Last Chance to See

while the tiny minibus, which we spent most of the evening in shuttling our bags from one full hotel to another, hurtled through the motorcyclists and counterfeit-watch sellers at video-game speeds. Somewhere not too far from here, toward the middle of the island, there may have been heaven on earth, but hell had certainly set up business on its porch.
    The tourists with their cans of lager and their FUCK OFF T-shirts were particularly familiar to anyone who has seen the English at play in Spain or Greece, but I suddenly realised as I watched this that for once I didn’t need to hide myself awayin embarrassment. They weren’t English. They were Australian.
    But they were otherwise so nearly identical that it started me thinking about convergent evolution, which I had better explain before I go on to say why they made me think of it.
    In different parts of the world, strikingly similar but completely unrelated forms of life will emerge in response to similar conditions and habitats. For instance, the aye-aye, the lemur that Mark and I originally tracked down in Madagascar, has one particularly remarkable feature. Its third finger is much longer than its other fingers and is skeletally thin, almost like a twig. It uses this finger for poking around under the bark of the trees it lives in to dig out the grubs which it feeds on.
    There is one other creature in the world which does this, and that is the long-fingered possum, which is found in New Guinea. It has a long and skeletally thin fourth finger, which it uses for precisely the same purpose. There is no family relationship between these two animals at all, and the only common factor between them is this: an absence of woodpeckers.
    There are no woodpeckers in Madagascar, and no woodpeckers in Papua New Guinea. This means that there is a food source—the grubs under the bark—going free, and in these two cases it is a mammal that has developed a mechanism for getting at it. And the mechanism they both use is the same—different finger, same idea. But it is purely the selection process of evolution that has created this similarity, because the animals themselves are not related.
    Exactly the same behaviour pattern had emerged entirely independently on the other side of the world. As in the gift shop habitats of Spain or Greece, or indeed Hawaii, the local people cheerfully offer themselves up for insult and abuse in return for money which they then spend on further despoiling their habitat to attract more money-bearing predators.

    “Right,” said Mark, when the three of us found some dinner that night in a tourist restaurant with plastic flowers and Muzak and paper umbrellas in the drinks, “here’s the picture. We have to get a goat.”
    “Here?” asked Gaynor.
    “No. In Labuan Bajo. Labuan Bajo is on the island of Flores and is the nearest port to Komodo. It’s a crossing of about twenty-two miles across some of the most treacherous seas in the East. This is where the South China Sea meets the Indian Ocean, and it’s riddled with crosscurrents, riptides, and whirlpools. It’s very dangerous and could take anything up to twenty hours.”
    “With a
goat
?” I asked.
    “A dead goat.”
    I toyed with my food.
    “It’s best,” continued Mark, “if the goat has been dead for about three days, so it’s got a good smell going. That’s more likely to attract the dragons.”
    “You’re proposing twenty hours on a boat—”
    “A small boat,” added Mark.
    “On violently heaving seas—”
    “Probably.”
    “With a three-day-old dead goat.”
    “Yes.”
    “I hardly know what to say.”
    “There’s one other thing that I should probably say, which is that I’ve no idea if any of this is true. There are wildly conflicting stories, and some are probably just out of date, or even completely made up. I hope we’ll have a better idea of the situation when we get to Labuan Bajo tomorrow. We’re flying tomorrow, via Bima, and we should be at Denpasar airport early. It was a nightmare getting these tickets and the connecting flight, and we
mustn’t
miss the plane.”

    We did. Fresh eruptions of hell awaited us at Denpasar airport, which was a turmoil of crowds and shouting, with a sense of incipient violence simmering just beneath the surface. The airline check-in man said that our flight from Bima to Labuan Bajo had not been confirmed by the travel agent and as a result we had no seats. He shrugged and gave us back our tickets.
    We had been