Last Chance to See

The plane was already there waiting and a representative from the airline assured us, against the evidence of all our previous experience, that there would be no problems, we could go straight to the plane. Then, a few minutes later, we were told that we would just have to go quickly to the immigration office. We could leave our bags. We went to the immigration office, where we were told that we should bring our bags. We brought our bags. Expensive-looking camera equipment.
    We were then confronted by a large Zaïrois official in a natty blue suit whom we had noticed earlier hanging around watching us take our baggage out of Charles’s plane. I had had the feeling then that he was sizing us up for something.
    He examined our passports for a good long time before acknowledging our presence at all, then at last he looked up at us, and a wide smile crept slowly across his face.
    “You entered the country,” he asked, “at Bukavu?”
    In fact, he said it in French, so we made a bit of a meal of understanding him, which was something that experience had taught us to do. Eventually we admitted that, insofar as we had understood the question, yes, we had entered at Bukavu.
    “Then,” he said quietly, triumphantly, “you must leave from Bukavu.”
    He made no move to give us back our passports.
    We looked at him blankly.
    He explained slowly. Tourists, he said, had to leave the country from the same port by which they had entered. Smile.
    We utterly failed to understand what he had said. This was almost true, anyway. It was the most preposterous invention. He still held on to our passports. Next to him a young girl was sitting, studiously copying down copious information from other visitors’ passports, information that would almost certainly never see the light of day again.
    We stood and argued while our plane sat out on the tarmac waiting to take off to Nairobi, but the official simply sat and held our passports. We knew it was nonsense. He knew we knew it was nonsense. That was clearly part of the pleasure of it. He smiled at us again, gave us a slow contented shrug, and idly brushed a bit of fluff off the sleeve of the natty blue suit toward the cost of which he clearly expected a major contribution.
    On the wall above him, gazing seriously into the middle distance from a battered frame, stood the figure of President Mobutu, resplendent in his leopard-skin pillbox hat.

H EARTBEATS
IN THE N IGHT
    IF YOU TOOK THE WHOLE of Norway, scrunched it up a bit, shook out all the moose and reindeer, hurled it ten thousand miles around the world, and filled it with birds, then you’d be wasting your time, because it looks very much as if someone has already done it.
    Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the southwest corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God’s earth, and one’s first impulse, standing on a clifftop surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.
    It is magnificent. It is awe-inspiring. The land is folded and twisted and broken on such a scale that it makes your brain quiver and sing in your skull just trying to comprehend what it is looking at. Mountains and clouds jumbled on top ofeach other, immense rivers of ice cracking their way millimetre by millimetre through the ravines, cataracts thundering down into the narrow green valleys below—it all shines so luminously in the magically clear light of New Zealand that to eyes which are accustomed to the grimier air of most of the Western world, it seems too vivid to be real.
    When Captain Cook saw it from the sea in 1773, he recorded that “inland as far as the eye can see the peaks are crowded together as to scarcely admit any valleys between them.” The great forked valleys have been carved out by glaciers over millions of years, and many are flooded by the sea for many miles inland. Some of the cliff faces drop hundreds of feet sheer into the water, and continue sheer for hundreds of feet below it. It still has the appearance of a work in progress. Despite relentless lashing by the wind and rain, it is sharp and jagged in its immensity.
    Much of it has still not been explored at ground level. The only roads that approach the Fiordland National Park peter out quickly in the foothills, and most visiting tourists only ever explore the fringe scenery. A few backpackers plunge farther in, and very, very few experienced campers try to get anywhere near the