The animals on Komodo can be divided into three main categories: highly venomous, mildly venomous and large, scary and drooling. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit – but the island does have a reputation for having more venomous snakes per square metre than anywhere else on the planet. It is also one of those places where you have to check for fatal surprises at every turn, whether it’s inside your boots, behind a bush or underneath the toilet seat.
And it is home to the largest and most dangerous lizard in the world.
Maybe I was just tired but, to be honest, if I had been given the choice between another visit to Komodo or a week tied up in a sack on a compost heap in Nigeria, I’d probably have chosen the compost heap. At the best of times, Stephen would rather go somewhere that could be enjoyed through Ray-Bans from the fluffed up cushions of a comfortable sofa.
But you know what they say about keeping your expectations low? It guarantees a pleasant surprise. Besides, we were doing a bit of island-hopping first, through the Malay Archipelago, and we were both looking forward to that.
‘Did you know I’m the same age as Malaysia, by the way?’ asked Stephen.
‘What? 63? You’re looking surprisingly good for someone nearing retirement age, all things considered.’
‘No,’ said Stephen. ‘I’m not talking about when British Malaya was dissolved just after the war – I’m talking about when it gained independence in 1957.’
We planned a bit of island-hopping first, starting with the magnificent island of Borneo.
I had been reading about Malaysia on the plane, but the walking-talking encyclopaedia, Stephen Fry, happened to know it all anyway. Maybe it had been a question on QI in one of the earlier episodes? He remembers every single fact and figure divulged since the first programme aired in September 2003. Test Your Knowledge competitions with him were always a foregone conclusion, so I gave up.
We were starting our travels in Borneo, for no better reason than that we both really wanted to go there (Borneo does count as Malaysia, by the way – the island is shared by three countries: Malaysia (which owns Sabah and Sarawak), Indonesia (which owns Kalimantan) and Brunei (which owns, well, Brunei – one of the smallest countries in the world).
Three hours into a very bumpy flight to Kota Kinabalu, on the northwest coast of Sabah, we hit a heavy thunderstorm.
‘I’ve flown through more terrifyingly bumpy thunderstorms in the past six months, travelling with you, than in the whole of the rest of my life put together,’ complained Stephen, as if it were my fault.
‘That’s the trouble with rainforests,’ I said. ‘As we discovered in the Amazon, it rains a lot.’
We did try to land, but aborted at the last possible moment and accelerated back into the storm clouds. Once the plane had settled at a safe cruising altitude, the pilot announced that we were being diverted to a place called Pulau Labuan, about 70 kilometres (43 miles) away as the hornbill flies. We blamed Komodo immediately for all the inconvenience.
We landed on a little airstrip and the pilot and co-pilot emerged from the cockpit, sweating profusely but grinning like a couple of released hostages. They slapped one another on the back, hugged the stewardesses and shook hands with a few of the passengers in the two front rows. It all seemed a bit melodramatic, but everyone else was apparently in on the celebration. It was beginning to feel as if we’d just escaped a terrible near-catastrophe, so I asked one of the stewardesses what had happened.
‘We only just had enough fuel on board for the diversion,’ she explained. ‘We don’t normally carry any more than we actually need. So the pilot was flying the plane on empty.’
I glanced at Stephen, whose eyes had noticeably widened.
‘Good grief!’ he whispered. ‘Maybe we should offer to buy some spare fuel, just in case? Have you got your American Express card? We’ve still got to get back to Kota Kinabalu.’
We made it to KK, eventually, and spent the rest of the week exploring some of the most beautiful and wildlife-rich places you could possibly imagine.
We travelled across mirror-calm, crystal-clear, turquoise seas, visiting one tropical paradise after another. There were small islands with golden beaches and Bart Simpson haircuts, formed by all the sticky-up palm trees; and there were even smaller islands with just enough room for one person to sit on, leaning against a solitary palm tree, with the warm seawater lapping at their feet.
Mud, mud, glorious mud – and some creatures that evolved out of it.
‘If I see one more dazzlingly gorgeous, holiday-brochure tropical island I think I’m going to be sick,’ joked Stephen.
We had a mud bath in a pool of hot, bubbling mud on the island of Pulau Tiga. Stripping down to our swimming trunks, we rolled around and played in the sludge like a couple of wallowing rhinos. The mud was so thick we could have lain on the surface and fallen asleep.
‘I feel like one of those Pompeii figures,’ said Stephen, ‘caught in a posture of “here comes a volcano”.’
We pushed and pulled one another up the slippery bank, while he sang ‘Mud, mud, glorious mud’ (I knew he would, eventually), and tiptoed our way through the forest towards the sea. We were literally covered in mud from head to toe and, much to the amusement of the crew filming us, instinctively avoided stepping in muddy puddles along the way.
Something caught our attention as we approached a little stream flowing towards the beach. We saw some fish jumping up and down at the water’s edge. This may strike you as an odd thing for a fish to do, but these curious critters were mudskippers – and, in defiance of all biological logic, they spend most of their time on land.
They survive by storing mouthfuls of water in large gill chambers, which are a bit like the aqualungs used by scuba divers – except, of course, that they are filled with water instead of compressed air. As a safety backup (presumably in case they sneeze or laugh, and lose all the water in their gill chambers), they can also breathe through their skin.
We watched as the mudskippers showed us how they got their name, by skipping across the mud and limping on their fleshy fins, like a crowd of people with broken legs hobbling about on crutches.
Once in a while, a male would try to impress the girls by raising his brightly coloured dorsal fin and showing off his athletic prowess. He would leap into the air, using his tail like a coiled spring, land with a little plopping sound, and then look around with his frog-like bobble eyes to see if anyone was looking.
‘Never again will I use the expression “like a fish out of water’’,’ said Stephen, as another fish the size of his little finger went flying through the air.
Mudskippers are not really related to the first land-walking animals that emerged from the sea about 375 million years ago. But we know so little about that missing evolutionary link – the fish that turned into a four-legged tetrapod – that studying the amphibiousness of mudskippers may help to shed some light on what these wonderfully named ‘fishapods’ might have been like.
It felt as if we saw more wildlife during that first week in Borneo than most people see in a lifetime. One of the many highlights was an afternoon spent with several troops of proboscis monkeys, in a mangrove reserve. It’s hard not to point out that these are rather ridiculous-looking monkeys, with pot bellies and red, pendulous noses (the Indonesians used to call them ‘Dutch monkeys’ as a dig against Dutch sailors and plantation owners). They even have ready-made cushions – thickened, hairless patches of skin on their backsides – for that extra-special comfort when sitting down.
The male is particularly impressive, with a jet-black scrotum, a bright red penis – and a permanent erection. I found it unbelievably difficult to take a picture of one that wouldn’t result in legal proceedings from Mr and Mrs Outraged from Surrey.
A proboscis monkey demonstrating why it was so difficult to take its photograph without prompting legal proceedings from Mr and Mr Outraged from Surrey.
Two men and a mammalian pine cone (otherwise known as a pangolin).
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nbsp; Stephen couldn’t help laughing at their honking and groaning vocalisations, ‘They sound like old codgers in the Garrick Club,’ he said. ‘Guffaw, guffaw, ruff, ruff. I don’t know why he’s been given a peerage. What’s he ever done? Oh, I see from my paper that you’re dead. Eeee. Uh? Ruff, ruff.’
We fed water monitor lizards with scraps from the breakfast table (‘I used to be a water monitor at school,’ offered Stephen), we were chased by crab-eating macaques (‘the poorer relatives of lobster-eating macaques’) and we released a rescued pangolin – a mammal with reptilian scales (‘it looks like the illegitimate child of a dachshund and an artichoke,’ said Stephen).
In fact, there was more wildlife in our assortment of cabins and huts than in some entire nature reserves in Britain. I remember on one particular night I woke up sensing a slight movement on my chest. Instantly, my brain kicked into gear and all sorts of possible explanations flashed through my mind. Snake? A venomous yellow and black mangrove snake had been caught in someone else’s cabin just the night before. It moved again, ever so slightly. Maybe it’s just a harmless mouse? Or a giant moth? But then a moth wouldn’t be heavy enough to wake me up. It’s amazing how many thoughts your brain can process in a mere nanosecond, especially when it’s a potentially life-threatening situation.
I fumbled for the light, trying to move as little as possible for fear of triggering a venomous bite, and switched it on. There, cleaning its whiskers, was a small black rat. We stared at one another for several seconds, before it sniffed, ambled down the entire length of my body to the bottom of the bed, and jumped into the darkness beyond.
During the course of our travels in Borneo, I noticed that Stephen was becoming a little eccentric (or, should I say, a little more eccentric). Maybe it was sheer tiredness, or a case of sensory overload, but he was saying ‘hello’ to all the animals we came across. ‘Hello fish,’ he would say. ‘Hello frog’, ‘Hello orangutan’, ‘Hello Muscovy duck’.
I asked him why.
‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Have I been doing that? You’re right, I have. Sorry. I’ll try to stop. I think my brain is struggling to compute everything we’re seeing and doing. It’s all a bit much.’
We decided to take the evening off. We lay in hammocks strung between palm trees at the back of a beach, watching the usual implausibly fiery red sunset (remind me why everyone keeps saying ‘ooh, you’re so lucky’), and the conversation turned to Alfred Russel Wallace.
One of the reasons people keep saying ‘Ooh, you’re both so lucky!’.
We are both huge fans of Wallace, a 19th century British naturalist who gave Darwin a run for his money. Wallace worked in the Malay Archipelago, where he collected no fewer than 125,600 plant and animal specimens for his own private collection and for various museums, and in the process wrote one of the most influential journals of scientific exploration published during that time. It was called The Malay Archipelago.
Most importantly, he came up with an idea that closely resembled Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin had been tinkering with his own theory for more than twenty years and was plunged into despair when he received a letter from Wallace outlining his thoughts. But it shocked Darwin into action and, in a bit of a panic, he published On the Origin of Species the following year.
It just goes to show what happens when people don’t have stringent deadlines.
Douglas Adams was notorious for missing deadlines (‘l love deadlines,’ he used to say. ‘I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by’). He developed problems keeping to deadlines early on in his writing career, and it got worse the more he wrote.
By the time we were writing the original Last Chance to See, he had the science and art of missing deadlines down to perfection. He was living in a rented villa in Juan les Pins, in the South of France, at the time – and I joined him for the dreaded task in hand.
We had a year’s worth of memories, many hours of BBC recordings for the radio series, and thousands of photographs from which to draw. Douglas had also made copious notes in the field using his latest toy, a Z88 electronic notebook, but unfortunately he sat on it while we were in Chile and had lost absolutely everything.
But the biggest problem was the South of France itself. There were just too many things to distract us from working.
Every day, we would get up fairly late and start talking about how we must knuckle down and start the book. We’d decide to go for a stroll along the seafront and maybe have a coffee while we talked through ideas for the structure and style of the first chapter. Then coffee would merge into lunch and we’d order some wine, to help ideas flow a little more freely. By the second bottle, we would agree to enjoy one last leisurely meal before heading straight back to the villa some time late in the afternoon to start work. Back at the villa, having failed miserably to discuss the book at all, we agreed that the day was going to be hopeless for writing so we might as well enjoy it and then start properly the following day. We usually went out to eat in the evenings, sometimes driving all the way to Monte Carlo for one last good time before the hard work really began. Then we followed the same routine the following day…
After four solid months in Juan les Pins we emerged with a grand total of one page written – and even that didn’t make it into the book. Afterwards, we returned to London where the publisher locked us in Douglas’s house in Islington, until it was done. We had nearly finished writing by the time the book was published. There were just a couple of chapters still to go (our search for Amazonian manatees in Brazil and an expedition to look for Juan Fernandez fur seals in Chile – both of which made it into the radio series but not the book), and the last chapter was considerably shorter than the others. But the publisher (understandably) decided that enough was enough and, having made us finish the page we happened to be working on, took the manuscript away and let us out for the first time in weeks.
I’m not sure if any of Douglas’s writing procedures or techniques rubbed off on me, but my absolute final deadline for this book was 30 April and the date today is 27 June. So if there isn’t another chapter after this one, lashings of apologies all round.
Something I really must tell you about, before it’s too late, is one of the greatest evenings of Stephen’s life. I know that’s true because he actually said ‘That was one of the greatest evenings of my life.’
It was one of mine, too.
We were still off the north coast of Borneo, this time on Selingan Island, in Turtle Island National Park. And we had 24 hours to spend quality time with a heavily protected population of endangered green sea turtles.
There is a turtle hatchery on the island and we were shown around by Nicholas Pilcher – a fellow Brit as well as a world-renowned turtle expert. The hatchery consisted of hundreds of artificial turtle nests in neat rows across the sand next to the park headquarters. Each nest was labelled, with a date and the number of eggs inside, and protected with a circle of plastic mesh roughly the size of a bucket.
One of the many threats facing sea turtles around the world is egg-collecting (the eggs are taken from the nests and eaten), so transferring the eggs to properly guarded hatcheries is a good way of keeping them safe.
We actually collected some from a female who had dug a nest under the mangroves at the back of the beach. I had the enviable job of leaning right into the depression behind her and scooping up her clutch as the eggs came out. She laid 95 altogether. They were warm and roughly the size and shape of table-tennis balls, though much heavier and softer.
We carried them back to the park headquarters, where they were placed inside one of the artificial nests.
‘It’s another example of how conservationists have to do almost exactly the same as poachers,’ observed Stephen. ‘Here we are collecting eggs – just like poachers. The difference, of course, is that we’re doing it to help save the species.’
We took a closer look at some of the nests already under protection. We paused at one of them and looked at the marker post:
81 eggs buried on 13 January 2009. It was 24 March 2009 – exactly seventy days later. Suddenly, a tiny hatchling appeared out of the sand. Then there was another, and another. Just as we realised what was happening, the entire nest erupted and they all scrabbled out like bubbling lava. I leant in towards the nest and it sounded like a pot of boiling water.
A green sea turtle coming ashore to lay her eggs on Selingan Island.
Nick was delighted.
‘On the day of hatching,’ he said, ‘they make their way up towards the outside world and wait patiently in a queue just beneath the surface of the sand. As soon as the light starts to fade, as it is now, they begin to emerge.’
Nick went to get a basket and, very gently, we lifted the tiny, perfectly formed turtles out, one by one. Their shells were soft and leathery, and they felt incredibly delicate.
‘It’ll be a while before they harden,’ Nick told us.
‘Ooh!’ said Stephen. ‘Aah! My darling!’
(The last time I’d heard him talk like that was when we released the adorable little Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur in Madagascar.)
Sixty-three hatchlings made it out altogether. It was a heart-wrenching moment, because we knew that very few of them would survive. The life expectancy of turtle hatchlings is worse than for drug-taking members of street gangs in Los Angeles – as few as one in a hundred survive long enough to become mature breeding adults.
‘Can you tell if these are male or female?’ asked Stephen.
‘Not just by looking at them,’ answered Nick, smiling. ‘But my guess is that they will be female. Have you noticed that the hatchery is half in the shade and half in the sun?’
Stephen looked up at the green fabric roof above our heads and nodded.
‘Well, that’s intentional – so that half the nests are slightly warmer, by a couple of degrees, than the other half. The warmer nests will produce mainly females and the colder ones mainly males. It enables us to manage the population more carefully.’
Last Chance to See Page 22
