‘It was thought I was the first white woman to enter, but actually that was untrue’
Interview with British photo-journalist Marion Morrison about visiting one of the world’s most remote, biodiverse places
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Manu National Park in Peru, stretching all the way from the puna grasslands in the Andes down into the lowlands of the Amazon basin. It was declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in the late 1970s, a World Heritage Site the following decade, and for years UNESCO said that the biodiversity there “exceeds that of any other place on Earth.” Home to several different indigenous peoples, including some living in “isolation” and “initial contact”, Manu is also believed by various researchers to be the location of “Paititi”, a legendary, supposedly lost Inca city.
A few years before the park was established, an intrepid British freelance journalist, Marion Morrison, together with her late husband Tony Morrison, a filmmaker and author, travelled deep into the Manu basin. The reason was to shoot a film, ultimately called “A Park in Peru” broadcast on the BBC in 1969, that was intended to contribute to calls to protect the region. Here, via email, Morrison, now in her 80s, tells me how that trip came about and what she remembers most vividly about it:
DH: It was a long time ago now, but you went to a truly extraordinary part of the world. What was the lead-up to it?
MM: As you say, it was a long time ago, a time when the opportunity to travel to exotic places was just opening up. Tony and I were incredibly fortunate to be there at the outset. We had a contract to make films for Anglia Television’s “Survival” series and for the BBC who for some years had been showing David Attenborough’s “Zoo Quest” and other wildlife programmes. We had already filmed in many parts of the Andes, so when the chance came to capture and explore a remote part of Peru’s Amazon it was quite a challenge.
DH: Was Attenborough directly involved with your trip or the making of “A Park in Peru”?
MM: By 1969 he had stopped producing programmes but had been appointed Controller of BBC2. He was keen to promote travel and wildlife, and commissioned the series “The World About Us”, for which we were working. Usually shown on a Sunday evening, the programmes were shot in colour and 50 minutes long.
DH: Was it Ian Grimwood - the British wildlife expert seconded by the UK’s Ministry of Overseas Development to Peru’s government in the mid-1960s - who originally drew your attention to Manu, or were you already aware of it? By that time there was considerable clamour - in Peru itself - for the region to be designated a park.
MM: Peru in the 1960s already had a wildlife champion in Felipe Benavides, an aristocrat with good contacts in Europe and the US, known to the likes of Sir Peter Scott and involved with the WWF [now called the World Wide Fund for Nature]. His particular concern was for the vicuna [a species of South American camelid], whose numbers were seriously diminished, but also for wildlife and the environment generally. Felipe had helped us with filming the export of live animals from Iquitos, and he introduced us to Ian, an experienced naturalist and investigator, who arrived at the invitation of the government to search for an area in Peru suitable for a national park. And along the entire jungle-covered eastern side of the Andes, Ian found only one place in pristine condition: an area of some 4,800 square miles of virgin terrain centering on the Manu river which rises east of the old Inca capital, Cuzco. As he said in a letter to us: “I hit the jack pot and found an area of really undisturbed selva in a pristine state: the area in question is the basin of the upper Rio Manu.”
DH: In terms of your preparations and all the equipment and kit that was required, how was it different from travelling into the Andes?
MM: It was very different. We had driven the length of the Andes from Chile to Colombia and back in a Land-Rover we shipped from the UK. Much of the time we were above 12,000 feet, mostly tent-camping or just under the stars, and negotiating narrow, difficult roads in search of wildlife or people to film. On occasions, like the remote area of southern Bolivia, with the vast Salar of Uyuni, and the equally spectacular Laguna Colorada, we had to be entirely self-sufficient and carried all our petrol and food supplies. There were more times than I can count when the Land-Rover got bogged down in muddy roads and high deserts.
DH: I know the Uyuni salt flats and the Laguna Colorada myself. Spectacular!
MM: Perhaps the only common factor with our journey in the Amazon was the need to provide all our petrol - 200 gallons - and enough food for three weeks. Our transport was exclusively by canoe, and our lodging either a beach, a riverside chacra or palm-thatched hut. Where in the Andes warm clothing was essential, most nights being below freezing, we needed different gear for the rainforest - in particular, light-wear clothing but which covered arms and legs, strong boots and some form of head covering. We always carried a medical kit, and for the Amazon trip we made sure we had good, effective insect repellent - the Manu was reportedly one of the worst mosquito areas in South America - and anti-histamine, which was just as well as at one point I brushed again a wasp’s nest and got extensively stung.
DH: Ouch! But I assume it wasn't just you and Tony going into Manu by yourselves. Who did you travel with?
MM: We had the help of a great friend, Hugo Echergeray, a part-Indian boatman from the lowlands, who spoke several local languages. Four years earlier, he had joined Tony and his colleague Mark Howell on two BBC filming expeditions, the first to find Vilcabamba, for many historians the real “lost city of the Incas”, and the other to shoot the infamous rapids below the Pongo de Mainique on the Urubamba river. For our expedition Hugo arranged the canoe and canoeists, helped source petrol and supplies, and fixed for our first night stay in a chacra near the confluence of the Madre de Dios river and its tributary, the Manu.
DH: What stood out for you most travelling along the River Madre de Dios and then entering the Manu basin?
MM: We picked up our canoe at Atalaya, a small settlement on the Madre de Dios. To get there was an eight hour drive down the tortuously twisting road that descends more than 130 miles from Cuzco through misty cloud-forest to the jungle. At the upper level of the park, at Tres Cruces, there is a stunning panoramic view of the cloud-covered Manu rainforest some 11,000 feet below. Overnighting in the Land Rover, we were up at dawn to help pack the canoe: our diary lists “five cylinders of petrol, 3 kitbags, several camera bags and tripods, boxes of tinned food, half a dozen other packages and seven people.” The river journey took two dawn-to-dusk days, made hazardous by very low water - at least five times we got out to push the canoe off shallow sandbanks - together with small but violent rapids and floating debris which could turn the canoe. We spotted Jabiru storks and Roseate spoonbills along the way.
DH: I know that road down from Cusco into the lowlands. Tortuous indeed.
MM: It was only my second visit deep into the rainforest, so the sheer remoteness, the prospect of seeing many different species in situ, and the chance to visit an indigenous Machiguenga community was very exciting, albeit against a backdrop of potential danger. Some months earlier an oil inspection team had been attacked in the upper Manu by Amahuaca Indians with bows and arrows. By the time of our trip, WWF had set up a basic post, Panahua, with two guards and a couple of huts and that is where we headed first. The accommodation comprised a couple of beds, a kitchen with open wood fire in a sawn-down oil drum, a make-shift shower, though ablutions were generally from a canoe in the river. Waking up to a dawn chorus from mist-covered rainforest was a unique and mind-blowing experience.
DH: Did the forest feel any different around Panahua, that remote, and did you see much wildlife?
MM: There was plenty of life in the undergrowth: agoutis, leaf-cutting ants, tortoises, all sorts of insects, while birdlife included storks, herons, king vultures, screamers with their piercing call, and in the higher, cloud-covered forest there were hoatzins, oropendolas, woodpeckers, toucans and parrots, the brilliant cock-of-the-rock and more. Along the river were rare black caiman - a night time sortie was to seek them out catching their eyes in torchlight - and capybaras, often with their young, as well as electric eels and turtles, some with nests and eggs. And, of course, snakes. The forest itself was magnificent: trees with stilted roots, the Brazil nut - among the largest of trees in the Amazon - ferns, stranglers and lianas, and in the canopy several different species of monkey. The call of the Red Howlers could be heard way off, and there were also Black-spider, Squirrel monkeys and Capuchins. Ian [Grimwood] thought I was the first white woman to enter this territory, but actually that was untrue.
DH: I know the woman you’re thinking of - Lizzie Hessel - who, of course, Tony wrote a book about. She was there long before you - in the late 1890s!
MM: One day we canoed two hours upriver to Lago Cocha Cashu, where we were lucky enough to see giant otters. We weren’t so lucky, though, after a three hour journey to the Colpa de Huanachaca, a salt lick where parrots and macaws gather in their 100s. We camped on a beach opposite and were up at dawn, but nothing. It was very disappointing not to have witnessed what is a truly colourful and extraordinary sight. Rather disturbingly, one morning we did notice paw marks on the beach - thought to be a jaguar. Mostly, though, the larger animals such as tapirs, deer, anteaters and sloths eluded us, though on one occasion the guards were successful in hunting turtle, coatimundi and peccary. We had “smoked peccary” for supper!
DH: One final question. As I think you know, I’ve been reporting, for more than 10 years now, on the ongoing interest of the oil and gas industry in Manu - even all these years after the region was turned into a park, and the obvious need to phase out fossil fuels. What do you think stands to be lost if Manu was opened up to that kind of exploitation?
MM: As you can imagine, I was horrified to read of plans to exploit oil and gas reserves in the region. The geographic isolation and longstanding protection have so far saved the park from changes that have been occurring elsewhere in the Peruvian Amazon. What would be lost is one of the most precious places on the planet. Not least for its amazing location from river level to almost 4000 metres - and the different zones of lush lowland rainforest, cloud forest and Andean grasslands - but also its incredible animal and plant diversity. Already recorded are over 4000 plant species, 1000 bird species, 200 mammals, 1300 butterfly species, and many more yet to be discovered. And there would be human loss too, for the indigenous people contacted and in “isolation” too - opening up the region would be catastrophic. And finally, Peru’s global reputation for safeguarding its environment would be seriously damaged.
DH: Marion, thank you.