Last Chance To See

by Douglas Adams

it is an uncomfortable experience to share a long ride on a small boat with four live chickens who are eyeing you with a deep and dreadful suspicion which you are in no position to allay.

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened – it’s just wonderful. And … the opportunity to spend seventy or eighty years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned

I have a cheerfully reckless view of this kind of air travel. It rarely bothers me at all. I don’t think this is bravery, because I am frequently scared stiff in cars, particularly if I’m driving. But once you’re in an aeroplane everything is completely out of your hands, so you may as well just sit back and grin manically about the grinding and rattling noises the old wreck of a plane makes as the turbulence throws it round the sky. There’s nothing you can do.

We had been told by someone on the plane that there were only three trucks on the whole of the island of Flores, and we passed six of them on the way in.

Virtually everything we were told in Indonesia turned out not to be true, sometimes almost immediately. The only exception to this was when we were told that something would happen immediately, in which case it turned out not to be true over an extended period of time.

For Westerners who are used to getting their chickens wrapped in polythene from the supermarket it is an uncomfortable experience to share a long ride on a small boat with four live chickens who are eyeing you with a deep and dreadful suspicion which you are in no position to allay.

there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you’ve been introduced to socially.

We moored at a long, rickety, wooden jetty that stuck out from the middle of a wide pale beach. At the landward end the jetty was surmounted by an archway, nailed to the top of which was a wooden board which welcomed us to Komodo, and therefore served slightly to diminish our sense of intrepidness.

Komodo dragons sleep headfirst in large burrows. It is a very, very, very bad idea to even think of pulling its tail.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

What makes you wonder about the nature of this god character is that he creates something that is so perfectly designed to be of benefit to human beings and then hangs it twenty feet above their heads on a tree with no branches. Here’s a good trick, let’s see how they cope with this. Oh, look! They’ve managed to find a way of climbing the tree. I didn’t think they’d be able to do that. All right, let’s see them get the thing open. Hmm, so they’ve found out how to temper steel now, have they? OK, no more Mr Nice Guy. Next time they go up that tree I’ll have a dragon waiting for them at the bottom. I can only think that the business with the apple must have upset him more than I realised.

I then became rather tense myself as the plane started to taxi out to the runway, because the preflight talk from our pilot included a description of our route, an explanation of the safety features of the aircraft, and also a short prayer. I wasn’t disturbed so much by the ‘O Lord, we thank Thee for the blessing of this Thy day’, but ‘We commend our lives into Thy hands, O Lord’ is frankly not the sort of thing you want to hear from a pilot as his hand is reaching for the throttle.

In contradiction of everything sensible we know about geography and geometry, the sky over Kenya is simply much bigger than it is anywhere else.

When a shop appeared to sell a mixture of ghetto blasters, socks, soap and chickens, it didn’t seem unreasonable to go in and ask if they’d got any toothpaste or paper stuck away on one of their shelves as well, but they looked at me as if I was completely mad. Couldn’t I see that this was a ghetto blaster, socks, soap and chicken shop?

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. We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.

I knew that what I was standing on was a termite hill, but was disappointed that the thing I was staring at was not a northern white rhinoceros, since we had been walking determinedly towards it for upwards of an hour in the blazing midday sun in the middle of what can only be described as Africa. Also we had run out of water. I could scarcely believe, having been brought up on a rich diet of H. Rider Haggard, Noël Coward and The Eagle, that the first thing I would do on encountering the actual real savannah plains of Africa would be to march straight out into them in the midday sun and run out of water.

A mountain gorilla and a twig. This is where all the trouble started.

If the white rhino had actually been darker than the black rhino people would just get cross, which would be a pity since there are many better things to get cross about regarding the white rhino than its colour, such as what happens to its horns.

It was like watching a JCB excavator quietly getting on with a little weeding.

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

The rhino snapped to attention, turned away from us, and hurtled off across the plain like a nimble young tank.

If you took the whole of Norway, scrunched it up a bit, shook out all the moose and reindeer, hurled it ten thousand miles round the world and filled it with birds then you’d be wasting your time, because it looks very much as if someone has already done it.

The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though you know that it probably will not be.

Ostriches do not bite because they have no teeth. They don’t tear you to pieces because they don’t have any forelimbs with claws on them. No, ostriches kick you to death. And who, frankly, can blame them?

For anyone who has ever wondered who in the world buys Richard Clayderman records, it’s the Chinese, and there are a billion of them.

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 dogfood commercial.

So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing Al Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight – the locals wouldn’t stand a chance.

It’s easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo we are now sadder and wiser, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.

There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.