It was a ground-breaking idea. Bear in mind that this was in the good old days, when endangered species and orphaned children could leave their dens or houses in complete safety, without having to pose next to D-list celebrities with falling ratings and crocodile tears. The aye-aye had never met a celebrity before, let alone one of Douglas’s stature (in both senses of the word).
Douglas’s mission was to report on conservation efforts in Madagascar, in his own inimitable style, by taking a unique and imaginative look at some of the wild animals and even wilder people that professional zoologists tend to take for granted. As he explained at the time: ‘My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise.’ My own role, basically, was to arrange plenty of wildlife encounters, help him identify what he was looking at and make sure he came back alive.
Mark and Douglas in Robinson Crusoe’s cave in the Juan Fernandez Islands, off the coast of Chile.
We met for the very first time at the airport in Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, and spent three hilarious and thought-provoking weeks bumbling through Malagasy jungles and red tape. Against all the odds we came face to face with an aye-aye, undeniably the strangest animal either of us had ever seen, for a fleeting few seconds near the end of the trip.
The best way to tell if you get on with someone is to be thrown together for a couple of hard weeks’ travelling and spend night after night sleeping on a wet concrete floor in the middle of a jungle. We found that we got on extremely well. In fact, we enjoyed the experience so much that we hatched a rather ambitious plan to do it all over again, half a dozen times. We put a big map of the world on a wall, Douglas stuck a pin in everywhere he fancied going, I stuck a pin in where some of the most endangered animals were, and we made a journey out of every place that had two pins.
Three years later we set off.
Actually, to be fair, it wasn’t quite that simple. Arranging all those long-haul trips to remote corners of the globe in the days before adventure travel became as normal as a £4 gallon of petrol, and long before anyone had even heard of email, deserves more than a merry ‘so we set off’. Let me rephrase it. Instead of ‘three years later’ please read ‘after hundreds of unbearably slow clank-clank-clanking telexes, dozens of typewriter-and-Tippex-written letters (most of which never arrived), goodness knows how many barely audible, pre-booked, long-distance phone calls, and thousands of grey hairs later’ … we set off in search of more endangered species.
Intrepid adventurer Douglas in the Amazon.
Eventually, everything was in place: the schedules were set, naturalists the world over were ready and waiting, our passports were stamped with a mind-boggling array of visas, and multitudinous flights, boats and hotels were booked.
Then Douglas called to announce that he hadn’t quite finished his latest novel, and would I mind doing it all over again?
I did do it all over again and, eventually, we had lots of life-changing, awe-inspiring and hair-raising experiences, presented a radio series, wrote a book about our adventures (called Last Chance to See) and became firm friends in the process.
Now history has repeated itself. It’s the same pins in the map, but this time it is Stephen who has been sleeping in the middle of jungles and sharing life-changing, awe-inspiring and hair-raising experiences to find out how all those wild animals – and their protectors – have got along in the years in between.
This is our story.
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