Last Chance To See Part 11

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 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 the hotel in Tongling 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 you found them in your cupboard at home you would call in the council.

We struggled a little with the meal, finally gave up and looked through the brochure again, in which I discovered another pa.s.sage: '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 pa.s.sed before, with the aid of Professor Zhou's letter, we were able to find an English-speaking guide and organise a small boat to do what we had come to do: go out on to 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 on to 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 two thousand kilometres. And the Yangtze is very wide. Not good, I think.'

We chugged along for quite some time, making our way gradually towards the opposite bank, about two kilometres 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 fis.h.i.+ng nets, of which we pa.s.sed 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, maybe. Dolphins had been seen there recently. He said that that might be a good thing, or it might not. Either they would be here because they had been recently, or they would not be here because they had been recently. This seemed .comfortably to cover all the options, so we sat quietly to wait.

The vastness of the Yangtze becomes very apparent when you try and keep a careful watch on it. Which bit of it? Where? It stretched endlessly ahead of us, behind us and to one side. There was a breeze blowing, ruffling and chopping up the surface, and after just a few minutes of watching, your eyes begin to wobble. Every momentary black shadow of a dancing wave looks for an instant like what you want it to look like, and I did not even have a good mental picture of what to look for.

'Do you know how long they surface for? I asked Mark.

'Yes...'

'And?

'It isn't good news. The dolphin's melon, or forehead, breaks the surface first, as it blows, then its small dorsal fin comes up, and then it plunges down again.'

'How long does that take?'

'Less than a second.'

'Oh.' I digested this. 'I don't think we're going to see one, are we?'

Mark looked depressed. With a sigh he opened a bottle of baiji beer, and took a rather complicated swig at it, so as not to take his eyes off the water.

'Well, we might at least see a finless porpoise,' he said.

'They're not as rare as the dolphins, are they?'

'Well, they're certainly endangered in the Yangtze. There are thought to be about four hundred of them. They're having the same problems here, but you'll also find them in the coastal waters off China and as far west as Pakistan, so they're not in such absolute danger as a species. They can see much better than the baiji, which suggests that they're probably relative newcomers. Look! There's one! Finless porpoise!'

I was just in time to see a black shape fall back in the water and disappear. It was gone.

'Finless porpoise!' Mr Ho called out to us. 'You see?

'We saw, thanks!' said Mark.

'How did you know it was a finless porpoise? I asked, quite impressed by this.

'Well, two things, really. First, we could actually see it. It came right up out of the water. Finless porpoises do that. The baiji doesn't.'

'You mean, if you can actually get to see it, it must be a finless porpoise.'

'More or less.'

'What's the other reason?

Well, it hadn't got a fin.'

An hour drifted by. A couple of hundred yards from us big cargo boats and barges growled up the river. A slick of oil drifted past. Behind us the fish nets fluttered in the wind. I thought to myself that the words 'endangered species' had become a phrase which had lost any vivid meaning. We hear it too often to be able to react to it afresh.

As I watched the wind ruffling over the bilious surface of the Yangtze I realised with the vividness of shock, that somewhere beneath or around me there were intelligent animals whose perceptive universe we could scarcely begin to imagine, living in a seething, poisoned, deafening world, and that their lives were probably pa.s.sed in continual bewilderment, hunger, pain and fear.

We did not manage to see a dolphin in the wild. We knew that we would at least be able to see the only one that is held in captivity, in the Hydrobiology Inst.i.tute in Wuhan, but nevertheless we were depressed and disappointed when we arrived back at our hotel in the early evening.

Here we suddenly discovered that Professor Zhou had managed to alert people to our arrival after all, and we were astonished to be greeted by a delegation of about a dozen officials from the Tongling Baiji Conservation Committee of the Tongling Munic.i.p.al Government.

A little dazed by this unexpectedly formal attention when we'd just been going to slump over a beer, we were ushered in to a large meeting room in the hotel and shown to a long table. A little apprehensively, we sat on one side along with an interpreter whom they had provided for the occasion, and the members of the committee carefully arranged themselves along the other.

They sat quietly for a moment, each with their hands neatly folded on top of each other, on the table in front of them, and looked distantly at us. My head swam for a moment with the hallucination that we were about to be arraigned before an ideological tribunal, before I realised that the distant formality of their manner probably meant that they were at least as shy of us as we were of them.

One or two of them were wearing a type of grey uniform tunic, one was wearing the old Maoist blue tunic, others were more casually dressed. They ranged in age from about mid-twenties to mid-sixties.

'The committee welcomes you to Tongling,' began the interpreter, 'and is honoured by your visit.' He introduced them one by one, each in turn nodding to us with a slightly nervous smile. One was the Conservation Vice-Chief, another the a.s.sociation Chief-Secretary, another the Vice Chief-Secretary, and so on.

I sat feeling that we were stuck in the middle of some gigantic misunderstanding about something, and tried desperately to think of some way of looking intelligent and not letting on that I was merely a science fiction comedy novelist on holiday.

Mark, however, seemed perfectly at his ease. He explained simply and concisely who we were, missing out the science fiction comedy bit, outlined the nature of our project, said why we were interested in the baiji, and asked them an intelligent opening question about the reserve they were building.

I relaxed. I realised, of course, that talking intelligently about conservation projects to large committees in languages he didn't know was part of what he did for a living.

They explained to us that the dolphin reserve was what they called a 'semi-nature reserve.' Its purpose was to constrain the animals within a protected area without taking them out of their natural environment.

A little upstream of Tongling, opposite the town of Datong, there is an elbow-shaped bend in the river. In the crook of the elbow lie two triangular islands, between which runs a channel of water. The channel is about one and a half kilometres long, five metres deep, and between forty and two hundred metres wide, and this channel will be the dolphins' semi-nature reserve.

Fences of bamboo and metal are being constructed at either end of the channel, through which water from the main river flows continuously. A huge amount of remodelling and construction work is being done to make this possible. A large artificial hospital and holding pools are being built on one of the islands to hold injured or newly captured dolphins. A fish farm is being built on the other to feed them.

The scale of the project is enormous. '~ It is very, very expensive, the committee said, solemnly, and they can't even be sure that it will work. But they have to try. The baiji, they explained, is very important to them and it is their duty to protect it.

Mark asked them how on earth they raised the money to do it. It had all been put into operation in an extraordinarily short time.

Yes, they said, we have had to work very, very fast.

They had raised money from many sources. A substantial amount came from the central government, and more again from local government. Then there were many donations from local people and businesses.

They had also, they said a little hesitantly, gone into the business of public relations, and they would welcome our comments on this. Chinese knew little of such matters, but we, as Westerners, must surely be experts.

First, they said, they had persuaded the local brewery to use the baiji as their trademark. Had we tried Baiji Beer? It was of a good quality, now much respected in all of China. Then others had followed. The committee had entered into . . .

Here there was a bit of a vocabulary problem, which necessitated a little discussion with the interpreter before the right phrase at last emerged.

They had entered into licensing agreements. Local businesses had put money into the project, in return for which they were licensed to use the baiji. symbol, which in turn made good publicity for the baiji dolphin.

So now there was not only Baiji Beer, there was also the Baiji Hotel, Baiji shoes, Baiji Cola, Baiji computerised weighing scales, Baiji toilet paper, Baiji phosphorus fertiliser, and Baiji Bentonite.

Bentonite was a new one on me, and I asked them what it was.

They explained that Bentonite was a mining product used in the production of toothpaste, iron and steel casting, and also as an additive for pig food. Baiji Bentonite was a very successful product. Did we, as experts, think that this public relations was good?

We said it was absolutely astonis.h.i.+ng, and congratulated them.

They were very gratified to know this, they said, from Western experts in such matters.

We felt more than a little abashed at these encomiums. It was very hard to imagine anywhere in the Western world that would be capable of responding with such prodigious speed, imagination and communal determination to such a problem. Although the committee told us that they hoped that, since Tongling had recently been declared an open city to visitors for the first time, the dolphins and the semi-nature reserve might bring tourists and tourist money to the area, it was very clear that this was not the primary impulse.

At the end they said, 'The residents in the area gain some profit - that's natural - but we have more profound plans, that is to protect the dolphin as a species, not to let it become extinct in our generation. Its protection is our duty. As we know that only two hundred pieces of this animal survive it may go extinct if we don't take measures to prevent it, and if that happens we will feel guilty for our descendants and later generations.'

We left the room feeling, for the first time in China, uplifted. It seemed that, for all the stilted and awkward formality of the meeting, we had had our first and only real glimpse of the Chinese mind. They took it as their natural duty to protect this animal, both for its own sake and for that of the future world. It was the first time we had been able to see beyond our own a.s.sumptions and have some insight into theirs.

I ordered the Thousand Year Old Eggs again that night, determined to try and enjoy them.

Rare, or Medium Rare?

Richard Lewis is a man who has worked out a foolproof way of getting snappy answers to his questions.

He drives his Landrover (well, not actually his Landrover, but the Landrover of anyone foolhardy enough to lend him one) with what can only be described as pizzazz along Mauritian roads that were built with something less than pizzazz in mind. The roads are often narrow and windy, and where they are tarmacked, the Tarmac tends to finish with an abrupt six-inch drop at the edge. Richard drives along these with a pizzazz that borders dangerously on elan, and when he asks you a question he turns and looks at you and doesn't look back at the road again until you've answered. Mortal terror is not the best state of mind in which to try and frame intelligent answers, but you have to try.

We had managed OK with 'How was the flight? ('Fine!') and 'How was the meal? ('Fine!') and 'Feeling jet-lagged? (We're fine!'), but then we got to what he clearly regarded as being the crunch, so to speak 'Why are you coming all the way to Mauritius to look for some c.r.a.ppy old fruitbat? The Landrover veered frighteningly.

One of the first things you need to know about Richard Lewis, indeed the thing you need to know about him, is that he's an ornithologist. Once you know that, everything else more or less falls into place.

'I just couldn't figure it out,' he protested, twisted half round in his seat to harangue us. 'You're going to Rodrigues? To look for a fruitbat? It's not even particularly rare.'

'Well, it's all relative,' protested Mark. 'It may not be particularly rare by Mauritian standards, but it is the rarest fruitbat in the...'

'Why don't you stay here on Mauritius for heaven's sake?'

'Well . . .'

'What do you know about Mauritius? Anything?'

'Well,' I said, 'I know that . . . er, there's a lorry coming...'

'Never mind about that. I'll take care of the lorries. What do you know about Mauritius?

'I know that it was originally colonised by the Dutch, and when they left it was taken over by the French who lost it to Britain after the Napoleonic Wars. So it's an ex-British colony, part of the Commonwealth. The inhabitants speak French or Creole. The law is basically English and you're, er, supposed to drive on the left...'

'All right, you've read the guide book. But do you know about the birds here? Don't you know about the pink pigeon? The echo parakeet? Don't you know about the Mauritius kestrel?'

'Yes, but...'

'Then why are you going off to the stupid island of Rodrigues to look for some ridiculous fruitbat? We've got a bunch of them here at the captive breeding centre if you really want to see one. Common as muck, stupid things. You'd be much better off staying here and seeing some real stuff. Jesus!'

He had suddenly caught an inadvertent glimpse of the road ahead of us and had to yank hard on the steering wheel to avoid an oncoming truck.

Tell you what,' he said, turning round again. 'How long have you got? Two weeks??

'Yes,' said Mark hurriedly.

'And you were planning to spend two days here and then fly to Rodrigues to spend, what, ten days, searching for the world's rarest fruitbat?'

'Yes.'

'OK. Here's what you do instead. You stay here for ten days, and then go off to Rodrigues for two days. Right?

'Will we find it in two days?'

Yes.'

'How do you know??

'Because I'll tell you exactly where to find it. Take you ten minutes. Take a couple of photos, go home.'