Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  The Amazonian manatee was first described as a cross between a seal and a hippo, though it’s not related to either. There is nothing else quite like this perfect piece of evolutionary engineering in the world.

  A baby manatee confides in the man charged with nursing it back to health.

  After a rejuvenating couple of days marvelling at manatees and poring over emails, we were ready for our final expedition into the wi-fi-free jungle beyond Manaus. This was the part of the trip we’d been looking forward to the most: we were going to release an orphaned manatee back into the wild.

  We took a scheduled flight 700 kilometres (440 miles) west, to a small town called Tefé, and set up base camp in the Anilce Hotel.

  If you’re ever given a year to live, move to Tefé. Founded as a base for missionaries in the 17th century, it’s pleasant enough, with a Central American flavour to its buildings and streets, but there is absolutely nothing to do. Every day lasts an eternity. I asked a couple of people how they spent their spare time there: ‘reading’, said one; ‘watching DVDs’, said the other.

  It reminded me of an Icelandic friend’s response to a visitor who asked what there is to do in his remote village in the winter. ‘Well, in the summer there is fishing and fornication,’ he said, ‘and in the winter there is no fishing.’

  We were fortunate, though, because we had things to do and people to see. We waited for the customary storm of the day to drop its customary load and then set off to find the offices of the Mamirauá Project.

  We’d flown halfway across the Amazon to meet an honorary member of the project, called Piti. Rescued from a fishing net with a nasty wound in his back (probably made by a harpoon), Piti was a baby manatee. He had been nursed back to health by the staff of the project and was about to embark on the first leg of a long journey to be released back into the wild.

  We found the offices, eventually, floating on a wooden platform in the middle of the river, and introduced ourselves to two of the staff: Miriam Marmontel and Carolina Ramos.

  If you’re a single male zoologist, looking for a suitable study subject, I would recommend Amazonian manatees. You would be part of an elite group of specialists studying an enigmatic and endangered animal. Plus Amazonian manatee-ologists are all passionate and intellectual and, in my limited experience, would all turn heads on the streets of London, Paris or New York.

  I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say.

  ‘Please can we see your manatee?’ sounded a little lame, or rude, or both.

  Stephen took over.

  ‘Please can we see your manatee?’ he said.

  We walked around the wooden platform, which was rolling slightly in the wake of a passing boat, picked our way past several garden sheds or offices (it was hard to tell which), and there in front of us was a bright blue fibreglass tank full of murky water. We leaned over the side, and saw Piti’s little back breaking the surface.

  Miriam and Carolina introduced us to Michelle, who had been Piti’s nurse and confidante for the past few months.

  The three girls asked who would like to help prepare Piti for his impending expedition. My hand shot into the air faster than a chameleon’s tongue.

  We carefully drained the water from his tank, until he was floundering around like an eel in an empty bath, and gently manhandled him onto the wooden floating jetty to be weighed and measured. He twisted and writhed. There was no hint of aggression, no lashing out, no biting. He simply wanted to demonstrate that he could out-wriggle us if he really wanted to. Michelle crouched down beside him and whispered something in his ear. He listened carefully and, miraculously, calmed down.

  I was instructed to hang on to his tail, in case he didn’t like being weighed and measured, and was thrilled to be able to help.

  He farted.

  This was not your average laugh-it-off friend-in-the-pub kind of fart. It was a lengthy, ear-splitting, far-reaching fart.

  Stephen stepped back.

  ‘At least he’s not a meat-eater,’ he remarked, trying to be helpful and positive.

  Then he farted again. This time it was a shockingly wet fart which I felt hitting my shirt, dribbling down my shorts and then running down my leg. I glanced up, gasping for air. Stephen was standing on the far side of the tank.

  Miriam pronounced Piti large enough to travel, so we lifted the anxious manatee out of his pongy postcard from the wild and started carrying him to another tank, ready and waiting on the deck of a boat called the Com te Abreu.

  ‘Watch your feet!’ Stephen called, helpfully, from behind a garden shed.

  The plan was to take Piti 160 kilometres (100 miles) into the heart of one of the biggest jungle reserves in Brazil where, ultimately, he would be set free.

  We hoisted the unwitting little manatee onto the deck of the Com te Abreu and into his temporary new home. With a wriggle and a splash, he disappeared beneath the surface.

  We said our goodbyes to Miriam, Carolina, Michelle and Piti, and arranged to meet early the following morning.

  But you know what they say about the best-laid plans? Without the benefit of hindsight, little did we realise that we were also about to embark on our biggest and toughest adventure yet.

  It was still dark when we rolled up, lifeless and uncommunicative, at the appointed ungodly hour.

  Mark, Michelle and Piti, preparing for a journey into the heart of one of the biggest jungle reserves in Brazil. But you know what they say about the best-laid plans?

  It started to rain.

  We commandeered two boats, just large enough to carry eight of us and 31 pieces of kit, and slowly motored out into the middle of the river. We found the Com te Abreu, which was moored alongside the floating wooden platform, and squeezed into a small gap in front of her bow.

  Stephen got out first. I set foot on the wet platform a few seconds later, just as he disappeared behind the main boat.

  Suddenly, there was a thump and a blood-curdling scream.

  I turned the corner to see him lying by the side of the Com te Abreu, almost within touching distance of Piti in his tank, with a look of sheer horror and agony etched into his face.

  Stephen never claimed to be the first to fall for an animal like Piti, though I dare say few have done it quite so dramatically. Everything seemed to be hurting – his arm, his shoulder, his back, his head, his ribs, his knee. He was feeling sick and yelping in pain with the slightest involuntary movement. But it was his right arm that seemed particularly bad, and we were worried because he was complaining of numb fingers and a ‘weird’ feeling in his elbow.

  We were less than three weeks into a four-week trip. We weren’t quite at the end of the universe, but for a while that morning it felt pretty close.

  We should have taken notice of the omens.

  There’s nothing worse than seeing a friend in pain, and feeling unable to do anything to make it better. We made him as comfortable as we could, under the circumstances, and waited for help.

  The next few hours are a blur of satellite phone calls, BBC medical kits, boat journeys, jungle clinics, plaster of Paris, injections, pouring rain and howls of pain. And all the time we were being filmed. Cameraman Will, ever the professional, kept his finger on the button.

  Eventually, after a lot of agonising debate and soul-searching, we split the crew in two. Will, Tim (Sound) and Sue (Assistant Producer) stayed with Piti, while the rest of us returned to Manaus.

  Captain Wilson had responded to our SOS and, surprisingly quickly, half of us were in the air heading towards proper medical help. I looked across at Stephen, eyes shut, slumped in his seat, with his shirt tattered and torn and his arm in a temporary plaster. The adventure was over and we were alone with our thoughts.

  All I could think about during the two-hour flight was that it could have been much worse. Stephen could so easily have knocked himself out and fallen into the fast-flowing river. I had visions of the rest of us diving in, holding our breath, feeling around in the darkness under the hu
ll, in the vague hope of finding and rescuing him.

  The next 24 hours were awful – another blur of clinics, X-rays, blood tests, heart checks and second opinions. At least we got a firm diagnosis. His right arm was broken, very badly, in three places. We decided to get him to Miami for a delicate and potentially dangerous operation to put it right.

  But just when you think things can’t get any worse, they do. I woke up with food poisoning and was vomiting every half an hour or so. A doctor was supposed to come to the hotel to clear Stephen for flying, but didn’t. Then we discovered that he couldn’t fly anyway, unless we could remove the fresh plaster cast from his arm (and all we could muster was a pair of curved nail scissors). In all the kerfuffle we lost the crucial hospital X-ray, and then mislaid the key to the storeroom where we kept all the kit. Tim and I were running around like headless chickens, while Stephen (who had slept in his torn and tattered clothes and looked as if he’d just stumbled out of the jungle after being raised by a troop of howler monkeys) was limping around with an unexpectedly stiff leg.

  Stephen and Tim eventually made it to Miami – only after persuading the airline to hold the flight – while I hitched another ride on Captain Wilson’s floatplane to catch up with the remnant crew, and Piti.

  I had the GPS coordinates of the Com te Abreu, hastily written on the back of a laundry list following a crackly satellite phone call from Sue, and after the usual death-defying swoop over the rainforest the missionary plane touched down in the nick of time. Against all the odds, I’d caught up with them just as Piti was about to be released.

  Miriam had sent out a message inviting the children of five local villages to come and meet their new, and still rather anxious, neighbour. As we closed in on Piti’s final destination, news of his arrival had been spreading. By boat and canoe, in twos and threes, and then in a flood, they came. Most had never seen a manatee before.

  The staff of the Mamiraua Project had built a temporary wooden enclosure next to a village overlooking the release site, where Piti could become acclimatised to his new home until it was time to be released fully into the wild.

  We carefully lifted him out of his tank, carried him across another floating wooden platform and gently lowered him into his halfway house. He disappeared beneath the surface of the murky water, but not before releasing a telltale trail of bubbles that said simply ‘I’m okay.’

  We collapsed in laughter.

  I watched his ripples for a while and then glanced at Miriam, Carolina and Michelle. They were hugging one another, with tears in their eyes. This was their big day, the result of months of planning and preparation, and they cared so much about Piti and his wild and endangered relatives.

  They had a dream. They hoped that the enthusiasm of all those children, for one baby peixe-boi, would feed back through families and traditional hunting communities and make manatees something to cherish rather than hunt. If their dream came true, Piti’s new-found freedom would be just the beginning and they would repeat the care and release of orphaned manatees across the Amazon Basin.

  The next day I managed to speak to Stephen on the satellite phone. He was in surprisingly good spirits, under the circumstances, as he awaited his operation.

  I was worried that he might be having second thoughts about our future travels together, but I think even he was surprised to discover just how much he was missing his home from home in the jungle.

  ‘Wherever we meet next,’ he said, though, ‘it is firmly understood that Stephen never leads, he only follows, and everybody helps him onto boats. Because he’s a clumsy arse. That’s just got to be understood.’

  And that was that. After all the mad panic of the past few days, both Stephen and Piti were in safe hands and there was nothing left to do. As we began the 12-hour boat journey back to Tefé, picking our way along the backwaters of the Amazon, I crawled into a hammock and slept.

  If Miriam’s dream comes true, Piti’s new-found freedom will be just the beginning, and more and more orphaned manatees can be released across the Amazon Basin.

  2

  DANGER: REBELS COMING

  A four-hour operation and several recuperative months later, we were on the road again. This time Stephen had a steel plate and no fewer than ten aluminium screws in his arm, along with an impressive 25-cm (10-inch) scar – ample proof of his official new status as intrepid adventurer.

  Our next stop was Africa.

  Twenty years ago, Douglas Adams and I visited Garamba National Park, in the northeastern corner of Zaire.

  I say ‘Zaire’ because that’s what the country was called while we were there, but it changes its name more often than The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. It was originally called Congo Free State, then Belgian Congo, then Congo-Léopoldville, and finally Zaire. Actually, it’s not even true to say ‘finally Zaire’ because since our visit it has changed its name yet again. Now it is called the Democratic Republic of Congo, or just DR Congo, or even DRC for short. It’s not to be confused with one of its many neighbours, the Republic of Congo, otherwise known as Congo-Brazzaville or just the Congo, which is a former French colony rather than a Belgian one.

  No one ever said African politics, or geography, was supposed to be easy.

  When people talk about ‘darkest Africa’, this is usually where they have in mind. It is a land of jungles, mountains, enormous rivers, volcanoes, more exotic wildlife than you’d be wise to shake a stick at, hunter-gatherer pygmies who are still largely untouched by western civilisation, and one of the worst transport systems anywhere in the world (ignoring our own transport system in Britain, of course).

  Stephen the adventurer returns – complete with steel plate and ten aluminium screws holding his broken arm together.

  The Country Formerly Known as Zaire isn’t the safest place to live if you’re an elephant.

  Anyway, we went to The Country Formerly Known as Zaire to look for one of the rarest animals on the planet: the northern white rhino.

  The northern white rhino has had a tough life. To be fair, it wasn’t too bad for the first few million years. It’s just the last hundred years that have been sheer hell.

  It was common at the time of its discovery, in 1903, and lived in five different countries: Chad, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda and the DRC. But it was highly sought-after by sports hunters and poachers (having two horns made it doubly attractive) and its numbers plummeted. By 1965, the population had dropped to 5,000; by 1980, there were just 800; and, by 1984, it had reached a frightening low of just fifteen animals left.

  Those last survivors, hanging on by a thread, were under the protection of a skeleton staff, with little training, virtually no money, and no equipment. Basically, if a poacher wanted to kill a rhino, all he had to do was to turn up.

  But that wasn’t the only problem. Hunting and poaching aside, the DRC lies in the heart of war-torn Africa. It has been fighting a series of complex, many-sided wars for umpteen years. Millions of people have died and many more have been displaced from their homes. No wonder: it’s an immense country (about eighty times the size of Belgium) with more than 200 ethnic groups. And, to make matters worse, many of these ethnic groups spill over the borders with all nine countries surrounding the DRC, adding a multifaceted international twist to the turmoil.

  I don’t pretend to understand the complexities of the situation in the region, but the DRC’s problems seem to be even greater than the ethnic quarrelling that tends to make world news. The battleground is as much about the country’s rich natural resources as it is about tribal warfare. As one Congolese official noted while we were there: ‘It’s interesting that the rebels aren’t in any areas that don’t have minerals.’

  The DRC could be one of the wealthiest countries in Africa, but it is actually one of the poorest. It’s rich in timber and in virtually every mineral known to man, from gold and diamonds to copper and tin. It is also a major source of coltan, or columbite-tantalite to give it its full name, the ‘black gold�
� metallic ore that is a key ingredient in mobile phones, DVD players and laptops. And it is believed to hold huge reserves of oil and gas. But ever since King Leopold II of Belgium made the country his personal property in 1885 (in cahoots with the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley) and exploited it mercilessly for its rubber and ivory, the allure of those resources has proved to be a curse, provoking and intensifying the never-ending conflict.

  One of the last surviving northern white rhinos in Garamba National Park, photographed by Mark in 1989.

  Expatriates living in this humanitarian disaster zone have given the DRC their own name – they say the acronym stands for ‘Danger: Rebels Coming’. It’s scarily apt, under the circumstances.

  So this is the setting for the northern white rhino’s last stand, in Garamba National Park.

  Garamba is about 5,000 square kilometres (2,000 square miles) in size, although I realise that means absolutely nothing to most of us. How big is 5,000 square kilometres? Well, it’s about the size of Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Mauritius and the Isle of Man combined, if that helps. Or, as Douglas once said, it’s ‘roughly the size of part of Scotland’. In other words, it’s very, very big.

  There were 22 rhinos rattling around the park when Douglas and I were there in 1989 – and that was the entire world population in the wild.

  We managed to stalk one on foot, creeping to within about 20 metres (66 feet) before it stopped grazing, lifted its head and made a dash for it, hurtling off across the plain like a nimble young tank. Then we hitched a ride in the park’s anti-poaching patrol Cessna 185. As we flew across the savannah (which looked like stretched ostrich skin from the air) we saw a second rhino. Suddenly, as we passed a screen of trees, we saw another two: a mother and calf, eyeing us suspiciously from behind a bush. In fact, during that three-hour flight we saw a total of eight different rhinos. It was quite a sobering thought – we had just encountered more than a third of the entire world population.