Travels (38 page)

Then he went over to the tracker, who was wearing a baseball cap. He took the cap, inspected it, sniffed it, and carefully put it back on the tracker’s head. Then he moved back a few paces.

I whispered to Rosalind, “That’s amazing.”

“Oh,” she said, “he always does that. That’s his greeting. You see, he knows them.”

Rosalind explained then that the gorillas quickly learned to recognize people. That was why the park officials didn’t let tourists visit the same troop two days running. On the second day, the gorillas would recognize the visitors and allow them to approach more closely than before. And the park officials didn’t want the gorillas to catch visitors’ colds.

They recognize you in one day?

Oh sure, Rosalind said. They’re very bright. You’ll learn to recognize them, too.

I doubted I would learn to recognize them. The gorillas looked pretty much the same to me, except that they were different sizes. As one or another popped out of the underbrush, I couldn’t tell if I had seen them before or not.

Meanwhile, the guide and the big male stared at each other, nose to nose. The silverback grunted. The guide grunted back. I had already been advised about this grunting. We were all supposed to grunt,
uh-huh
, from time to time, or in response to the male’s grunt. The grunt apparently meant something like “I’m here and everything is fine.” In any case, grunting was said to have a calming effect on the gorillas.

I was all for that. Because we were very close to them. Never in my life had I been so close to large wild animals without intervening bars. But nobody had a gun or a weapon of any sort. Our safety lay in the
assumption that the gorillas would be friendly. And they seemed to be friendly.

But the point was, we were in their hands. We were in their territory, guests in their house. And apparently it was going to be all right.

I relaxed, and drifted into a feeling of extraordinary enchantment. Never in my life had I experienced anything like this. To be so close to a wild creature of another species, and yet to feel no threat. And slowly I began to recognize the different animals, just as Rosalind had said. The female with the big incisor. The older juvenile male who strutted about, being manly. The young ones, hardly larger than human infants, who charged us and beat their chests and then dashed up into the trees.

I never wanted to leave.

The guide led the other tourists back, and I stayed with Rosalind and Nicole. And as time passed, I began to have an uncanny sense that I understood what was going on. A female began to move toward us, and I thought,
You’re getting too close, he won’t like that
. And, sure enough, the male looked over and roared, and the female backed off hastily. Overhead, some of the young juveniles played roughly. The silverback grunted loudly; they modified their play. But when the older male came up and glowered at us, the silverback let him do it.

It all made a kind of sense. There were spatial arrangements, invisible but nonetheless distinct boundaries, and the silverback was keeping everybody in his or her place. After a while, he went to sleep. He had one of the infants in his huge palm; the baby fitted entirely in his hand.

I was still trying to deal with my feeling that I understood the troop. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals, but in this case it was hard not to do it. In a relaxed setting, the gorillas seemed very akin to us. Nicole was right: they seemed like men. I hadn’t expected that. I had been around other great apes, and I had never had such a feeling. A chimpanzee, for instance, presents a visual parody of a human being, but it is a distinctly different animal, and in many ways a vicious, unpleasant one. Orangutans appear gentle and morose, but they don’t really seem like human beings. Yet here, among a group of gorillas, creatures that did not look or smell like human beings, I had the distinct sense that we all understood one another. It was overpowering, and sad. When I left them, it was like awakening from a dream.

In 1958, when George Schaller studied mountain gorillas, he estimated their numbers at 525. When I visited Virunga in 1981, it was thought there
were about 275. Now it is thought there are 200. No one is sure what the minimum breeding population is, or whether the gorilla numbers have already fallen below it. In any case, their prospects are not good.

When I left the mountain, I said to Nicole, “I understand now what you mean about not wanting to study gorillas because they are like men.”

“Yes,” she said. “I could not.” She paused. “And also because it is too sad.”

An Extinct Turtle
 

It didn’t seem like much of an adventure: walking past the McDonald’s stand in the Singapore airport, going to the Hertz counter to pick up my rented Datsun for the drive north to a resort hotel in Kuantan, on the east coast of Malaysia.

Nor did it get better driving through Singapore itself, a city that has systematically destroyed every vestige of its own exoticism in a period of ten years. When I first went there, in 1973, Singapore was magical—part modern business center, part sleepy British colony, and everywhere beautiful, hot, green. Wherever you turned, it revealed tantalizing glimpses of its own history, like the barbed wire around the balconies of the colonial houses, reminders of the Japanese occupation. It was a city of distinct quarters: the Indian quarter, the Chinese quarter around the river, the Malay quarter, each with its own feeling, faces, architecture, and smells.

But all that is gone now. Even its innocent pleasures, the vast chili-crab palaces along the coast, have disappeared. Whatever its modern virtues, and they are many, Singapore has chosen to destroy its unique face, and replace it with skyscrapers and giant shopping malls so it looks like everywhere else.

It took an hour to drive north, across the bridge into Malaysia, and then to find the road to the east coast. My feeling of adventure did not increase as I crept behind a long line of diesel-belching trucks. Waiting
for the light to change: nothing so ruins a sense of exotic adventure as a traffic light.

Driving up the east coast of Malaysia, I had the feeling of visiting someplace that had once been remote but was no longer. A succession of drab little towns on the water, a mangrove-swampy coast, a potted but serviceable highway.

The weather turned cold, and rainy, one of the drenching Malaysian rains that you always expect to be tropical but are somehow chilling and cold. I rolled up the windows, turned the wipers up full, and felt isolated in my car, slowly beginning to feel I didn’t know where I was. Even after the rain stopped, I felt disoriented.

Kuantan was a big, ugly town—cement factories and Honda truck dealerships. It seemed an unlikely place for a resort hotel, and I didn’t see any signs for the Hyatt Kuantan. I drove on.

Night approached. The features of the countryside began to recede into grayness. The road was badly marked, and I did not want to be driving at night. I missed the road for the Hyatt, asked directions at a little roadside restaurant, doubled back, missed it again. This wasn’t high adventure, it was mundane frustration. When I finally arrived at the hotel, I saw immediately it was the kind of place that gives Hyatt a bad name. I wished I hadn’t come.

But charming guesthouses on the east coast are not easily telexed at short notice, and I had come here in the spring of 1982 for a particular reason—to see the seasonal egg-laying of the giant Malaysian leatherback turtles.

For several months beginning in May, the turtles emerge from the ocean to lay their eggs on the isolated beaches of the east coast. In fact, so remote are the beaches that the turtles were presumed extinct until the 1950s, when they were observed still laying their eggs.

This was all I really knew, but I assumed I would find out more at the location. So as I checked into the hotel, I asked the receptionist.

“I’ve come to see the turtles.”

“Yes? We have no turtles at the hotel.”

“The giant turtles that lay their eggs?”

“Yes. They are not here.”

“But on the coast?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps farther north. You will have to ask.”

“Whom should I ask?”

“Ask the tourist desk in the morning. But I think it is the wrong time.”

“It does not begin in May?”

“I don’t know. I think there are no turtles, it is the wrong time.”

A negative person, I thought, and uninformed as well. The hotel should think twice about having such a person behind the reception desk. After all, the turtles must be a great attraction in this region; a hotel person would logically be expected to know about them.

But in subsequent days I became discouraged. Nobody seemed to know about the turtles. They knew about the windsurfers. They knew about the jungle tours. They knew about the native dance excursions. But no one knew about the turtles. I went into Kuantan town and found the local tourist office. It was closed. They said the woman who ran it was in Kuala Lumpur and would be back in a week.

Finally, one day, as I was arranging for a windsurfer, one of the men who worked at the beach shack said casually, “They saw turtles yesterday.”

“Who did?”

“Chinese people.”

“Where did they see them?”

He named a hotel.

“Where is that?”

“Up the coast. Fifty kilometers.”

“And they saw turtles last night?”

“About two a.m. Three turtles,” he said, nodding. “Big ones. Two hundred kilos.”

I told him I wanted to see these turtles.

“Yes, why not? It is the season.”

“Well, I haven’t been able to arrange it.”

“No one can arrange it. The turtles do as they please.”

“What do I do to see them?”

“Go up to the hotel. They have turtles there.”

“Every night?”

“No, not every night. You can call first before you drive up.”

I called the hotel. Yes, they had seen turtles. They had seen them three of the last four nights. Yes, I could call later on and they would tell me if they were seeing turtles.

I called around ten that night. The woman said they had not seen turtles yet; it was too early in the season.

I called at midnight. No one answered the phone.

I drove up anyway.

On the way, it started to rain. Fifty kilometers to the north, I pulled into a modern hotel, gray concrete structures, grassy lawns. The rain was
coming down hard. There was a beach directly ahead. I got out of the car and walked to the beach. There was no one there, and nothing to see. The rain slashed down heavily.

A man came up in the darkness. “Why are you here?”

“I came to see turtles.”

“No turtles tonight.”

“But I thought—”

“No turtles.”

I went home.

I called the following night. The hotel said they had seen many turtles last night, but none so far tonight.

At midnight, I called again. A man said they had seen a turtle. It was on the beach nearby. How long would it be there? I asked. Many hours, he said.

I drove up.

There was again nobody around the hotel. The lobby was deserted. I pushed the buzzer for the manager. Nobody came. I walked out onto the beach. It was a beautiful night, a full moon, fleecy clouds, warm air. I saw nobody on the beach, which extended away for miles in every direction.

Pretty soon a young boy on a motor scooter buzzed down the beach, near the water. I watched him go, the sound fading. About ten minutes later he came back.

“Turtles?” he called to me softly in the darkness. He might have been a drug dealer.

“Yes,” I said.

“I am looking for them. I find them, I take you there.”

“Good. Thank you.”

“You have seen them?”

“No, never.”

“You have not seen the one?”

“Where?”

“Close. By the tree.” He pointed.

There were trees at the edge of the beach, casting shadows in the moonlight. Beneath one I saw a shape in the sand. I went over and clicked on my flashlight.

The turtle was enormous, the size of a desk. She was facing the ocean. With her flippers she had dug a pit of sand perhaps three feet deep. Now she was laying her translucent, slippery, soft eggs in the pit. Her magnificent head moved slowly back and forth. A tear came to her eyes.

The turtle must have weighed three hundred pounds, perhaps more.
To crawl a hundred yards up the beach, dig a pit with her clumsy flippers, and lay her eggs had required an enormous effort. She had an exhausted, dazed look on her face. There were more tears, but these were apparently excretions from the eyes and not true tears. I watched the turtle with astonishment, amazed by the effort, the ancient ritual that led her to do this each year. I was quite content to stay there all night.

There was a commotion to one side. A dozen people, Chinese and Malays, came up the beach. They had heard about the turtle. They brought powerful lights, which they shone on the animal. I began to feel uncomfortable. There were now a lot of people standing around this turtle while she laid her eggs.

The others began to fire flashbulbs, taking pictures of the turtle. They got very close to her face and fired flash after flash. Finally the father of the Chinese family said something to his son, and the boy climbed on the turtle’s back while his father flashed another picture. Pretty soon his whole family was posed astride the turtle, as she moved her hind flippers ineffectually.