Last Chance to See (4 page)

The person we had been expecting was a Mr Condo (pronounced Chondo), who was to be our guide. I was puzzled as to why he alone among all the Indonesians we had met so far was called 'Mr'. It lent him an air of mystery and glamour which he wasn't there to dispel because he had, apparently, gone diving. He would, Kiri and Moose explained to us, be along shortly, and they had come to tell us that.

We thanked them, loaded all of our baggage into the back of the pick-up truck and sat on top of it as we bumped away from the arrivals but towards the town of Labuan Bajo. 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.

Because of our experiences of the day before we made a point of stopping at the Merpati Airlines but on the way and reconfirming our seats on the return flight.
The office was manned by a man with flip-flops and a field radio, with which he made all the flight arrangements. He didn't have a pen so he simply had to remember them as best he could. He said he wished we had bought single tickets rather than returns, so that we could have bought our return tickets from them. No one, he said, ever bought tickets from them and they could do with the money.

We asked him how many people were on the flight back. He looked at a list and said eight. I noticed, looking over his shoulder, that there was only one person on the list other than the three of us, and I asked him how he had arrived at the figure of eight. That was simple, he explained. There were always eight people on the flight.

As it turned out, a few days later, he was exactly right. There may be some elusive principle lying hidden in this fact which British Airways and TWA and Lufthansa, etc. could profit from enormously, if only they could work out what it was.

The road into town was dusty. The air was far hotter and more humid than in Bali, and thick with heady smells from the trees and shrubs. I asked Mark if he recognised the smells of any of the trees, and he said that he didn't, he was a zoologist. He thought he could detect the smell of sulphur crested cockatoos in amongst it all, but that was all he would commit himself to.

Soon these minor, evanescent odours were replaced by the magisterial pong of Labuan Bajo's drains. The truck, as we clattered into town, was surrounded by scampering, smiling children, who were delighted to see us, and keen to show off anew thing they had found to play with, which was a chicken with only one leg. The long main street was lined with several more of Flores's three trucks, noisy with the sounds of the children, and the scratchy gargling of the tape recorded muezzin blaring from the minaret which was perched precariously on top of the corrugated iron mosque. The gutters seemed inexplicably to be full of cheerfully bright green slime.

A guest house or small hotel in Indonesia is called a losmen, and we went to wait in the main one in the town for Mr Condo to turn up. We didn't check in because we were meant to be setting off for Komodo directly that afternoon, and anyway the losmen was practically empty so there didn't seem to be any urgency. We whiled away the time in the covered courtyard which served as a dining room drinking a few beers and chatting to the odd extra guests who arrived from time to time. By the time we finally twigged, as the afternoon wore on with no Mr Condo, that we were not going to be getting to Komodo that day after all, the losmen had filled up nicely and there was a sudden panic about getting ourselves somewhere to sleep.

A small boy came out and said they still had a bedroom if we would like it, and took us up some rickety steps. The corridor we walked along to get to the bedroom turned out itself to be the bedroom. We were misled by the fact that it didn't have any beds in it, but we agreed that it would be fine and returned to the courtyard, to be greeted at last by Mr Condo, a small charismatic man, who said that everything was organised and we would be leaving in a boat at seven in the morning.

What about the goat? we asked anxiously.

He shrugged. What goat? he asked.

Won't we need a goat?

There were plenty of goats on Komodo, he assured us. Unless we wanted one for the voyage?

We said that we didn't feel that we particularly did, and he said that he only mentioned it as it seemed to be the only thing we weren't intending to take with us. We took this to be a satirical reference to the pile of intrepid baggage with which we were surrounded and laughed politely, so he wished us good night and told us to get some good sleep.

Sleeping in Labuan Bajo, however, is something of an endurance test.

Being woken at dawn by the cockerels is not in itself a problem. The problem arises when the cockerels get confused as to when dawn actually is. They suddenly explode into life squawking and screaming at about one o'clock in the morning. At about one-thirty they eventually realise their mistake and shut up, just as the major dog-fights of the evening are getting under way. These usually start with a few minor bouts between the more enthusiastic youngsters, and then the full chorus of heavyweights weighs in with a fine impression of what it might be like to fall into the pit of hell with the London Symphony Orchestra.

It is then quite an education to learn that two cats fighting can make easily as much noise as forty dogs. It is a pity to have to learn this at two-fifteen in the morning, but then the cats have a lot to complain about in Labuan Bajo. They all have their tails docked at birth, which is supposed to bring good luck, though presumably not to the cats.

Once the cats have concluded their reflections on this, the cockerels suddenly get the idea that it's dawn again and let rip. It isn't, of course. Dawn is still two hours away, and you still have the delivery van horn-blowing competition to get through to the accompaniment of the major divorce proceedings that have suddenly erupted in the room next door.

At last things calm down and your eyelids begin to slide thankfully together in the blessed predawn hush, and then, about five minutes later, the cockerels finally get it right.

An hour or two later, bleary and rattled, we stood on the waterfront surrounded by our piles of expeditionary baggage and gazed as intrepidly as we could across twenty miles of the roughest, most turbulent seas in the East - the wild and dangerous meeting point of two immense opposing bodies of water, a roiling turmoil of vortices and riptides.

It was like a millpond.

Ripples from distant fishing boats spread out across the wide sea towards the shore. The early sun shone across it like a sheet.

Lesser frigatebirds and white-bellied sea eagles wheeled serenely above us, according to Mark. They looked like black specks to me.

We were there but Mr Condo was not. After about an hour, however, Kiri turned up to fulfil his regular role of explaining that Mr Condo was not coming, but that he, Kiri, was coming instead, and so was his guitar. And the captain wasn't the actual captain, but was the captain's father. And we were going in a different boat. The good news was that it was definitely Komodo we would be going to and the trip should only take about four hours.

The boat was quite a smart twenty-three-foot fishing vessel called the Raodah, and the entire complement, once we were all loaded and under way, consisted of the three of us, Kiri, the captain's father, two small boys aged about twelve who ran the boat, and four chickens.

The day was calm and delightful. The two boys scampered about the boat like cats, rapidly unfurling and raising the sails whenever there was a whisper of wind, then lowering them again, starting the engine and falling asleep whenever the wind died. For once there was nothing we had to do and nothing we could do, so we lounged around on the deck watching the sea go by, watching the crested terns and sea eagles that flew over us, and watching the flying fish that swarmed occasionally round the boat.

The four chickens sat in the prow of the boat and watched us.

One of the more disturbing aspects of travel in remote areas is the necessity of taking your food with you in non-perishable form. 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.

Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural and pleasant life than one raised on a. battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.

As it happened we would not be eating all four of them ourselves. Whichever god it is in the complicated Hindu pantheon who has the lowly task of determining the fate of chickens was obviously in a rumbustious mood that day and was planning a little havoc of his own.

And then at last the island of Komodo was ahead of us, creeping slowly towards us from the horizon. The colour of the sea around the boat was changing from the heavy, inky black it had been for the last few hours to a much lighter, translucent blue, but the island itself seemed, perhaps to our impressionable senses, to be a dark and sombre mass looming over the water.

As it approached, its gloomy form gradually resolved into great serrated heaps of rocks and, behind them, heavy undulating hills. Closer still we could begin to make out the details of the vegetation. There were palm trees, but in meagre numbers. They were stuck sporadically across the brows of the hills, as if the island had spines, or as if someone had chucked little darts into the hills. It reminded me of the illustration from Gulliver's Travels, in which Gulliver has been tethered to the ground by the Lilliputians, and has dozens of tiny Lilliputian spears sticking into him.

The images that the island presented to the imagination were very hard to avoid. The rocky outcrops took on the shape of massive triangular teeth, and the dark and moody grey brown hills undulated like the heavy folds of a lizard's skin. I knew that if I were a mariner in unknown waters, the first thing I would write on my charts at this moment would be `Here be dragons'.

But the harder I looked at the island as it crept past our starboard bow, and the harder I tried to filter out the promptings of a suggestible imagination, the more the images nevertheless insisted themselves upon me. The ridge of a hill that stretched in a thick folding shape down into the water, heavily wrinkled round its folds, had the contours of a lizard's leg - not in the actual shape, of course, but in the natural interplay of its contours, and in the heavy thickness of its textures.

This was the first time that I had such an impression, but several times during the subsequent trips that we made during this year the same feeling crept up on me: each new type of terrain we encountered in different parts of the world would seem to have a particular palette of colours, textures, shapes and contours which made it characteristically itself; and the forms of life that you would find in that terrain would often seem to be drawn from that same distinctive palette. There are obvious mechanisms we know about to account for .some of this, of course: for many creatures camouflage is a survival mechanism, and evolution will select in its favour. But the scale on which these intuited, perhaps half-imagined, correspondences seem to occur is much larger and more general than that.

We are currently beginning to arrive at a lot of new ideas about the way that shapes emerge in nature, and it is not impossible to imagine that as we discover more about fractal geometry, the `strange attractors' which lie at the heart of newly emerging theories of chaos, and the way in which the mathematics of growth and erosion interact, we may discover that these apparent echoes of shape and texture are not entirely fanciful or coincidental. Maybe.

I suggested something along these lines to Mark and he said I was being absurd. Since he was looking at exactly the same landscape as I was, I have to allow that it might all simply have been my imagination, half-baked as it was in the Indonesian sun.

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.

The moment we passed under the archway there was suddenly a strong smell. You had to go through it to get the smell. Until you'd been through the archway you hadn't arrived and you didn't get the strong, thick, musty, smell of Komodo.

The next blow to our sense of intrepidness was the rather neatly laid out path. This led from the end of the jetty parallel to the shore towards the next and major blow to our sense of intrepidness, which was a visitors' village.

This was a group of fairly ramshackle wooden buildings: an administration centre from which the island (which is a wildlife reserve) is run, a cafeteria terrace, and a small museum. Behind these, ranged around the inside of a steep semi-circular slope were about half a dozen visitors' huts - on stilts.

It was about lunchtime, and there were nearly a dozen people sitting in the cafeteria eating noodles and drinking 7-Up; Americans, Dutch, you name it. Where had they come from? How had they got here? What was going on?

Outside the administration but was a wooden sign with regulations all over it, such as `Report to National Park office', 'Travel outside visitors' centre only with guards', 'Wear pants and shoes', and `Watch for snakes'.

Lying on the ground underneath this was a small stuffed dragon. I say small, because it was only about four feet long. It had been modelled in completely spreadeagled posture, lying flat on the ground with its forelimbs stretched out in front and its back limbs lying alongside its long tapering tail. I was a little startled to see it for a moment, but then went up to have a look at it.