Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

Here and there along the street were rickety trestle tables with big old photocopiers on them, and once or twice I was hailed by a street hustler and asked if I wanted to have something photocopied or sleep with his sister. I returned to the hotel, wrote some notes on the writing paper, which for some reason was pink, and slept as if I were dead.

This is giving me big David Sedaris energy.

The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaïre to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the way to Zaïre and not go and see them. I was going to say that this is because they are our closest living relatives, but I’m not sure that that’s an appropriate reason. Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living there’s a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don’t find out you’re in town. At least with the gorillas, you know that there’s no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history, so you can visit them with impunity.

The section of the primate family of which we are members (rich, successful members of the family, the ones who made good and who should, by any standards, be looking after the other, less well-off members of the family) are the great apes. We do not actually call ourselves great apes, though. Like many of the immigrants at Ellis Island, we have changed our names.

The Virunga volcanoes, where the mountain gorillas live, straddle the border of Zaïre, Rwanda, and Uganda. There are about 280 gorillas there, roughly two-thirds of which live in Zaïre, and the other third in Rwanda. I say roughly, because the gorillas are not yet sufficiently advanced in evolutionary terms to have discovered the benefits of passports, currency-declaration forms, and official bribery, and therefore tend to wander backward and forward across the border as and when their beastly, primitive whim takes them. A few stragglers even pop over into Uganda from time to time, but there are no gorillas actually living there as permanent residents because the Ugandan part of the Virungas only covers about twenty-five square kilometres, and is unprotected and full of people whom the gorillas, given the choice, would rather steer clear of.

Like most colonies, Zaïre had imposed on it a stifling bureaucracy, the sole function of which was to refer decisions upward to its colonial masters. Local officials rarely had the power to do things, only to prevent them from being done until bribed. So once the colonial masters are removed, the bureaucracy continues to thrash around like a headless chicken with nothing to do but trip itself up, bump into things, and, when it can get the firepower, shoot itself in the foot. You can always tell an ex-colony from the inordinate numbers of people who are able to find employment stopping anybody who has anything to do from doing it.

I believe in traveling light, but then I also believe I should give up smoking and shop early for Christmas.

If we were prepared to pay them to carry Dickens and aftershave up to the gorillas and back down again, then they were perfectly happy to do it. White men have done much worse things in Zaïre than that, but maybe not much sillier.

For much of the time we were tramping through wet fields of sago, and a foolish but happy thought suddenly occurred to me. We were walking through the only known anagram of my name—which is Sago Mud Salad.

All guides had to carry rifles, they told us, partly as protection against the wildlife, but more importantly in case they encountered poachers. Murara told us that he had personally shot dead five poachers. He explained with a shrug that there was pas de problème about it. No bother with inquests or anything like that, he just shot them and went home.

Hmm. Reminds me of the Delia Owens situation.

Poaching of one kind or another is, of course, the single most serious threat to the survival of the mountain gorillas, but it’s hard not to wonder whether declaring open season on human beings is the best plan for solving the problem.

Four in every five of the gorillas alive in the world’s zoos today were originally taken from the wild, but no public zoo would accept a gorilla now, except from another zoo, since it would be a bit difficult to explain where it came from.

This is the most destructive aspect of this sort of poaching: for every young gorilla captured, several other members of its family will probably die trying to protect it.

Worse than those who want to collect gorillas for their private zoos are those who just want to collect bits of gorillas. For many years there was a brisk trade in skulls and hands that were sold to tourists and expatriates who mistakenly thought they would look finer on their mantelpieces than they did on the original gorilla. This, thank goodness, is also now declining, since a taste for bone-headed brutality is now held to be less of a social grace than formerly.

Mark had told me before we went to bed that when I woke up the first thing I had to remember was to turn my boots upside-down and shake them. I asked him why. “Scorpions,” he replied. “Good night.”

He explained that gorillas like to live in montane rain forest, or cloud forest. It was over ten thousand feet above sea level, above the cloud level, and always damp. Water drips off the trees the whole time.

This sounds kind of insane but in a good way.

One of the characteristics that laymen find most odd about zoologists is their insatiable enthusiasm for animal droppings. I can understand, of course, that the droppings yield a great deal of information about the habits and diets of the animals concerned, but nothing quite explains the sheer glee that the actual objects seem to inspire. A sharp yelp of joy told me that Mark had found some.

We told Conrad how alarmed we had been by Murara and Serundori’s accounts of simply going out and mowing down the local poachers, and he sat back in his chair, kicked up his heels, and roared with laughter. “It’s incredible what these guys will tell the tourists! I bet they told you they were ex-commandos as well, didn’t they?” We admitted, rather sheepishly, that they had. Conrad clasped his hand to his brow and shook his head. “The only thing about them that’s ex-commando,” he said, “is their uniforms. They buy them off the commandos. The commandos sell them to buy food because they hardly ever get paid. It’s all complete nonsense.

The gorillas are perfectly capable of making it clear when they don’t wish to be disturbed. There was one occasion on which a gorilla group had had a particularly stressful morning as a result of an encounter with another gorilla group, and the last thing they wanted was to be bothered with humans in the afternoon, so when a tracker brought some tourists and overstayed his welcome, the silverback took hold of the tracker’s hand and gently bit his watch off.

The point about not running out of water in the middle of the savannah is that you do actually need the stuff. Your body regularly mentions to you that you need it, and after a while becomes quite strident on the subject. Furthermore, we were miles from anywhere, and though there were a number of theories flying around about where we’d left the Land Rover, none of them so far had stood up to rigourous testing.

Because their house is so open, it is regularly full of animals. A young hippo, for instance, frequently comes to chew on the pot plants in their living room. It often spends the night asleep in their bedroom with its head resting next to the (second) baby’s cot. There are snakes and elephants in the garden, rats which eat all their soap, and termites gradually nibbling away at the support poles of the house. The only animals that really worry them are the crocodiles, which live in the river at the bottom of the garden. Their dog was eaten by one. “It is a bit of a worry,” Kes told us. “But we just have to make our lives as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. If we lived in the city, we’d be just as concerned about the children getting run over by a bus or abducted as we are about them being attacked by a crocodile.”

Charles flies his plane the same way my mother drives her car around the country lanes in Dorset. If you didn’t know she had done it invincibly every day of her life for years, you would be hiding in the footwell gibbering with fear instead of just smiling glassily and humming “Abide With Me.”

I was struck again by something that was becoming a truism on these travels, that seeing animals such as these in a zoo was absolutely no preparation for seeing them in the wild—great beasts moving through seemingly limitless space, utterly the masters of their own world.

Mark said that he had never seen anything like it in all his travels in Africa. Garamba, he said, was unique for the freedom it allowed you to get close to the animals and away from other people. There is, of course, another side to this. We heard recently that, a few weeks later, someone sitting in the exact same spot where we were sitting had been attacked and killed by a lion.

Tonight, I discovered why it is that mosquito nets get tied up into knots. The reason is embarrassingly simple, and I can hardly bear to admit what it is. It’s to stop the mosquitoes from getting into it. I climbed into bed and gradually realised that there were almost as many mosquitoes inside the net as outside. The action of draping the net over myself was almost as much use as the magnificent fence that the Australians built across the whole of their continent to keep the rabbits out when there were already rabbits on both sides of the fence.

We gathered our cameras together and walked. “Quietly,” said Charles. We walked more quietly. It was difficult to be that quiet struggling through a wide, marsh-filled gully, with our boots and even our knees farting and belching in the mud. Mark entertained us by whispering interesting facts to us. “Did you know,” he said, “that bilharzia is the second most common disease in the world after tooth decay?” “No, really,” I said. “It’s very interesting,” said Mark. “It’s a disease you get from wading through infected water. Tiny snails breed in the water and they act as hosts to tiny parasitic worms that latch on to your skin. When the water evaporates, the worms burrow in and attack your bladder and intestines. You’ll know if you’ve got it, because it’s like really bad flu with diarrhea, and you also piss blood.” “I think we’re meant to be keeping quiet,” I said.

The animal was turned slightly away from us, continuing gently to crop the grass. At last the wind was well established in our favour and, nervously, quietly, we set off again. It was a little like that game we play as children, in which one child stands facing the wall while the others try to creep up behind and touch her. She will from time to time suddenly turn around, and anyone she catches moving has to go all the way to the back and start again. Generally she won’t be in a position to impale anyone she doesn’t like the look of on a three-foot-horn, but in other respects it was similar.

The animal is, of course, a herbivore. It lives by grazing. The closer we crept to it, and the more monstrously it loomed in front of us, the more incongruous its gentle activity seemed to be. It was like watching an excavating machine quietly getting on with a little weeding.

Rhinoceroses declare their movements and their territory to other animals by stamping in their feces, and then leaving smell traces of themselves wherever they walk, which is the sort of note we would not appreciate being left.

Again, I imagine myself sitting here in my study writing this through the afternoon and gradually realising that a slight smell I had noticed earlier is still there, and beginning to wonder if I should start to look for other clues as to what it could be. I would start to look for something, something I could see: a bottle of something that’s fallen over, or something electrical that’s overheating. The smell is simply the clue that there’s something I should look for. For the rhino, the sight of us was simply a clue that there was something he should sniff for, and he began to sniff the air more carefully, and to move around in a slow, careful arc. At that moment the wind began to move around and gave us away completely. The rhino snapped to attention, turned away from us, and hurtled off across the plain like a nimble young tank.

And flight, of course, is a means of escape. It’s a survival mechanism, and one that the birds of New Zealand found they didn’t especially need. Flying is hard work and consumes a lot of energy. Not only that. There is also a trade-off between flying and eating. The more you eat, the harder it is to fly. So increasingly what happened was that instead of having just a light snack and then flying off, the birds would settle in for a rather larger meal and go for a waddle afterward instead. So when eventually European settlers arrived and brought cats and dogs and stoats and possums with them, a lot of New Zealand’s flightless birds were suddenly waddling for their lives. The kiwis, the takahes—and the old night parrots, the kakapos.

Sadly, however, it seems that not only has the kakapo forgotten how to fly, but it has also forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. Apparently a seriously worried kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it, whereupon it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground. By and large, though, the kakapo has never learned to worry. It’s never had anything much to worry about.

The kakapo is a solitary creature: it doesn’t like other animals. It doesn’t even like the company of other kakapos. One conservation worker we met said he sometimes wondered if the mating call of the male didn’t actively repel the female, which is the sort of biological absurdity you otherwise find only in discotheques.

I’ve heard a tape of collected kakapo noises, and it’s almost impossible to believe that it all comes just from a bird, or indeed any kind of animal. Pink Floyd studio outtakes perhaps, but not a parrot.

They’ve been used to trap the kakapos on Stewart Island so that they can then be airlifted to Codfish Island and here to Little Barrier Island by helicopter. First time any of the species have flown at all for thousands, perhaps millions, of years.”

The effect was that of walking into a slightly suburban Garden of Eden, as if on the Eighth Day God had suddenly got going again and started creating Flymos, secateurs, and those things I can never remember the name of but which are essentially electrically driven pieces of string.

Had to google the first two things (lawn mower, heddge trimmers) to realize the last item being described is a weed whacker.

It was so horribly easy to introduce predators onto the island by mistake, and the damage would be very serious. The tourists who came on organised trips could be managed quite carefully, but the danger came from people coming over to the island on boats and setting up barbecues on the beach. All it would take would be a couple of rats or a pregnant cat, and the work of years would be undone. I was surprised at the thought that anybody thinking of taking a barbecue to an island beach would necessarily think of including a pregnant cat in their party, but she assured me that it could happen very easily. And virtually every type of boat has rats aboard.

A few minutes later Arab himself arrived. I had no idea what I expected a freelance kakapo tracker to look like, but once we saw him, it was clear that if he was hidden in a crowd of a thousand random people, you would still know instantly that he was the freelance kakapo tracker.

I’ve never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I’ve seen a few and they’re never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you’re in the right frame of mind, which is usually about lunchtime.

But the early sun was beginning to glimmer through the trees and there was a lot of fragile beauty business going on where it glistened on the tiny beaded dewdrops on the leaves, so I supposed that it wasn’t altogether bad. In fact, there was so much glimmering and glistening and glittering and glinting going on that I began to wonder why it was that so many words that describe what the sun does in the morning begin with the letters “gl,” and I mentioned this to Mark, who told me to take a running jump.

The damn bird was just stringing us along, and it would be another gloomy evening of sitting in the hut cleaning our lenses and trying to look on the bright side. At least there wouldn’t be any whisky this time because we’d drunk it all, so we would be leaving Codfish the following day clearheaded enough to know that we had flown twelve thousand miles to see a bird that hadn’t turned up to see us, and all that remained was to fly twelve thousand miles back again and try to find something to write about it. I must have done sillier things in my life, but I couldn’t remember when.

ASSUMPTIONS ARE THE things you don’t know you’re making, which is why it is so disorienting the first time you take the plug out of a washbasin in Australia and see the water spiraling down the hole the other way around. The very laws of physics are telling you how far you are from home. In New Zealand even the telephone dials are numbered anti-clockwise. This has nothing to do with the laws of physics—they just do it differently there. The shock is that it had never occurred to you that there was any other way of doing it. In fact, you had never even thought about it at all, and suddenly here it is—different. The ground slips. Dialing in New Zealand takes quite a bit of concentration because every digit is where you least expect to find it. Try and do it quickly and you will inevitably misdial because your automatic habit jumps in and takes over before you have a chance to stop it. The habit of telephone dials is so deep that it has become an assumption, and you don’t even know you’re making it. China is in the Northern Hemisphere, so its washbasins drain clockwise, like ours. Their telephone dials are numbered like ours. Both those things are familiar. But every single other thing is different, and the assumptions that you don’t know you’re making will only get you into trouble and confusion.

What an intro!

In the middle of one of the biggest, longest, noisiest, dirtiest thoroughfares in the world lives the reincarnation of a drowned princess, or rather, two hundred reincarnations of a drowned princess. Whether these are two hundred different reincarnations of the same drowned princess, or the individual reincarnations of two hundred different drowned princesses, is something that the legends are a little vague about, and there are no reliable statistics on the incidence of princess-drownings in the area available to help clear the matter up. If they are all the same drowned princess, then she must have led a life of exquisite sinfulness to have had the conditions of her current lives repeatedly inflicted on her. Her reincarnations are constantly being mangled in ships’ propellers, snared in fishermen’s nets full of hooks, blinded, poisoned, and deafened. The thoroughfare in question is the Yangtze River, and the reincarnated princess is the baiji, the Yangtze river dolphin.

I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burned to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide. “But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question. “But it’s been burned down?” “Yes.” “Twice.” “Many times.” “And rebuilt.” “Of course. It is an important and historic building.” “With completely new materials.” “But of course. It was burned down.” “So how can it be the same building?” “It is always the same building.” I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself. I couldn’t feel entirely comfortable with this view, because it fought against my basic Western assumptions, but I did see the point.

I said to Mark, “It must be continuous bedlam under the water.” “What?” “I said it’s hard enough for us to talk in here with this band going on, but it must be continuous bedlam under the water.” “Is that what you’ve been sitting here thinking all this time?” “Yes.” “I thought you’d been quiet.” “I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be a blind man trying to live in a discotheque. Or several competing discotheques.” “Well, it’s worse than that, isn’t it?” Mark said. “Dolphins rely on sound to see with.” “All right, so it would be like a deaf man living in a discotheque.” “Why?” “All the stroboscopic lights and flares and mirrors and lasers and things. Constantly confusing information. After a day or two you’d become completely bewildered and disoriented and start to fall over the furniture.” “Well, that’s exactly what’s happening, in fact. The dolphins are continually being hit by boats or mangled in their propellers or tangled in fishermen’s nets. A dolphin’s echolocation is usually good enough for it to find a small ring on the sea bed, so things must be pretty serious if it can’t tell that it’s about to be brained by a boat

“So,” I said, “what do you do if you are either half-blind, or half-deaf, living in a discotheque with a stroboscopic light show, where the sewers are overflowing, the ceiling and the fans keep crashing on your head, and the food is bad?” “I think I’d complain to the management.” “They can’t.” “No. They have to wait for the management to notice.”

In the Western world, to ring a bell or sound a horn is usually an aggressive thing to do. It carries a warning or an instruction: “Get out of the way,” “Get a move on,” or “What the hell kind of idiot are you, anyway?” If you hear a lot of horns blowing on a New York street, you know that people are in a dangerous mood. In China, you gradually realise, the sound means something else entirely. It doesn’t mean, “Get out of my way, asshole,” it just means a cheerful “Here I am.” Or rather it means, “Here I am here I am here I am here I am here I am …,” because it is continuous.

I do wish cars had two kinds of horns for exactly this purpose.

One of the things that you quickly discover in China is that we are all at the zoo. If you stand still for a minute, people will gather round and stare at you. The unnerving thing is that they don’t stare intently or inquisitively, they just stand there, often right in front of you, and watch you as blankly as if you were a dog-food commercial.

I had already managed to dispose of one bottle of aftershave in the hotel in Beijing, and I hid another under the seat on the train to Nanjing. “You know what you’re doing?” said Mark as he spotted me. I’d thought he was asleep. “Yes. I’m trying to get rid of this bloody stuff. I wish I’d never bought it.” “No, it’s more than that. When an animal strays into new territory, where it doesn’t feel at home, it marks its passage with scent, just to lay claim. You remember the ring-tailed lemurs in Madagascar? They’ve got scent glands in their wrists. They rub their tails between their wrists and then wave their tails in the air to spread the scent around, just to occupy the territory. That’s why dogs pee against lampposts as well. You’re just scent-marking your way around China. Old habits die hard.”

“He actually thinks he’s a human?” I asked. “Oh yes. Well, if he thinks Carl’s his mother, it more or less follows, doesn’t it? They may not be brilliant, but they’re logical. He’s quite convinced he’s a human. He completely ignores the other kestrels, hasn’t got time for them, they’re just a bunch of birds as far as he’s concerned. But when Carl walks in here he goes completely berserk. It’s a problem because, of course, you can’t introduce an imprinted bird into the wild, it wouldn’t know what the hell to do. Wouldn’t nest, wouldn’t hunt, it would just expect to go to restaurants and stuff. Or at least it would expect to be fed. It wouldn’t survive by itself.

You see, the young birds that we’ve hatched here don’t come to sexual maturity at the same time, so when the females start getting sexy, the males are not ready to handle it. The females are bigger and more belligerent and often beat the males up. So when that happens, we collect semen from Pink, and—” “How do you do that?” asked Mark. “In a hat.” “I thought you said in a hat.” “That’s right. Carl puts on this special hat, which is a bit like a rather strange bowler hat with a rubber brim, Pink goes mad with desire for Carl, flies down and fucks the hell out of his hat.” “What?” “He ejaculates into the brim. We collect the drop of semen and use it to inseminate a female.” “Strange way to treat your mother.” “He’s a strange bird. But he does serve a useful purpose in spite of being psychologically twisted.”