Last Chance to See

getting other people to handle the dangerous animals. Won’t do it myself. Don’t want to get bitten, do I? You know what it says on my book jackets? ‘Hobbies: gardening—with gloves; fishing—with boots; traveling—with care.’ That’s the answer. What else? Well, in addition to the boots wear thick, baggy trousers, and preferably have half a dozen people tramping along in front of you making as much noise as possible. The snakes pick up the vibrations and get out of your way, unless it’s a death adder, otherwise known as the deaf adder, which just lies there. People can walk right past it and over it and nothing happens. I’ve heard of twelve people in a line walking over a death adder and the twelfth person accidentally trod on it and got bitten. Normally you’re quite safe if you’re twelfth in line. You’re not eating your cakes. Come on, get them down you, there’s plenty more in the venom fridge.”
    We asked, tentatively, if we could perhaps take a snake bite detector kit with us to Komodo.
    “ ’Course you can, ’course you can. Take as many as you like. Won’t do you a blind bit of good because they’re only for Australian snakes.”
    “So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly, then?” I asked.
    He blinked at me as if I were stupid.
    “Well, what do you think you do?” he said. “You die of course. That’s what deadly means.”
    “But what about cutting open the wound and sucking out the poison?” I asked.
    “Rather you than me,” he said. “I wouldn’t want a mouthful of poison. Shouldn’t do you any harm, though. Snake toxins have a high molecular weight, so they won’t penetrate the blood vessels in the mouth the way that alcohol or some drugs do, and then the poison gets destroyed by the acids in your stomach. But it’s not necessarily going to do much good, either. You’re not likely to be able to get much of the poison out, but you’re probably going to make the wound a lot worse trying. And in a place like Komodo it means you’d quickly have a seriously infected wound to contend with as well as a leg full of poison. Septicemia, gangrene, you name it. It’ll kill you.”
    “What about a tourniquet?”
    “Fine if you don’t mind having your leg off afterwards. You’d have to because if you cut off the blood supply to it completely it’ll just die. And if you can find anyone in that part of Indonesia who you’d trust to take your leg off then you’re a braver man than me. No, I’ll tell you: the only thing you can do is apply a pressure bandage direct to the wound and wrap the whole leg up tightly, but not too tightly. Slow the blood flow but don’t cut it off or you’ll lose the leg. Hold your leg, or whatever bit you’ve been bitten in, lower than your heart and your head. Keep very, very still, breathe slowly and get to a doctor
immediately
. If you’re on Komodo that means a couple of days, by which time you’ll be well dead.
    “The only answer, and I mean this quite seriously, is
don’t get bitten
. There’s no reason why you should. Any of the snakes there will get out of your way well before you even see them. You don’t really need to worry about the snakes if you’re careful. No, the things you really need to worry about are the marine creatures.”
    “What?”
    “Scorpion fish, stonefish, sea snakes. Much more poisonousthan anything on land. Get stung by a stonefish and the pain alone can kill you. People drown themselves just to stop the pain.”
    “Where are all these things?”
    “Oh, just in the sea. Tons of them. I wouldn’t go near it if I were you. Full of poisonous animals. Hate them.”
    “Is there anything you do like?”
    “Yes,” he said. “Hydroponics.”
    We flew to Bali.
    David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.
    The narrow, muddy streets of Kuta were lined with gift shops and hamburger bars and populated with crowds of drunken, shouting tourists, Kamikaze motorcyclists, counterfeit-watch sellers, and small dogs. The kamikaze motorcyclists tried to pick off the tourists and the small dogs,