Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  This is our story.

  1

  TRAVELLING CASE FOR A SEAL

  Stephen reminds me a little of Douglas: unnaturally bright, exceedingly well read, enthralled by obscure facts and figures, never without a pocketful of weird and wonderful gadgets or an Apple Mac, and very tall.

  He strode into the Arrivals Hall, head and shoulders above his fellow passengers, wearing a slightly crumpled light-blue shirt, a blue-and-white striped blazer favoured by wealthy yacht owners, beige chinos, a deep golden suntan after spending Christmas in the Caribbean, and a broad smile.

  I had the fleeting impression of Crocodile Dundee arriving for the first time in Manhattan, except in reverse, if you see what I mean.

  Admittedly, I was a little apprehensive. Stephen is no Crocodile Dundee. Travelling with him was going to be like travelling with Wikipedia permanently online. He knows pretty much everything about everything. I’ve never heard him struggling to recall a person, a place, a fact or a figure (I probably have, of course, perhaps once or twice, but I’ll be damned if I can remember when).

  Sure enough, next to him I felt unnaturally short, pitifully pale and extraordinarily dim. It wasn’t his fault. Stephen is far too unassuming and generous to make anyone feel in any way deficient on purpose. But he’s the kind of person who makes you continually question your own intellect. Why on earth didn’t I know the name of the Key Grip in the 1987 film The Princess Bride, how many syllables there are in a dodecasyllable, which was the last place in Britain to be converted to Christianity, when Daniel O’Connell became Lord Mayor of Dublin, what a quatrefoil is, or so many other things from countless topics of conversation that cropped up during our travels together?

  Stephen has a few minutes to spare, so he decides to learn Portuguese.

  Sometimes it felt as if we were on two different channels – he on BBC News and me on the Home Shopping Channel. At one point I actually wrote a rather desperate-sounding note in my diary: ‘Must read more’.

  But I sought refuge in the knowledge that my work as a zoologist takes me to the world’s wildernesses for so many months every year that my mind has been broadened and my bowels loosened more often than I care to remember. A lifetime of being on the move, unrecognisable food, strange beds (or no beds at all), communicating by sign language, and hair-raising or life-changing experiences made a month-long expedition to the Amazon seem quite normal.

  In fact, to be honest, I feel more like a fish out of water when I’m at home, wearing slippers, watching telly.

  Stephen, on the other hand, is more at home at home – at least, appearing on telly rather than watching it. His natural habitat is a television or radio studio. He’s by no means a stranger to travel or even wildlife (he’s the only person I know who has been on an expedition to search for Paddington Bear in Peru) but, let’s face it, you’re unlikely to bump into him in an outdoor shop with armfuls of mosquito repellent and Imodium.

  It didn’t even cross my mind at the time, but he was a little apprehensive too.

  ‘I felt quite nervous of you,’ he admitted later. ‘I was expecting to feel very foolish if ever I said “what’s that?” and you’d give me one of those long, burning looks as if you couldn’t believe there’s a sentient being on the planet who is unaware of what a capybara is, or whatever it might have been.’

  We did have at least one thing in common. Our Amazon adventure had been occupying our thoughts a great deal over the previous year or so, and we were both thrilled and eager to get started. Although it was already well past midnight we had a great deal to talk about, and we talked about it until we could barely keep our eyes open.

  Not once, strangely, did we talk about potential dangers. The jungle is full of bottom-emptying and life-threatening hazards. Yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, tetanus, rabies, giardiasis, cholera, typhoid, Chagas’ disease, bilharzia, dengue fever, several strains of malaria and leishmaniasis immediately come to mind. The Amazon is the perfect place to go if you’d like to increase the odds of dying from something you’ve never even heard of.

  In fact, if the Amazon were in Britain, the Health and Safety Executive wouldn’t allow it at all.

  Most exciting, among all the potential hazards, you could be killed by an animal that hasn’t yet been named by science: perhaps a rare species of poison-dart frog, a chigger that no one has had the time (or bothered) to investigate, a well-camouflaged spider, or a particularly secretive venomous snake.

  Stephen ready for anything in his expeditionary gear.

  A welcoming face in the Amazon.

  By the way, if you want to be cleverer than almost everyone else on the planet (even so-called ‘experts’ who write about these things) here’s an interesting fact. Dangerous snakes are not poisonous. They are venomous, and there’s a big difference. For something to be poisonous it has to be ingested (or, in some cases, touched). An animal that is venomous, on the other hand, actually injects its poison with a bite or sting. Try to bring it up in casual conversation – everyone will be amazed.

  While we’re on the subject of potential misadventures, perhaps worst of all (certainly commonest of all) is traveller’s diarrhoea, especially if you’re on the move every day, staying hundreds of kilometres from the nearest loo, and filming. The trots, the runs, dysentery, gastroenteritis or Montezuma’s revenge are all part and parcel of travelling (Stephen’s philosophy, quite rightly, is that travel boils down to laundry and bowels). You simply have to choose whether to go for amoebic dysentery or bacterial dysentery, and the ghastly concoction of microbes lurking in virtually everything you eat or drink will take care of the rest.

  In reality, of course, these things sound much worse from afar. There’s probably more chance of getting deep-vein thrombosis on the cramped long-haul flights from London to São Paulo and on to Manaus than of being struck down by a deadly disease or bitten by an animal that’s venomous not poisonous.

  Aerial view of part of the largest nonstop expanse of pure, unremitting nature on earth.

  What we hadn’t anticipated was something the Health and Safety Executive would probably have warned us about, had we bothered to ask, and that’s the risk of slipping on a wet wooden boardwalk in the dark at 5am. But now we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

  Whether or not jungles keep you awake at night, overwhelmed with awe and wonder, you’d have to be a lump of rock not to be impressed by the Amazon Basin. If you’re like most people, and it occupies a murky, something-to-do-with-jungles place in the back of your mind, you deserve a good slap for failing to grasp the sheer scale and splendour of the largest nonstop expanse of pure, unremitting nature on earth.

  Imagine a place nearly the size of Australia, spread across no fewer than eight different countries and one overseas territory (Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana). Then cover it with all the jungles, or tropical rainforests, from Africa and Southeast Asia (indeed, half of all the jungles left on earth). Add the world’s mightiest river (watercourse connoisseurs will get cross if I say ‘longest’, because the Amazon is ‘only’ 6,448 kilometres (4,030 miles) long – 222 kilometres (139 miles) shorter than the record-breaking Nile); and crisscross the entire region with a mind-boggling spider’s web of 1,100 major tributaries (many of which are among the world’s largest rivers in their own right). And then, like the icing on a cake, fill it up with nearly one-fifth of all the free-flowing fresh water in the world.

  I would say it defies description, but then I’d have to delete the last paragraph.

  Larger than the whole of western Europe, and draining half the total landmass of South America, it bombards you with sensory overload at every turn. Compared with lesser parts of the world, even its palms look palmier and its rain feels considerably wetter.

  But there’s more. This vast territory of trees and water is home to something like one in ten of all known species of plant and animal. Counting them can be tricky and time-consuming, even for people who li
ke to do such things, so we can only guess at total numbers. But here’s a recent list: 427 mammal species, 1,294 birds, 378 reptiles, 3,000 fish and 40,000 plants. I don’t know anyone who’s even tried to count the insect species, so let’s just say that there are more than you can shake a stick at. Millions of them.

  Now, the bad news is that all these figures are wrong. New species are being found in the Amazon almost daily, so by the time you read this they’ll be completely out of date. But the good news is that, if you can tell a waxy-tailed planthopper from a South American palm weevil, or a kissing bug from a peanut-headed bug, you could take a couple of weeks off work, set up camp in a quiet corner of the rainforest, and discover a whole assortment of species entirely new to science.

  You could name them, too, though you’d have to be drunk. Judging by the names dreamed up by many experts, one can only assume there is a serious drinking problem among the world’s zoologists: I have little doubt that whoever came up with no-eyed big-eyed wolf spider, dik-dik, bongo, blob fish, burnt-neck eremomela or Bounty Islands shag had more than one celebratory drink to toast their great discoveries.

  A friend of mine once named a new species of sea slug after his wife; she didn’t like it.

  A great potoo – who comes up with these names?

  Alternatively, you could take a proper sabbatical and go in search of something really newsworthy. Vast areas of the Amazon remain as unexplored as in the days of the early adventurers, so you could set off to find the warring women who apparently fight like the Amazons of Greek mythology or the tribe reputed to have their feet facing the wrong way to deceive trackers.

  The last thing you’d expect to stumble upon in the Amazon is a large city. But, sure enough, plonked in the middle of this natural unexplored treasure trove is just that: a city of 1.7 million people in northern Brazil, called Manaus.

  Manaus is where our adventure really began.

  Our challenge was to find one of the least-known and most outlandish animals on the planet. We were going in search of an Amazonian manatee, the first endangered species on our list.

  There are several species of manatee around the world (informatively named the West Indian, West African and Amazonian manatees, plus the closely related but less informatively named dugong), all belonging to a group of aquatic mammals officially called the sirenians. They’re better known as sea cows.

  We were looking for the smallest and hardest to find. Found only in the Amazon Basin, from the river mouth to the upper reaches of calm water tributaries in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana and Peru, the Amazonian manatee is shy and retiring and likes to keep itself to itself.

  With a wonderfully carefree rotund body, predominantly black skin the texture of vinyl, a bright pink belly and diamond-shaped tail, a cleft lip, a unique sixth sense, a reputation for farting more than any other animal on the planet, and an affinity for remote corners of tropical rainforest rarely penetrated by humans, the Amazonian manatee is not your average endangered species.

  A backlit squirrel monkey poses for Mark’s camera.

  It was first described as a cross between a seal and a hippo, though it’s not related to either. Douglas Adams more aptly portrayed it as ‘not so much like a seal as like a travelling case for carrying a seal in’. There is nothing else quite like this perfect piece of evolutionary engineering in the world.

  In the old days, when men were men and manatees were much more common, sailors used to confuse them with mermaids. Or so they say (the word ‘sirenian’ comes from the seductive ‘siren’ of Greek mythology – part-woman, part-fish). I like manatees, a lot, but I’m not sure I’d be so keen on a 400-kilo marine temptress with a bristly face.

  Clearly, it’s not just zoologists who’ve been drinking too much.

  Manatee-ologists say that the Amazonian manatee is active both during the day and at night. But ‘active’ is probably too strong a word. It is spectacular mainly for its single-minded determination to do everything as slowly and calmly as possible.

  Either an Amazonian manatee or a travelling case for carrying a seal in.

  Most of the time it eats, then farts, then sleeps. Sometimes it just farts and sleeps. It doesn’t leap out of the water to perform breathtaking acrobatics like a dolphin, jump daringly from tree to tree like a monkey, or hang upside down like a sloth. Its main activity is doing nothing much at all.

  Oh, and it is vegetarian (not that there’s anything wrong with being vegetarian – I’m just saying so by way of introduction).

  The Brazilians call it the peixe-boi, or ox-fish, which pretty much sums it up.

  On the plus side, it is a mammal and that means it has to breathe air. This is where things start to get pretty exciting. When it rises to the surface of the river to take a breath, it pokes its bristly snout nearly a centimetre into the tropical world outside for as long as a second at a time. Few people have seen this happen in the wild (a manatee can stay submerged for twenty minutes, which means there are often tediously long gaps between bouts of such awe-inspiring activity) but, needless to say, most of them have never forgotten it.

  Despite weeks of trying, Douglas and I had failed to see one all those years ago. Actually, that’s not strictly true. Our jungle guide saw a manatee disappear beneath the surface of a remote tributary of the Rio Negro, I saw the ripples after it had disappeared, and Douglas nearly saw the ripples. We consoled ourselves with the thought that we’d more or less breathed the same air as a manatee.

  Stephen and I were determined to do even better.

  But first a bit of luxury. The roughing it, the creepy-crawlies, the piranhas-for-breakfast survival cuisine, the jungle-borne diseases and the frightening lack of electrical sockets to plug in Stephen’s Apple Mac could all come later. Stephen, like Douglas Adams before him, was more used to comfortable hotel rooms larger than my flat. Like reintroducing an orphaned manatee to the wild, he had to be habituated first. Some things definitely call for a warm-up.

  So we courageously booked ourselves into the surprisingly comfortable Tropical Hotel, on the outskirts of Manaus, and bivouacked for the night in our air-conditioned hotel rooms.

  ‘We’ were seven of us altogether. We’d brought a BBC film crew with us (although they’d probably say it was the other way round – they brought us) to make a TV series about our adventures: Stephen and I, a four-person team from the UK and translator Marina Barahona De Brito. We were planning to meet up with Ivano Cordeiro, our Fixer, in a few days’ time. We didn’t have a baggage handler or a chef or a masseuse, but with the BBC determined to cut costs we thought we’d try and muddle through.

  Manaus is the biggest city in the world’s biggest forest. While much of the Amazon Basin remains unexplored, this particular part of it has been very heavily explored indeed – not least by coach-loads of tourists. It’s the launch pad for a motley collection of half-day, full-day, several-day and one-week jungle adventures.

  The salmon-coloured opera house, or Amazon Theatre, is so out of place in Manaus it might as well be on the moon.

  Surrounded by rainforest and water, some 1,450 kilometres (906 miles) from the open ocean, the city sprawls along the Rio Negro near its confluence with the Rio Solimões.

  These two great rivers have different densities, temperatures and speeds, so they run side by side for several kilometres without mixing. You can actually see a distinct line between them – the dark, Guinness-coloured water of the Negro on one side and the light-brown café-au-lait-coloured Solimões on the other. After years of creative thinking, brainstorming and lively debate by an army of geographers, strategic planners, publicity agents and marketing consultants, the powers that be decided to call it the ‘Meeting of the Waters’.

  Sprawling into the surrounding jungle – the city of Manaus.

  Eventually, the two rivers grudgingly begin to mix, creating all sorts of intriguing whorls and eddies more like an Impressionist painting. And when they’ve finished, they form the mighty Amazon.

  The c
ity itself is best known for its sumptuously grand, salmon-coloured opera house. The Teatro Amazonas, or Amazon Theatre, was completed in 1896 at a time when Manaus was a rubber boomtown and temporarily had an overblown status in the world economy. With its exuberant red velvet seats, crystal chandeliers, Brazilian wood (polished and carved in Europe), Italian marble and 36,000 individually decorated ceramic tiles, it is so out of place amid the hot and humid streets of utilitarian, grime-coloured buildings it might as well be on the moon.

  But the best thing about Manaus is the fish market (I realise that only a zoologist – or a fisherman – would have the audacity to say anything so ridiculous). I would never normally admit this to anyone, but I really do like fish markets, despite having to get out of bed at an ungodly hour to see them at their best.

  Anyway, there’s no denying that the warehouse-sized fish market in Manaus is in a league of its own: a five-star deluxe version unparalleled by fish markets in lesser parts of the world. It’s not all sweetness and light (it also bears testimony to the industrial-sized fishing fleets now monopolising the market and openly flouting laws and regulations designed to protect Amazonian fish stocks), but it’s worth losing a few hours’ kip for.

  The imaginatively named ‘Meeting of the Waters’.

  But here’s the thing: it is far and away the best place to see some of the most peculiar and unbelievable fish you could ever imagine in your wildest dreams. A temple to biodiversity, it’s the next best thing to a lifetime of diving in the Amazon (except, of course, all the stars of the show are dead) and gives a wonderful insight into an ecosystem that harbours half of all the freshwater fish species in the world.

  Manaus fish market, or Mercado Municipal Adolpho Lisboa to give it its proper name, is a bustling place. Every morning, as many as 100 fishing boats dump their colourful catches into large wooden boxes on the shore of the Rio Negro and then porters run, literally, with these heavyweight aquatic menageries balanced precariously on their heads. They race along the wobbly wooden jetty floating on metal drums, up the concrete steps, over the road and into the white-tiled market. There to meet them in the gloomy light, illuminated only by 15-watt bulbs hanging from a web of bare wires, is an army of fishmongers dressed in bloody aprons and equipped with long, curved knives.