Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [48]
“Then,” he said quietly, triumphantly, “you must leave from Bukavu.”
He made no move to give us back our passports.
We looked at him blankly.
He explained slowly. Tourists, he said, had to leave the country from the same port by which they had entered. Smile.
We utterly failed to understand what he had said. This was almost true, anyway. It was the most preposterous invention. He still held on to our passports. Next to him a young girl was sitting, studiously copying down copious information from other visitors’ passports, information that would almost certainly never see the light of day again.
We stood and argued while our plane sat out on the tarmac waiting to take off to Nairobi, but the official simply sat and held our passports. We knew it was nonsense. He knew we knew it was nonsense. That was clearly part of the pleasure of it. He smiled at us again, gave us a slow contented shrug, and idly brushed a bit of fluff off the sleeve of the natty blue suit toward the cost of which he clearly expected a major contribution.
On the wall above him, gazing seriously into the middle distance from a battered frame, stood the figure of President Mobutu, resplendent in his leopard-skin pillbox hat.
HEARTBEATS
IN THE NIGHT
IF YOU TOOK THE WHOLE of Norway, scrunched it up a bit, shook out all the moose and reindeer, hurled it ten thousand miles around the world, and filled it with birds, then you’d be wasting your time, because it looks very much as if someone has already done it.
Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the southwest corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God’s earth, and one’s first impulse, standing on a clifftop surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.
It is magnificent. It is awe-inspiring. The land is folded and twisted and broken on such a scale that it makes your brain quiver and sing in your skull just trying to comprehend what it is looking at. Mountains and clouds jumbled on top of each other, immense rivers of ice cracking their way millimetre by millimetre through the ravines, cataracts thundering down into the narrow green valleys below—it all shines so luminously in the magically clear light of New Zealand that to eyes which are accustomed to the grimier air of most of the Western world, it seems too vivid to be real.
When Captain Cook saw it from the sea in 1773, he recorded that “inland as far as the eye can see the peaks are crowded together as to scarcely admit any valleys between them.” The great forked valleys have been carved out by glaciers over millions of years, and many are flooded by the sea for many miles inland. Some of the cliff faces drop hundreds of feet sheer into the water, and continue sheer for hundreds of feet below it. It still has the appearance of a work in progress. Despite relentless lashing by the wind and rain, it is sharp and jagged in its immensity.
Much of it has still not been explored at ground level. The only roads that approach the Fiordland National Park peter out quickly in the foothills, and most visiting tourists only ever explore the fringe scenery. A few backpackers plunge farther in, and very, very few experienced campers try to get anywhere near the heart of it. Looking out across its serrated masses and its impossibly deep ravines, you feel that the very idea of trying to cross it on foot is ludicrous. Most serious exploration is of small local pockets, reached by helicopter, which is how we came to it.
Bill Black is said to be one of the most experienced helicopter pilots in the world, and he needs to be. He sits like a cuddly old curmudgeon hunched over his joystick and chews gum slowly and continuously as he flies his helicopter directly at sheer cliff faces to see if you’ll scream. Just as the helicopter seems about to smash itself against the rock wall, an updraught catches it and wafts it impossibly up and over the top of the ridge, which then falls away again precipitously on the other side, leaving us