home     galleries     new     equipment     links     about    contact

Manu Road, eastern Peru        Images © Mark A. Chappell

Peru is a nation with enormous ecological variation, and the Manu Road, from Cusco down into Amazonia to the east, cuts through a great deal of this diversity.   The road was built to support the rubber boom in the 1950s and is an amazing piece of engineering, especially considering how difficult the surveys must have been at that time.   Nevertheless, it can be a hair-raising ride, with precipitous drop-offs, tight turns, blind corners, and frequent landslides.   These images range in elfin cloud forest near Wayqecha Research Station (3000 m) and mid-altitude cloud forest near San Pedro (1500 m).

  • Canon 1D4; 24-105 mm IS, 70-200 f4 IS, or Tokina 11-16 mm, some with graduated neutral-density filters (2011, 2012)