Last Chance to See

time. Often some government official or other important person would decide that he needed a seat, and, of course, someone else would then lose theirs. We asked if this was what had happened to us. He said, no, it wasn’t the reason, but it was the sort of reason we should bear in mind when thinking about these problems.
    At this point we agreed to have the coffee.
    He organised hotel rooms for us for the night, and a minibus tour of the island for the afternoon.
    There is a good living to be made in Bali, we discovered, from pointing at animals. First find your animal, and then point at it.
    If you set yourself up properly, you can even make a living from pointing at the person who is pointing at the animal. We found a very good example of this enterprise on the beach near the famous temple of Tanah Lot, and apparentlyit was a long-established and thriving business. Up on the beach there was a very low, wide cave, inside which, in a small cranny in the wall, a couple of yellow snakes had made their home.
    Outside on the beach was a man who sat on a box and collected the money, and pointed at the man in the cave. Once you had paid your money, you crept into the cave, and the man in the cave pointed at the snakes.
    Apart from this highlight, the guided tour was profoundly depressing. When we told our guide that we didn’t want to go to all the tourist places, he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don’t want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists. Which is not to say that we weren’t tourists every bit as much as the others, but it does highlight the irony that everything you go to see is changed by the very action of going to see it, which is the sort of problem which physicists have been wrestling with for most of this century. I’m not going to bang on about Bali being turned into a Bali Theme Park, in which Bali itself is gradually destroyed to make way for a tatty artificial version of what used to be there, because it is too familiar a process to come as news to anybody. I just want to let out a squeak of frustrated rage. I’m afraid I couldn’t wait to leave the most beautiful place on earth.
    The following day we finally succeeded in leaving Denpasar airport for Bima. Everyone knew us from the ructions of the day before, and this time the narrow man who had peered at us through wreaths of smoke was wreathed in smiles and terribly helpful.
    This, though, was only softening us up.
    At Bima we were told that there was no flight at all to Labuan Bajo till the following morning. Perhaps we would like to come back then? At that point we started to get into a bit of a frenzy, and then suddenly we were unexpectedly seized and pushed through the crowds and shoved on to adilapidated little plane that was sitting fully loaded on the tarmac, waiting to take off for Labuan Bajo.
    On the way to the plane, we couldn’t help noticing that we passed our pile of intrepid baggage sitting on a small unregarded baggage cart out in the middle of the tarmac. Once we were on the plane, we sat and debated nervously with each other about whether we thought they might be thinking of loading it.
    Eventually my nerve broke and I got off the plane and started running back across the tarmac. I was quickly intercepted by airline staff who demanded to know what I thought I was doing. I said “Baggage” a lot and pointed. They insisted that everything was okay, there was no problem, and that everything was under control. I persuaded them at last to come with me to the baggage cart standing in the middle of the tarmac. With hardly a change of beat, they moved smoothly from assuring me that all our luggage was on board the plane to helping me actually get it on board.
    That done, we could finally relax about the baggage and start seriously to worry about the state of the plane, which was terrifying.
    The door to the cockpit remained open for the duration of the flight and might actually have been missing entirely. Mark told me that Air Merpati bought their planes second-hand from Air Uganda, but I think he was joking.
    I have a cheerfully reckless view of this kind of air travel. It rarely bothers me at all. I don’t think this is bravery, because I am frequently scared stiff in cars, particularly if I’m driving. But once you’re in an airplane, everything is completely out of your hands, so you may as well just sit back and grin manically about the grinding and