to see this extraordinary diversity so that we don't, you know, carry on destroying it. It's threatened; it's threatened by logging. The threat to put a road in it, the threat of what happens with an expanding population within your national park is probably currently its biggest threat. But it's their national park; it's, you know, that national park is the Mater National Park.

So, it's kind of, you know, there's, of course, indigenous people who live somewhere that don't really recognize a park boundary, and why should they? You get this sort of frenzied moment with vultures when they start feeding. What I wanted to do was actually get into the carcass and see the birds interact with each other inside a carcass. Vultures, they're too smart; they didn't—they could see my camera.