Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  I decided to demonstrate the spectacle we were hoping to see. I balanced on tiptoe and hopped sideways across the open patch of red sand, like a ballet dancer doing a grande jété. Holding my arms high above my head for balance, I twisted 180 degrees in midair ready for another bout of sideways hopping towards the forest, but fell heavily onto an exposed tree root with an ‘oomph!’ and a lot of pain. Several weeks later, my rib was still so painful I wanted to cling to the ceiling every time I sneezed.

  Stephen wasn’t all that impressed. But as I dusted myself off, Josia called in a stage whisper from the edge of the forest.

  With their distinctive black-and-white coats, soft-toy cuddliness and air of swaggering arrogance, ring-tailed lemurs were hard to miss around Berenty.

  ‘They’re coming!’

  She had been watching a small troop of seven sifakas, taking a long time to prepare themselves for their regular morning dash across the sandy plain, and one was about to go.

  It was all over in less than a minute. The sifaka dropped to the ground, looked at us, hesitated for a moment, then stood up on its hind legs, locked its ankles together, thrust its stomach out, lifted its arms and tail into the air and skipped and hopped its way across to the other side. It looked like a competitor in a sack race. Even Stephen agreed that it had been worth the wait.

  ‘That’s the most preposterous way of getting around I’ve ever seen in my life,’ he laughed.

  As soon as the sifakas had disappeared we were joined by a troop of ring-tailed lemurs.

  With their distinctive black-and-white coats, soft-toy cuddliness and air of swaggering arrogance, ring-tailed lemurs were hard to miss around Berenty. This particular troop was sixteen-strong and included several babies, which were riding on their mothers’ backs like wide-eyed miniature jockeys. ‘Cute’ wasn’t the word; in fact no word has been invented to describe cuteness on such a grandiose scale. I’m already sounding a bit soppy and sentimental, so just look at the picture (page 119) and you’ll see what I mean.

  The highlight of the morning was a stink-fight between two males. I used to have stink-fights with my brother Adam, when we were kids and shared a bedroom together, but male ring-tailed lemurs do it professionally. It’s a way of establishing rank. Our two males ran their bushy tails over hidden scent glands on their wrists, to make them as smelly as possible, and then waved them about in one another’s faces. Eventually, one of them (presumably the least smelly) backed off, but by then we were all in heaps of laughter. Zoologists aren’t supposed to giggle at their subjects (we’re supposed to retain an air of detached scientific professionalism), but it was ridiculously funny.

  Failing to hit brown lemurs with purple dye from point-blank range.

  Forget walking around ladders or tossing spilt salt over your left shoulder – superstition in Madagascar is nothing short of professional.

  Josia eventually dragged us away to help with her research on brown lemurs. We just had enough time before moving on.

  There were about fifty troops of brown lemurs in Berenty and each troop had to be marked with a harmless coloured dye as part of an ongoing study into their population dynamics. I was issued with a bunch of bananas while Stephen was armed with a syringe. The plan was for me to tempt them in close enough for him to fire the dye. I’m sorry to report that he was pretty hopeless, despite recently being trained to shoot a .44 Magnum for Stephen Fry in America. The lemurs continued to eat their bananas, innocently oblivious to the clouds of purple dye being squirted to their left, to their right, over their heads and in front of their feet. We were crouching on the ground, almost within touching distance of the targets, so it didn’t exactly require shooting to Olympic standard.

  The more he missed, the more the rest of us struggled to keep straight faces and the more tense and nervous poor Stephen became. Eventually, two little spots of dye hit the back of one of the females, then a single spot hit the tail of another. Before you could say ‘Dirty Harry’ (repeatedly, for 45 minutes), Stephen had marked a grand total of three brown lemurs.

  ‘That’ll do,’ said Josia, slightly exasperated. ‘We only need to mark a few from each troop.’

  ‘Great!’ said Stephen enthusiastically, suddenly proud of progress so far. ‘I’ve got the hang of it now. Let’s go and find another troop.’

  There was a long pause as Josia caught the eye of one of her research students.

  ‘Erm, it’s okay thanks,’ she said. ‘We’ll take over from here.’

  Superstition is central to life in Madagascar. I’m not talking about walking around ladders instead of underneath them, tossing spilt salt over your left shoulder or avoiding the number thirteen. The Malagasy version is a more specialist form of superstition that is so complex and all-encompassing it has an enormous impact on the way many people live their lives.

  It begins with a great belief in the power of dead ancestors. This isn’t so much a morbid obsession with death – it’s more a rather convoluted celebration of life. Dead people are considered to be potent forces that continue to look after their descendants and share in everyday family affairs. Their wishes dictate the behaviour of living family members and any calamities in the household are usually blamed on their anger.

  Central to these beliefs is a complicated network of taboos, called ‘fady’.

  In Madagascar, things you would hardly even notice elsewhere in the world are supposed to bring bad luck. And an inordinate number of routine day-to-day tasks are frowned upon, or downright forbidden. There are few places in the world where it is possible to offend so many people so easily without even realising you’re doing it.

  There are so many potential faux pas. For instance, you mustn’t sing while you are eating (admittedly, not a major problem for most of us) or you will grow long teeth; you must never hand an egg directly to another person (it must be placed on the ground first); you mustn’t hold a funeral on a Tuesday or there will be another death in the village; and you must always use a spade with a loose handle to dig a grave (to keep a loose connection between the living and the dead). These fady (the plural is the same as the singular) vary from place to place, family to family and even from person to person, making them even more indecipherable for bumbling, uninformed westerners.

  Fady has a big impact on wildlife and conservation, too. Sometimes it is beneficial (killing certain animals or chopping down sacred trees is prohibited) but more often it is detrimental.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, the aye-aye is central to many superstitious beliefs. In a few areas it is thought to embody ancestral spirits and bring good luck, but for the most part it is considered at best a harbinger of evil and at worst an omen of death.

  Its otherworldly appearance probably doesn’t help. Nor can its rather alarming repertoire of weird and wonderful calls: grunts, screams and whimpers, as well as eerie sounds that can only be described as ‘fuffs’ and ‘hai-hais’ (it’s one of those animals that helpfully calls out its own name, like a cuckoo or a curlew, but not like a pygmy puff-back flycatcher).

  Some people believe that if an aye-aye points its middle finger at you, or strolls through your village, you or someone close to you is going to die. Others go so far as to claim that aye-ayes sneak into houses through their thatched roofs and murder the sleeping occupants, using those long middle fingers to puncture their victims’ hearts. A few people in the far north actually believe that aye-ayes eat people.

  This may seem a little absurd – laughable even – in the comfort and safety of the western world. But it’s serious stuff in Madagascar. There have even been cases of entire villages being burnt down, and rebuilt, after an aye-aye has dared to set foot somewhere inside.

  Fady aren’t good from an aye-aye’s point of view either, because the only way to prevent bad luck prevailing is to kill the offending aye-aye. Incidents of such killings are reported every year.

  Then there is the problem of disposing of the body. In some villages, if someone finds and kills an aye-aye near his h
ouse, he thoughtfully removes the bad luck from his own family by putting the corpse in his neighbour’s back garden. Then the neighbour does the same thing, to try and avoid something awful happening to his family, until the carcass ends up on the village outskirts. But it’s still too close for comfort, so someone hangs the dead animal (or just its head or tail) from a pole, in the hope that passing travellers will carry the evil and ill-fortune away with them.

  Such is the ingrained fear of this harmless nocturnal lemur that ‘aye-aye’ was once reputed to be the cry of alarm uttered if the Malagasy saw one of these enigmatic animals.

  Sadly, these days, hardly anyone ever does.

  We were so tired by the time we’d flown to Morondava and driven most of the way to Kirindy Forest, near the west coast, that we had resorted to negotiating with our hapless driver over how much longer we had to go.

  ‘How long do you reckon before we get there?’ asked Stephen.

  ‘Oh, about an hour.’

  ‘Do you mean exactly an hour or a little under an hour?’ I asked.

  ‘Um, probably a little under I would guess.’

  ‘So that means 45 minutes or actually nearer to half an hour then,’ cajoled Stephen.

  ‘In fact, if we keep up this speed and don’t make any more stops it’ll be more like 15 minutes,’ I confirmed.

  ‘Less than 15 minutes. Great. We’re nearly there then.’ Stephen’s voice had a sense of finality to it and drew a firm line under the negotiations. We’d be there in ten minutes, which made us both much happier. The driver just sighed.

  I think it was Indiana Jones, when someone accused him of getting old and struggling to keep up, who observed that ‘it’s not the years – it’s the mileage.’ Exactly. It’s the relentless packing and unpacking, the driving and flying, waking up to a different ceiling every morning and adapting to different food and ways of life that really takes it out of you.

  On this particular morning, I’m pretty sure Stephen was feeling the same weary way.

  We were sitting in silence (unusual for us) in the back of a Land Rover, watching the world go by. Another early start, another airport, another flight, another back-breaking drive on so-called roads that wouldn’t even pass for roads in other parts of the world, and yet another bloody adventure.

  And they said the baobab trees were weird.

  Sometimes, just sometimes, it would be nice to have nowhere to go and nothing to do.

  We made a brief stop at Baobab Alley, two parallel lines of baobab trees that neatly lived up to their name. We bought a couple of Cokes from a man with an unlikely bright orange fridge fired by kerosene (bear in mind that this was in the middle of nowhere), and wandered in admiration among the trees.

  There is an old saying that one day God gave each animal a tree to plant and the hyena accidentally planted his, the baobab, upside down. That’s exactly what these Grandidier’s baobabs, to give them their full and proper name, looked like. They are quite unlike trees in lesser parts of the world. For a start, they have massively swollen trunks that act like huge sponges and store vast amounts of water, and give them the shape of giant Chianti bottles. Then their pot bellies are adorned with sparse and ridiculously stubby and twisty branches, making them look as if they are having a particularly bad hair day. And to complete the look their freaky, flaky bark has a distinctive reddish hue.

  Baobabs are emblematic of Madagascar and are often protected by fady (and because the wood is neither strong enough for building nor particularly good for burning). Most of the surrounding forest had been cleared, but these few baobabs in Baobab Alley survived. With luck, they will live for hundreds or even thousands of years.

  Nothing makes Stephen happier than a bit of camping (that’s a lie, by the way).

  The cause of the only argument between Stephen and Mark during six months of travelling together (actually, it was more of a heated exchange than an argument).

  By the time we arrived at Kirindy itself, it was well and truly dark. There were a few wooden huts in a clearing in the forest and some tents in amongst the trees, but no sign of a toilet.

  ‘The forest is our toilet’, pronounced Stephen in the manner of Ray Mears. ‘But I’d hold it in as long as you can, if I were you.’

  ‘You seem surprisingly happy,’ I said. It was a relief. Stephen and tents are rarely a happy mix.

  ‘There’s only one word that would make me really happy,’ he replied. ‘And that’s “broadband”. I suppose a century ago it would have been “pigeon loft”. But sadly we have neither here. Just forest. And tents.’

  In fact, Kirindy was probably the part of the trip we’d been looking forward to the most. An area of dry deciduous forest, it is not as rich as the eastern rainforest but is home to more endemic and endangered species than anywhere else we’d been so far. And they are all animals with remarkably exotic-sounding names: hog-nosed snakes, narrow-striped mongooses, pale fork-marked lemurs and straw-coloured fruit bats among them.

  Our first quest was the giant jumping rat – the kind of animal that would require a wild imagination, a completely free rein and a bottle of vodka if you were designing it from scratch. We barely had time for a swig of vodka (or several swigs in Stephen’s case, as the reality of yet more camping suddenly dawned) before jumping back into the car and heading off into the darkness. Like aye-ayes, giant jumping rats only come out at night.

  ‘What the hell am I doing?’ asked Stephen of the world at large. ‘I could be sipping a glass of chilled Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc and eating moules marinières at a candlelit table in my favourite restaurant in London, before an entertaining and relaxing evening at the theatre and a good night’s sleep in my own exceedingly comfortable bed. But, instead, I am excruciatingly hot and covered in dust, I’ve been travelling all day, I haven’t eaten for as long as I can remember, and now I’m racing along a dirt track in the dark with a bunch of people talking about transects and vositses, to look for a dim-witted giant rat that jumps. Good grief. What was I thinking? And what is a vositse, anyway?’

  ‘That’s the Malagasy word for “giant jumping rat”,’ I answered, trying not to provoke a debate about the expediency of our little adventure. ‘And, besides, how do you know that it’s dim-witted?’

  ‘Um, because I read about it on the internet last night’ came the slightly embarrassed reply.

  ‘But you’re not supposed to be reading up about anything. That’s the whole point – it’s all meant to be surprising and fresh so you learn about it as we go. It’s supposed to be a journey of discovery.’

  ‘Well, I was interested.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Sorry. I won’t do it again.’

  ‘That’s what you said in the Amazon. And Uganda.’

  ‘Ah well, I didn’t read all that much.’

  ‘Ha. Okay. What’s the scientific name of the giant jumping rat, then?’

  ‘Well, actually, I do know that. It’s Hypogeomys antimena.’

  ‘There we are, you see. Typical. Go on, what does it look like?’

  ‘Um, let me think. It’s browny-grey, roughly the size of a small cat and looks a bit like a rabbit with a horse’s head. Oh, and it has a very chunky, bare tail. And big feet and huge ears.’

  ‘Oh God. You have been swotting, haven’t you? Right, here’s another one. Where does it live?’

  ‘Ah, I know that. It lives only in a tiny patch of dry deciduous forest in and around Kirindy Forest, which is where we are now, and nowhere else in the world. And there are only about 30,000 of them left.’

  He hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Or did you mean where does it live within the forest? In which case, the answer is that it lives in a complex network of underground tunnels, with as many as six entrance holes, a bit like a badger sett. ‘And’ (he emphasised the word to irritate, aggravate and exasperate as much as possible) ‘it plugs the entrances with a barrier of soil to keep out Madagascar ground boas and other predators. Am I right?’

  ‘
Yes.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  We lapsed into a sulky silence.

  It was all a bit embarrassing because we’d been joined by an old friend of mine, British ornithologist and conservationist Richard Lewis, who didn’t know what to think, where to look or what to say. I hadn’t seen Richard for years, and this was the first time he’d met Stephen – and all he’d seen so far was an argument.

  I explained that we were tired, and it was the mileage, and that he shouldn’t worry.

  Richard and I first met in 1989, when I’d visited Mauritius with Douglas Adams to search for the endangered Mauritius kestrel. (Actually, we’d gone to look for the slightly less endangered Rodrigues fruit bat, which of course is a mammal, but with a ‘why are you going off to the stupid island of Rodrigues to look for some ridiculous fruit bat?’ Richard persuaded us to stay on Mauritius and spend quality time with his beloved birds.) Richard is well known in the conservation world for bringing birds back from the brink of extinction, and for reckless driving. In the twenty years since our first meeting, he had married a Malagasy woman, had two children, saved a few more endangered birds, settled in Antananarivo, and learnt how to drive a little more slowly.

  Stephen ‘can I hold it?’ Fry with his next victim.

  We stopped the car and followed him, with a small team of local researchers, deep into the forest. We picked and clambered our way to a little opening between the trees and stood in front of a big hole. Immediately outside the hole was a metal box, containing a rustling sound. And sure enough, inside the box was a giant jumping rat. One of the researchers pulled it out, carefully.

  ‘Can I hold it?’ asked Stephen.

  He could, and did, and held it up for all to see. The giant jumping rat stared back in disbelief, peering through a jungle of stiff white whiskers like someone sneaking a look through a net curtain. I begrudgingly confirmed, at Stephen’s insistence, that it looked exactly as he had described, watched in admiration as the rat tried to bite his thumb, and then stood back to let the researchers take a few measurements before letting it go.