Stephen and Mark: an unlikely duo.
On 11 May 2001 I was shocked and heartbroken to hear of the sudden and wholly unexpected death of Douglas Noel Adams – the DNA at the core of so much that I loved and valued in the world. He was just 49 years old. The years since have passed and every day I have missed Douglas as a friend, teacher and companion. How can I know what to think of iPhones and iMacs, compact cameras, GPS devices and Blu-ray players without Douglas here to offer his unique sideways view?
Then one day in 2007, out of the blue, I had a phone call. Might I consider travelling, with Mark, back to those animals that had formed the principal cast list of Last Chance to See, this time filming the experience for television? I sounded myself out, I sounded Mark out and then I sounded the BBC out. We all seemed to be in agreement that the time was right. Out of the eight species Mark and Douglas had originally chosen it seemed that two were already functionally extinct (the northern white rhino and the Yangtze river dolphin) – in other words, a quarter of their almost random snapshot of vulnerable species had been wiped from the map of creation. Mark told me at our first meeting that he believes whichever eight critically endangered species they had chosen back then the chances are that a quarter would now be extinct.
It fell out that this documentary filming project would have to go hand in hand with another that I was doing for the BBC in which I visited every state of the USA, so for a time I was worried that I would not be able to take on the commitment. Willingness and cooperation on all sides ensured that it could be done, however, and in January 2008 I flew from Miami, Florida to Manaus, Amazonia to join Mark and start work on the first film, which was to feature the Amazonian manatee.
Mark has written these adventures up with that mixture of zoological mastery and human insight that characterises him and raises him so far above the level of most professional naturalists and conservationists. He has been very modest about himself, however. Let me just say that without his energy, enthusiasm, local knowledge and refusal to accept second best, neither Last Chance to See the television series nor this new book could ever have been completed. There is no length to which Mark will not go in order to observe an animal, photograph it and, if needs be, save it from peril. He has put his own life in the severest possible danger time and time again in his work for anti-poacher patrols in Africa and Asia, all at the service of protecting rhinos, elephants and tigers from those who would slaughter them wholesale for gain. The more endangered the species become, the higher the price their horns, tusks and penises command for the ‘traditional medicine’ market in the Far East and the more willing poachers are to kill anyone who comes between them and their route to riches. Mark talks rarely and self-deprecatingly of his courage in putting himself in the line of fire, but it is a more extreme proof of what anyone would observe if they saw Mark in the wild under any circumstances: commitment, passion and extraordinary zest. No matter how many times he has seen an animal before, Mark will want to see it again. He will climb mountains, ford streams and penetrate steamy malaria-infested swamps just for one glimpse. Not only that, but he will encourage, belabour and enthuse any large, sweaty unwilling companions who happen to be lumbering at his side wishing there were better phone signals and air-conditioning available.
I embarked on this whole project honestly believing I had bitten off more than I could chew. I am no physical hero: I am clumsy, overweight, unfit and uncoordinated. The first episode of filming began with me falling off a floating dock and smashing my right humerus. Yet somehow, a year and a quarter later, I had lost much weight and was happily hurling myself into physically demanding conditions that I would have wept and gibbered at before. The life-changing benefits of the filming experience I owe to the animals and to Mark. That he and I never quarrelled is testament to his extraordinary good temper and sweetness of nature. He tolerated the presence of an amateur, idler and dilettante and proved a perfect teacher and matchless travel companion.
Most importantly of course, through Mark I also met and befriended the extraordinary, enchanting and rare creatures that you are about to meet now. I hope the experience inspires you to consider what you might do to help, in however small a way, the work of conservation that goes on around the world to save these and other species from no longer existing.
If this book and our adventures have any purpose it is to help with the conservation conversation. Are the animals worth saving because they hold an important place in the great interconnected web of existence? Are they worth saving because they might one day yield important clues and compounds to help us with medicine or some other useful technology? Or are they worth saving because they are the beautiful achievement of millions of years of natural selection? Extinction is a natural part of creation, this is unquestionably true: yet no matter what one’s views on climate change or global warming, it is impossible, impossible, to deny that man-made alterations to habitat are threatening thousands of plant and animal species across the planet at an unprecedented rate and scale. So the question is perhaps not ‘why should we save them?’ but ‘what right do we have to destroy them?’
Let us never stop talking about the creatures we share the planet with. The first step is to know them a little better.
Stephen Fry
Pouring over an Amazon-sized map in the jungle.
No one believed me when I said I was going to the Amazon with Stephen Fry. It must have seemed about as likely as taking Johnny Rotten to the opera, or joining the Dalai Lama for a week of downhill skiing in Holland.
When I mentioned that we were going to a particularly remote corner of the world’s greatest rainforest to look for a large, black, sleepy animal easily mistaken for an unusually listless mudbank, they merely stared at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses.
But, sure enough, the Amazon was the first (and, as it happened, nearly the last) stop on a whirlwind year-long world tour.
Two days after Christmas 2007 we set off on a 145,000-kilometre (90,000-mile) journey to eight different countries on five continents in search of the weird and the wild. Our aim was to come face to face with some of the rarest and most peculiar animals on the planet: from nocturnal ET-like lemurs in Madagascar and tourist-eating dragons in Indonesia to flightless and charmingly gormless parrots in New Zealand and square-lipped rhinos in war-torn Congo.
Along the way, we hoped to meet some of the remarkable people whose fearless and gritty determination, sometimes in the face of tremendous personal danger, is all that has kept most (though, sadly, not all) of these animals from going extinct.
Stephen and I had known one another a little since the late 1980s (enough to say ‘hello’ and ‘how are you?’ and, more recently, ‘can’t you get reception on your iPhone either?’). But we’d barely sat in the same car together, far less shared cabins, huts, tents, far-flung adventures or tropical diseases. Suddenly, for better or for worse, we were being thrown together on a lengthy, often uncomfortable, occasionally quite gruelling and, once or twice, quite traumatic journey that would challenge our evolving friendship, test our patience, put our best-laid plans through the wringer and even cross-examine our medical skills.
‘I must confess I’m quite nervous about this whole enterprise,’ admitted Stephen. ‘I like my creature comforts rather more than I like my creatures.’
But there was method in our madness. We’d decided to retrace the steps I had taken exactly twenty years earlier with a mutual friend – the late Douglas Adams, who very sadly died in May 2001.
In 1985, the Observer Colour Magazine agreed to send Douglas, a comedy writer better known for The Hitch Hiker’s