‘Rather you than me,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want a mouthful of poison. Shouldn’t do you much 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. Septicaemia, 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. Keep the leg, or whatever bit of you it is 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 poisonous than anything on land. Get stung by a stone fish 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, 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, towards 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 away in 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 pacts 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 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.