Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  The next morning we were up and about earlier than expected. The Malagasy have no respect for lie-ins – and for that I blame the wildlife as much as the people. Dawn was still two hours away when the drivers decided to have a car door-slamming competition, then an engine-revving contest, and finally a hearty singsong right in the middle of camp. There were birds calling noisily, never-to-be-identified mammals snuffling and shuffling in the undergrowth around my tent and a never-ending cacophony of insects humming, drumming and thrumming.

  The largest carnivore in Madagascar, licking its lips.

  I gave up, and got up, when I heard people running around shouting ‘fossa! fossa! fossa!’. That was one sound I did want to hear. The fossa is the largest carnivore in Madagascar and it’s an animal I hadn’t really expected to encounter during our trip. Looking like a cross between a puma and a mongoose (actually, it’s more like an Egyptian carving of a sacred cat), there’s nothing else quite like it. Since it’s not particularly common, comes out mostly at night and generally likes to keep itself to itself, it is a hard animal to see. Like almost everything else we had come across so far, it is endemic to Madagascar.

  I struggled out of my tent and immediately clapped eyes on a flash of honey-coloured athletic-looking body with a small head and an inordinately long tail racing across camp. I sprinted across the clearing, almost bumping into Stephen coming the other way, and we caught up with the fossa on the edge of the forest on the far side. It stopped suddenly and we came to a skidding halt no more than 5 metres (16 feet) away. It gave us a disdainful sideways glance and, with no hint of concern, did a rather condescending sniff before trotting off among the trees, silent as a light breeze.

  In fact, we saw as much wildlife around our camp in Kirindy as you’re likely to see in an entire national park.

  That night we heard the most extraordinary shrieking and screaming noise coming from high up in the forest canopy. We left our tents and tiptoed through the darkness, expecting to find a young researcher being ripped to shreds by a yet-to-be-described species of giant carnivorous lemur.

  ‘I can see something,’ whispered Stephen, slightly alarmed.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over there next to that big tree. Oh my God, it moved. It’s huge. It’s about the size of a bear.’

  We crept forwards.

  ‘Ssshh!’ said the thing about the size of a bear. It was a primate – a young researcher, sitting on a deckchair and pouring hot coffee from a flask.

  ‘Ssshh!’ she said again.

  ‘Sorry.’

  She gave us the same sideways glance as the fossa had done earlier in the day. Then she shone a torch up into the treetop and peered through a pair of binoculars.

  A Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur, the smallest of the world’s primates, oozing charisma.

  We both looked up.

  There was the very same fossa (I recognised a distinctive cut across its nose) with another fossa, twisted together on a thick branch. They looked too big to be so high above the ground. And they were quite clearly mating. Very noisily.

  ‘How long have you been watching them?’ I whispered to the researcher.

  ‘Hours,’ she answered, monosyllabically.

  ‘Hours?’ asked Stephen.

  ‘From dusk until dawn. I watch them all night.’ She sounded cross. Actually, since it was too dark to see her face (I wouldn’t recognise her in a police line-up) it was impossible to tell if she really was cross, or simply busy, or just shy.

  ‘Really? All night?’ I asked.

  ‘All night, every night.’

  ‘How long have you been doing that?’ asked Stephen.

  ‘Sssssshhhhh!’ she said.

  She was definitely cross.

  We took another peek into the canopy, feeling guilty in case merely looking at the fossas might make her even more cross, said a few whispered goodbyes and carefully picked our way back to camp.

  We couldn’t have stayed too long, anyway, because we had an appointment with two rather more friendly primates: a Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur and a Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur researcher, called Melanie (‘not Mel’).

  Found only in Kirindy Forest, and nowhere else on earth, this record-breaking lemur is the smallest of all the world’s primates. It was named after a famous Malagasy primatologist (famous in the world of primatology, at least) after being discovered for the first time just a few years ago.

  Melanie had caught one as part of her study, to take essential measurements, and had kindly invited us to help release it back into the forest.

  We peered into its little box. Two inoffensive brown eyes peered innocently back. The mouse lemur lived up to its name – it was so small it could have sat comfortably inside an egg cup. In fact, it could have perched on my finger. Its head was more orange than brown and it had white streaks down its nose, like face-paint left over from a children’s party. And its little ears twitched as Stephen ooh-ed and aah-ed with every little movement. I’ve never heard the big man ooh and aah so much over anything, before or since.

  Melanie gently rested the box on a branch and the rare Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur slowly and cautiously inched its way towards the exit, and freedom. After what seemed like an eternity, since we were involuntarily holding our breath, it plucked up the courage to stand on the branch and look at us with those adorable hypnotic eyes. What it lacked in size it made up for with animal charisma.

  ‘Ooh!’ said Stephen.

  Suddenly, the diminutive lemur made a dash for it. It ran up the branch, pausing briefly to look at us one more time, before leaping a good 2 metres (6½ feet) to another branch and disappearing into the darkness.

  ‘Aah!’ said Stephen.

  The world’s smallest primate had captured the heart of one of the world’s biggest. I think if we’d seen a baby Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur (which is reputed to be an energetic little furball, climbing and jumping all over the place and swinging, Tarzan-like, from its mother’s tail) Stephen would have exploded with excitement.

  That night I lay awake in my tent, imagining our mouse lemur skipping and jumping around the twigs and branches of its forest home. I pictured it lying in wait for passing moths (it catches moths – even ones bigger than itself – by leaping into the darkness and seizing them in its mouth in midair), and fell asleep hoping it would be safe.

  I’ve added it to my imaginary list of truly special animals that give me a huge amount of pleasure just knowing they’re out there. Now that I am back in England, watching the rain on a grey Monday morning, all I have to do is to cast my mind back to that Lilliputian lemur … and I will survive until Tuesday.

  It was a four-hour drive from Antananarivo to Analamazaotra, or Perinet as it’s more commonly called. But in those four hours we had more near misses than a lifetime of drunken air traffic controlling.

  The general rule of thumb when driving in Madagascar is that if you don’t clip someone or something with your wing mirror, as you pass each other in the street, you’re not driving close enough. The Malagasy would think nothing of squeezing three or four lanes into a typical one-way street in Britain.

  It’s remarkable how quickly we got used to it.

  Driving anywhere outside the highly regulated, nanny-stated western world gives you a false sense of security. I wouldn’t dream of speeding in Britain with bald tyres and intermittent brakes and without wearing a seat belt. But somehow it seems less dangerous when you’re thousands of kilometres from home.

  ‘It’s just the way we do it here in Madagascar’ was a common explanation.

  But overtaking on blind bends, with steep drops on either side, in torrential rain with fork lightning, in a vehicle that swerves towards the oncoming traffic without any help from the driver is just as dangerous in Madagascar as it is anywhere else in the world. Of course it is.

  The diminutive lemur making a dash for freedom.

  So it was a truly horrible car journey to Perinet. Thrown around like a couple of test dumm
ies in a Maserati crash laboratory, on the fastest road in the country, both Stephen and I felt car-sick most of the way.

  We started talking about death.

  ‘It’s a mystery we’re not dead already,’ observed Stephen.

  ‘I can think of better ways to go,’ I replied.

  ‘How about being eaten by a lion?’ he asked. ‘Do you think if I got eaten by a lion people would laugh? They’d be sad, of course. At least, I hope they’d be sad. But not in the same way as if I’d been killed on a winding mountain road in Madagascar. No one would be able to keep a straight face.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. Just imagine Ian Hislop and Paul Merton sniggering on Have I Got News For You.’

  ‘I know, I know. Every time anyone got eaten by a lion it’d be known as “doing a Stephen Fry”.’

  ‘At least people would take notice.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Stephen.

  ‘Well, suppose we’d crashed when we were flying back to Tana through that awful thunderstorm the other day’ (we’d been caught in a dreadful storm on the way back to Antananarivo – so bad that the Cessna flying with us, and carrying most of our kit, had to make an emergency landing en route). ‘None of the rest of us would have got a look-in. The headlines would have read “Stephen Fry killed in fatal plane crash”.’

  ‘Maybe we should fly in separate planes, then?’ he suggested helpfully.

  ‘Well, that wouldn’t help. If our plane crashed and yours didn’t the headlines would simply read “Stephen Fry narrowly escapes fatal plane crash”.’

  ‘You’re right, I suppose. It’s one of the big advantages of fame – more people tend to hear about it when you die.’

  We stopped talking about dying and tried to focus on living, pretending not to notice the driver as he screamed ‘Whoaa!’ and laughed hysterically every time we had yet another near miss.

  Against all the odds, we made it to Perinet in record time.

  We screeched to a halt and the driver’s mobile phone rang. Hallelujah! There was reception. After hours of fidgety signal-less torture all the way from Antananarivo, Stephen leapt into action, pulling a selection of mobiles from his various pockets faster than Clint Eastwood could draw a Smith & Wesson. Using both hands and all fingers to text and email simultaneously from them all, he set to work. He was never happier than being in one part of the world while maintaining direct contact with as many people as possible in other parts of the world.

  Things just got better and better. Not only was there mobile phone reception, but we were staying in a positively comfortable lodge. Stephen was ecstatic. So was I, to be honest. I’m all for camping and adventure, or even sleeping rough, if that’s the only way to see a rare lesser-spotted, ruby-throated, bow-legged something-or-other. But if there’s an option to stay in a comfortable lodge instead, and still see the animal in question, I’ll go for the lodge every time.

  That night we ate a longed-for simple dinner of spaghetti bolognese next to an enormous window overlooking the jungly Andasibe-Mantadia National Park, did our best to drink Madagascar dry of all its best French wine, and stumbled through the dark to our various chalets. We were dead tired. We’d been on the road for more than a month and desperately needed a few nights’ good sleep in comfy rooms with cosy beds.

  No sooner had I fallen into a deep slumber, or so it seemed, than something on the end of my bed started howling and screeching so loudly I almost leapt out of the window in a half-conscious heart-pumping panic. It sounded like a cross between a police siren and an amateur opera singer. In fact for a moment, while fumbling for the light, I thought I must have been having a dream, in the sea, under water, listening to a yet-to-be-described species of whale with a preposterously loud voice.

  As soon as I grasped that there was actually nothing sitting on the end of the bed, I began to work out what might have woken me. It was a troop of teddy-bear-faced lemurs, called indris. They were yelling their 5am territorial calls from deep within the surrounding jungle. They were as loud as a fire alarm. (It later dawned on me that this was a daily event and, sure enough, comfy room and cosy bed notwithstanding, I was woken in a state of mild distress at five o’clock on the dot every single bloody morning.)

  An indri. It’s brighter than it looks.

  The eerie, wailing sound was definitely a song, rather than a call. While other lemurs mutter, grunt or swear, indris literally sing.

  The mother and father sing in duet, with the youngsters joining in the first part of the chorus in a kind of family singsong. The songs spread from one family to another across the forest, until every group in the local vicinity has declared its location to the world at large.

  The indri is the largest living lemur. I once heard it described as ‘more like a gone-wrong giant panda than a lemur’, which is a pretty good way of introducing this animal oddity. Predominantly black and white, it has silky fur, large greenish eyes, round fuzzy ears and long, immensely powerful legs designed to propel it as far as 10 metres (33 feet) from trunk to trunk. It’s yet another endangered species to add to Madagascar’s notoriously world-beating collection of animals and plants on the edge.

  Indris were precisely what we’d come to Perinet to see. There were two habituated troops in this well-studied corner of the montane rainforest, so we got up in the dark and set off in search of one of them.

  Clambering up and down the wet, spongy, steep forested slopes, struggling through a thick jungle of ferns on the forest floor and hauling our way past colossal bamboo stems and myriad trees, it was a pretty hard and dirty hike. We decided to head for a vantage point to look for the troop from up on high.

  ‘Do we have to?’ asked Stephen. ‘I hate vantage points,’ he muttered, plonking himself rather stubbornly onto a fallen tree. ‘They inevitably involve a steep walk or a climb.’

  ‘But that’s the best way to find the indri,’ I countered. ‘And, besides, there is supposed to be mobile reception somewhere on the top of this ridge.’

  That was, I admit, a bit of a lie. But it worked.

  ‘All right,’ he said more cheerily, leaping melodramatically from the log faster than you could say ‘texting’. ‘Let’s go.’

  We spotted the indri at roughly the same time as one of Stephen’s mobiles spluttered into life. Inadvertently, I hadn’t lied after all.

  There were two adults, a young male and a four-month-old baby, gazing down at their human observers rather benevolently. The baby looked permanently wide-eyed and surprised, as if it were being mercilessly goosed by its older brother. It was leaping, or rather bouncing, from branch to branch like a rubber yo-yo, always returning to pause next to Mum and regain enough confidence and assurance to do it all over again.

  Stephen had settled down on another wet and rotting log and, with a half-hearted eye on the baby indri, was tapping enthusiastically into his mobile phone.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked, clambering back to where he was sitting.

  ‘Just checking emails,’ he said, cross that I should ask.

  ‘But we’re in the middle of the jungle, surrounded by endangered indris.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So? So? What do you mean “So?” This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This is what we risked life and limb on that road from Antananarivo for.’

  He ignored me. I didn’t have the energy to argue and brushed past him to watch the indris myself. I distinctly heard Stephen mutter ‘twat’ under his breath. Ah well. Perhaps he had a point. I get so wrapped up in wildlife sometimes that I forget how insufferable I must be to someone who isn’t quite so obsessed. To Stephen I must sometimes sound like a man with a side parting and adenoids. I think this time I might have dragged the poor guy away from his natural habitat for a little too long.

  Suddenly, we both snapped to attention. Without warning, the indris had started calling from just 5 metres (16 feet) away. It was so loud and so unexpected that we both instinctively covered our ears, as if a car alarm had erupted into
life as we were walking past.

  We marvelled at the indris for half an hour or so, one of us more enthusiastically than the other, and then turned back towards the car and the lodge.

  Stephen was uncharacteristically irritable. Even the forest insects were getting on his nerves.

  ‘What’s the point of wasps?’ he asked grumpily. ‘They’re not like bees, are they? Bees are useful because they make honey, so I can respect them and like them,’ he continued for the benefit of anyone who cared to listen. ‘But wasps. Ugh. If they could at least make sandwich spread or something. And as for flies…’

  The next day Stephen was unable to hike. He had a bad knee. He really did have a bad knee, to be fair, although it seemed to flair up as a Pavlovian reaction to the word ‘hike’.

  The rest of us decided to go anyway, to try and film the rarest lemur in the world – the greater bamboo lemur. With fewer than a hundred survivors left in the wild, this unassuming olive-brown lemur eats virtually nothing but giant bamboo. It’s not merely endangered, it is critically endangered. Few people have ever seen one in the wild, but some researchers had offered to take us to see one of their study groups.

  We drove to a research camp (just a few tents in the jungle) and then started a long and arduous hike, up and down the forested slopes, literally fighting our way through the tangled undergrowth, slipping and sliding in the mud and counting all the snakes and scorpions we stumbled past along the way. Stephen would have HATED it, in large capital letters.

  The whole thing was a complete fiasco. We hiked for seven hours before catching a fleeting glimpse of a single greater bamboo lemur, about 10 metres (33 feet) away through thick foliage. The entire encounter lasted no more than one and a half seconds, during which time it was barely visible, before the rarest lemur in the world bounded off into the impenetrable jungle never to be seen again.