Last Chance to See

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 toward the shore. The early sun shone across it like a sheet. Lesser frigate birds 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 fulfill 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. Andwe 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 around the boat.
    The four chickens sat in the boat’s prow and watched us.
    One of the more disturbing aspects of travel in remote areas is the necessity of taking your food with you in nonperishable 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 pantheonwho 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 toward 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