Last Chance to See

vehicle
, just as three other vehicles are coming toward you performing exactly the same maneuver. Presumably Sir Isaac Newton has long ago been discredited as a bourgeois capitalist running-dog lackey.
    Tongling, in turn, made us long wistfully for the cheerful, familiar hominess of Nanjing.
    To quote the welcoming brochure for tourists that I found in my bleak hotel bedroom: “As a new rising industrial mining city, Tongling has already founded a rather [sic] scale of non-ferrous metallurgical, chemical, textile, building material, electronics, machinery, iron and steel and coal industries; especially the non-ferrous metallurgical building material and chemical industries, which, with a broad prospect of development, have already made or been on the way of making Tongling the major production centre.”
    Tongling was not beautiful. It was a bleak, grey, unwelcoming place, and I made immediate plans to lay down a territorial aftershave marker here.
    I took the brochure with me and met Mark and Chris in the hotel restaurant, which was also bleak. We had been pretty open to suggestion as far as food had been concerned in China, and had been prepared, sometimes recklessly prepared, to eat whatever people put in front of us. Much of it had been delicious, much of it less so, and some of it had been rather startling to a Western palate.
    The food in this hotel fell heavily into the startling category, including, and especially, the Thousand-Year-Old eggs. The name is, of course, not meant to be taken literally, but merely as a sort of hint as to how startling they are.
    The eggs are lightly boiled in green tea and then buried in a box of mud and straw for three months. In that time the white turns bright green and firm, and the yolk turns very, very dark green indeed and sludgy. The startling thing is that they are then presented to you as a delicacy, whereas if youfound them in your cupboard at home, you would call in the Sanitation Department.
    We struggled a little with the meal, finally gave up, and looked through the brochure again, in which I discovered another passage: “It has been already decided to set up a water reserve to protect
Lipotes vexillifer
, a kind of precious rare mammal in Yangtze River, which is now regarded as ‘Panda in water.’ ”
    “Have you noticed the beer you’re drinking?” Mark asked me.
    I looked at the bottle. It was called Baiji Beer. It had a picture of a dolphin on the label, and the Latin name for it,
Lipotes vexillifer
, printed on the cap.
    “I noticed another hotel on the way into town this afternoon,” said Chris. “I thought, there’s a funny coincidence, it’s called the Baiji Hotel. Looked a sight better than this dump.”
    Even if we’d come to the wrong hotel, we’d clearly come to the right place.
    A day passed before, with the aid of Professor Zhou’s letter, we were able to find an English-speaking guide and organise a small boat to go out onto the river and do what we had come to do: go out onto the Yangtze River and look for baiji dolphins ourselves.
    We were by this time two or three days behind the schedule we had originally planned, and had to leave the following morning on a ferry to Wuhan. We had therefore only a few hours in which to try and see one of the rarest aquatic mammals in the world in a river in which it would be hard to see your hand in front of your face.
    Our small boat chugged away from a small, crowded wharf and out onto a wide extent of the dirty brown river. We asked Mr. Ho, our guide, what he thought our chances of success were.
    He shrugged.
    “You see, there are only two hundred baiji in a hundred and twenty-five miles. And the Yangtze is very wide. Not good, I think.”
    We chugged along for quite some time, making our way gradually toward the opposite bank, about a mile away. The water was shallower there, which meant that there was less boat traffic. The dolphins also tend to keep close to the banks for the same reason, which means they are more likely to get snared in the fishing nets, of which we passed several, hung from bamboo frames extending from the banks. Fish populations are declining in the Yangtze and, with all the noise, the dolphins have greater difficulty in “seeing” the fish that there are. I guessed that a net full of fish might well lure a dolphin into danger.
    We reached a relatively quiet spot near the bank, and the captain turned off the engine.
    Mr. Ho explained that this was a good place to wait,