Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  But it’s not Stephen’s fault. Ask someone else who has seen a whale and they will explain that I’m not quite as barmy and irrational as you might think. There are plenty of ‘whale junkies’ out there – people, like me, who have to see a whale at frequent intervals just to survive their normal daily lives.

  Whale barnacles and whale lice making themselves at home on a grey whale’s head.

  It was hard to tell who was supposed to be watching whom.

  And they all came back complaining that they hadn’t seen anything.

  So even if I am crazy, I am definitely not alone.

  Stephen, for one, is a recent convert. He summed up our close encounters better than I’ve heard anyone sum it up before or since.

  ‘Suck my pants and call me Noreen,’ he enthused. ‘What a phenomenal experience. Epic. Epic. Epic.’

  It was our last evening in San Ignacio, so I poured myself a beer and sat alone on the beach, watching the natural world go by and the sun set over the water.

  Squadrons of brown pelicans flew past in sullen procession, looking as if they had important business to attend to – like finding a suitable roost for the gathering night. They travelled in single file, beak to tail feather, their heavy wing beats and enormous beaks making them look like pterodactyls left over from prehistory.

  After supper, I went to sleep in my hut with the curtain wide open, thinking about the events of the day and listening to the sounds of the night. Lying in the moonlight, I could hear coyotes calling from beyond the shower hut, a cacophony of barks from distant sea lions, an occasional whimbrel or American oystercatcher disturbed at their roost, waves lapping on the beach, and the thunderous blows of whales swimming about in the lagoon beyond.

  Grey whale breaching – like a fleet of juggernauts leaping out of the water.

  I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Louis Armstrong had been sitting on my cabin steps, overwhelmed by the magnificence of it all and moved to sing What a Wonderful World.

  It was truly idyllic. Good for the soul.

  Meanwhile, Stephen hadn’t been doing so well. The next morning he was behaving rather strangely.

  I was walking past his hut, on the way to breakfast, when I heard him call out. He sounded really stressed.

  ‘I can’t find my glasses. Or my trousers. Someone has stolen my trousers.’

  I went over to see what was happening. At first, I thought he was drunk. Tired and dishevelled, as if he had slept in his clothes, he was staggering about and bumping into things.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked, leaning through the open door.

  ‘I’ve lost my trousers,’ he replied.

  ‘You’re wearing your trousers.’

  ‘No, no, not these trousers. Different trousers. Someone has stolen my trousers.’

  Brown pelicans looking like pterodactyls left over from prehistory.

  ‘I don’t think that’s very likely. Are you sure you haven’t just mislaid them?’

  ‘Oh God, I don’t know. What’s happening?’

  He sat on the side of the bed, his head in his hands, groaning and rocking slowly backwards and forwards.

  By this time, Tim, the Director, had arrived. He was looking very concerned.

  ‘Do you think he’s had a stroke?’ he asked in a loud stage whisper.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered back. ‘He’s certainly behaving oddly, but I haven’t had much experience in diagnosing strokes.’

  ‘He didn’t seem himself last night, did he?’ said Tim.

  ‘That’s true. He left supper incredibly early – some time between 7 and 7.30, I think – saying that he was tired and had a cold. He wanted to get an early night.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Stephen, sounding like a frightened child at the hospital.

  ‘You don’t seem very well,’ I said, in what I hoped was a soothing voice. ‘We’re worried about you.’

  We decided to call the BBC and a doctor for advice, and left Stephen sitting on the side of his bed while we went off in search of the satellite phone. Half an hour and several intense discussions later, we concluded that it probably wasn’t a stroke but we ought to seek medical help just in case. We were due to leave Cortez Camp later that day anyway, so we’d just get going a little earlier than expected.

  We went back to help Stephen pack his things, but the hut was empty. He had gone. We ran around in a complete panic, calling his name, until one of the staff said they had seen him wandering off into the desert.

  He was found fairly quickly, lying under a cactus, and brought back for safekeeping.

  Fortunately, the weirdness didn’t last long. He was noticeably better by lunchtime and almost back to normal by the time we checked in to a little hotel in San Ignacio town.

  But it was several weeks before I found out exactly what had happened – and even then only after reading his Twitter entries for that fateful day:

  ‘Tequila. That’s all I have to say. Tequila. Damn you. Tequila. Odi et amo. Oh dear. Oh my.’

  Apparently, he had drunk a couple of glasses of tequila and then taken two sleeping tablets, before turning in for the night. It had worked. At least, it had worked by sending him into a deep, 11-hour sleep. But as soon as he’d woken up the following morning, fitful sleep turned into hysterical delirium.

  He hadn’t had a stroke after all – he had just gone round the bend, albeit temporarily.

  The good news is that his glasses turned up on the dining table in the main hut of Cortez Camp, and his trousers miraculously reappeared – two days later – in a drawer by the bed in his hotel room.

  We never discussed it again.

  Muleteering about to commence.

  Tim casually dropped a bombshell one evening in San Ignacio town: the following day we had to be up early to go on a mule trek. Two hours up a mountain on the back of a mule, and then two hours back again. Four hours of hell on earth.

  Throw me into a pit full of writhing vipers, hide a tarantula in my sleeping bag or tie a vampire bat to my hair. Anything, but anything, rather than put me on a four-legged animal with hooves.

  Stephen wasn’t the least bit happy, either.

  ‘A thousand boiling arses,’ was his immediate response.

  I egged him on, like one of the keas we’d been watching in the car park in New Zealand, in the vain hope that Tim might buckle under pressure and abandon his plans for a death-defying donkey derby.

  ‘I vowed never to sit on another four-legged animal again,’ continued Stephen, getting into his stride, the human equivalent of a canter, ‘and now you’re going to make me break the promise to myself.’

  ‘Oh come on – it’ll be fun!’ cajoled Tim, imagining the comedy TV moment (for everyone except us).

  ‘Fun? Fun? It’s all very well in a planning meeting in Cardiff, when you lot decide that it’d be nice to have Mark and me riding through the mountains on mules like a couple of learner cowboys – but the reality is dust, sunstroke, dehydration … and, ultimately, death.’

  ‘But it’s the only way to get to see some of the best pre-Columbian cave paintings in Baja.’

  ‘I’ll walk,’ said Stephen, seeing through the wheeze.

  ‘But you’re not entering into the spirit of the occasion,’ retorted Tim.

  The pros and cons of riding on the back of a mule, watching other people ride on the back of a mule, walking alongside a mule or not going anywhere near a mule were discussed at length over drinks, then dinner, and finally coffee, until it was time for bed.

  But Tim was having none of it. We were going and that was the end of the matter.

  The next morning we drove the one-and-a-half-hour journey to our mule rendezvous point in sulky silence.

  Heading east from San Ignacio, along ever-diminishing dirt tracks, we travelled through a sea of cacti, desert and rugged mountains. It was all very spaghetti western.

  We arrived at a small ranch in a place called Santa Marta (although to all intents and purposes it
was in the middle of nowhere) and were met by two grinning rancheros. They were wearing obligatory cowboy hats on their heads and thick leather chaps on their legs.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Stephen. ‘It all looks a bit serious. Why the hell are they wearing those chaps? It’s rather melodramatic, don’t you think? Like it’s going to be a proper expedition or something.’

  We had one more last-ditch attempt at talking Tim out of the whole preposterous idea and begrudgingly climbed on to the backs of our respective mules.

  Muleteering was about to commence.

  We hadn’t even left the car park (if that’s the word for a dusty compound full of horses, donkeys and mules tied to various wooden fence posts) before we were getting into trouble.

  ‘Oh hell! It’s going backwards!’

  ‘Mine’s walking round in circles.’

  ‘Help! No, seriously, help!’

  ‘How do I stop it?’

  ‘Aaagh! It’s jumping forwards with jerky movements.’

  ‘Why is it going sideways?’

  ‘Now it’s bending down and eating. How do I stop it eating?’

  Tim had to turn away to hide the tears of laughter rolling down his cheeks. The camera was quivering and quaking as the cameraman convulsed with laughter behind the eyepiece.

  The rancheros gave us a helping hand and then gave the mules a stiff talking-to – or maybe it was the other way round – and we were off up the mountain track.

  ‘This will make our inner thighs sit up and take notice,’ groaned Stephen. ‘And goodness knows…’

  Just as he was about to continue a little tirade about the trials and tribulations of mule trekking, his mule suddenly lifted its head and made a strange and rather alarming sound. It started with a horse-like whinny, evolved into a donkey-like heehaw and ended with a pitiful whimper like a cowboy after a shoot-out gasping for breath. Stephen braced himself and sat bolt upright, waiting for something horrible to happen. But the mule just snorted and continued on its way.

  I grew to become quite fond of my particular mule. In fact, to be honest, I felt pangs of guilt for expecting it to be an obnoxious creature, with the asininity and stubbornness of a donkey and the stupidity and angst of a horse. But it seemed to have inherited the better characteristics of both parents: the sobriety, patience and sure-footedness of a donkey, and the strength, courage and self-assurance of a horse.

  Stephen with a testicle snuggled in each armpit.

  Rather like a kidnap victim growing fond of his captor, I developed a special affinity for Bubba (I think that’s what they said his name was) during our enforced time together.

  There was just one little hiccup in our developing relationship.

  After an hour or so, it became blatantly obvious why the rancheros were wearing thick leather chaps. It definitely wasn’t to look like Clint Eastwood. Our mules took inordinate delight in brushing us past every single viciously prickly cactus along the path. If there weren’t any cacti along the path, they went off-piste to find some specifically to brush past. Even through long trousers the thorns ripped and snagged our legs. Had we worn shorts we’d have been red fleshy pulp from the waist down.

  I called out to Stephen, who was a few metres behind me muttering under his breath.

  ‘How are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, despite having raw and bloodied legs. And apart from having a testicle snuggled in each armpit, vowing never to descend again. And apart from my buttocks being more anguished and outraged than an Italian defender protesting innocence in the penalty box, I’m doing okay,’ he called back.

  Then he glanced up for the first time.

  I looked around just in time to see his eyes pop out of his head. For a split second he looked like a bad actor in a Hollywood B-movie spotting a posse of arrow-firing Red Indians galloping over the brow of a hill.

  ‘Holy mackerel!’ he yelped, looking at the path ahead turning abruptly towards the highest mountain. ‘We can’t possibly be going up that slope. Surely not? It’s far too steep.’

  He watched as my mule followed the path and started up the slope.

  ‘Oh my God, we are,’ I heard him say to himself, almost in a whisper.

  The mules bounced and jiggered, slipped and stumbled their way up the impossibly rough and steep mountain slope, until the path levelled and we breathed an audible sigh of relief.

  You have to hand it to mules. For an infertile cross between a male donkey and a female horse, their mountain-climbing abilities are an absolute miracle. Thousands of years of evolutionary trial and error have given them perfect four-hoof-drive precision far better than any four-wheel-drive vehicle designed by human engineers.

  The long-lasting paint was made from a mixture of urine and pulverised rock, and comes in black or maroon (depending on whether the urine donor had, or had not, eaten beetroot the night before).

  Three professional cowboys.

  Not a moment too soon, our mules stopped walking and we were given permission to get off, or dismount I should say. We had arrived.

  We turned and admired the view. The setting was spectacular – forbidding, arid, wild and vast. The rancheros told us that it rains in this particular corner of Baja only once or twice a year; sometimes it never rains at all. In that respect, at least, it bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to my home town of Bristol, where it seems to stop raining only once or twice a year.

  The whole landscape spoke aloud of the dramatic elemental forces that move continents, form oceans and build mountains.

  ‘It’s all very well creating a backlit deer or an adorable baby whale,’ observed Stephen. ‘But why not make the earth safe and solid, instead of making it with tectonic plates that cause earthquakes and tsunamis?’

  Behind us was a huge rocky overhang, which was literally covered in cave paintings. We recognised several different animals: lots of antelopes, a fish (or maybe it was a whale?), some rabbits, a couple of birds and a sea turtle. There were human figures, too, though they looked unlike any people we knew. Some were wearing what looked like top hats, others appeared to be in their pyjamas, and several looked more humanoid than human. One, clearly a woman, had eye-catchingly long breasts that dangled down to her knees.

  Snorkellers with a baby whale shark – imagine how big its Mum must be.

  A whale shark: more like a fictional sea monster than a real-life fish.

  Some of the images were superimposed on top of one another, suggesting feverish bouts of artistic creativity.

  The Mexicans call them ‘rustic pictures’. I like that.

  No one knows who painted them or how long ago they did it. Surprisingly little is known about rock art and even less is known about this particular collection. The most plausible theory is that they were produced by hunter-gatherers, between five hundred and a thousand years ago, and have something to do with shamanic rituals.

  But it’s all entirely speculation.

  My favourite theory comes from a Cochimí Indian legend, which says that this remarkable mural was the work of giants who inhabited the mid-peninsula region a thousand years ago. It makes a lot of sense – they were the only people who could possibly have reached at least 10 metres (33 feet) above the ground without the advantage of a ladder or scaffolding.

  Given the paintings’ age and exposure to the rigours of the outside world, they were all surprisingly vivid and well preserved. Archaeologists reckon the exceptionally long-lasting paint was made from a mixture of urine and pulverised rock – a lesson to the builder who redecorated my bathroom with paint that barely lasted six months. The only problem is choice of colour – hunter-gatherer paint apparently comes in nothing but black or maroon (presumably depending on whether the urine was obtained from someone who either had, or had not, eaten beetroot the night before).

  Reluctantly, we climbed back onto our mules and headed back towards the mule park. It was a bit of a shock to discover that going downhill was considerably worse than going uphill, and took even longer, bu
t we made it just as the sun was setting – dusty and suffering a little from sunstroke and dehydration, but nonetheless alive.

  ‘That was fun,’ said Stephen, sarcastically. ‘Aside from feeling tortured and tormented beyond all hope, as though I’ve been buggered by a train and stoned by a crowd of homo-hating fanatics, I feel great.’

  ‘Get in the water! Jump! Get in the water!’ shouted the skipper, as we came alongside the largest fish in the sea.

  I dropped over the side of our small boat into the cool waters of La Paz Bay – a colossal bite out of the southeastern corner of Baja – and dunked my head below the surface. There, no more than a couple of metres in front of me, was a dorsal fin that would have made Steven Spielberg glow with pride. Covered with light-coloured spots and stripes, it was attached to one of the most gargantuan whale sharks I had ever seen: it was more like a fictional sea monster than a real-life fish.

  Snorkelling with whale sharks is not quite as safe as watching breakfast television – simply because, in theory, any animal the length and weight of a bus is powerful enough to knock a person out of the water – but it comes pretty close. It’s another one of the most exhilarating wildlife encounters on the planet.

  I finned along with the shark, struggling to keep up as the giant feeding machine methodically worked its way through billowing clouds of plankton.

  I could see its broad, flattened head far to the front and, briefly turning around, glimpsed its barn-door-sized tail swinging slowly backwards and forwards far to the back. Immediately below me was a huge pectoral fin, roughly the size of my kitchen table, covered with a motley collection of remoras calmly hitching a free ride.

  Briefly, it made me think of a giant, spotty tadpole.

  The shark swam with a smooth, graceful movement that belied its phenomenal size and, despite my attempt at Olympic-standard snorkelling, effortlessly left me behind.

  Estrella stayed with it for a bit longer, but then she was considerably younger and fitter than me and made my pathetic attempt at speed-snorkelling seem somewhat less than impressive.