Voyager: Travel Writings (25 page)

The islands themselves, La Digue and Praslin, situated close to each other, are as unique as the rare birds that make them their last home. Several biblical legends have been associated with the islands, generated by the famous coco-de-mer, the towering palm that grows only on Praslin. It’s a tree whose huge seeds of astonishingly erotic shapes have washed up for eons on the shores of India, Africa, and Indonesia, coming from a place so far off the map that, until relatively recent times, no one knew it existed. Inevitably, the rare and mysterious nut came to be regarded as an aphrodisiac, and naturally, Victorian Christians, once they discovered its source, decided that the place was the original paradise and that the coco-de-mer was surely the Edenic fruit that had caused so much trouble there and everywhere.

As our boat approached La Digue, the old man with the black umbrella tottered up and out of the cabin to the deck and began studying the shore through his binoculars, not missing one of the not-too-many moments he had left. His combined ferocity of pur
pose and concentration and his physical fragility made him a striking sight, especially surrounded as he was by a gang of boisterous, healthy Seychellois school kids who seemed to have no focus whatsoever for their enormous vitality.

The coco-de-mer aside, the island of La Digue, if not paradise, was not far east of Eden. There were very few people, fewer than two thousand, and almost no motor vehicles. No place was too far to walk to. Bicycles and oxcarts were used for transportation, though the oxcarts were mostly for hauling tourists from the jetty along the single-lane dirt road to the one hotel in town. Réunion, the town, was a tiny fishing settlement scattered along the coast, facing Praslin a few miles to the northwest.

At La Digue Island Lodge, I was put in “the yellow house,” which turned out to be a renovated, bright yellow colonial residence with a shady veranda and eight small neat rooms, each with a spiral staircase leading to a large first-class bathroom below. There was an abundance of elaborately carved woodwork everywhere: banisters, doors, sashes, countertops—all of it beautifully crafted, fitted, and finished.

It was the heat of the day, midafternoon, but I was so eager to see more of this place that I unpacked quickly and went out for a serious walk, forgetting my hat and neglecting to bring a bottle of water.

Big mistake. I hiked north through the village, passing day-trippers from Mahé and Praslin pedaling rented bikes out to the beaches and now and then a scrawny dog who couldn’t find a piece of shade. North of town and then around the point, one incredibly beautiful cove led to another, with no one there—nothing but lush, equatorial foliage, flowers, white sand beach, pink and red granite boulders eroding into fantastic shapes. Soon I’d gone beyond the point of easy return to the village. But it was impossible not to keep walking. The astounding beauty like a drug led me way beyond the point of no return, until I was closer to circling the whole island
than going back over my tracks. So I kept going, despite the heat and my thirst.

At one point I caught up to a teenage girl walking barefoot in a red dress in the glaring heat and sunlight, over from Mahé, she told me, on holiday from school and on her way to visit her grandma. A Little Red Riding Hood who may have been a hallucination by this time, although she seemed real enough, and I certainly did speak with her as we walked side by side for several miles. I felt like the Wolf, disguised not as a proper woodsman but as a tanned hiker who, beneath his clever disguise, was all lupine gray and corrupted by the huge dark industrialized world beyond.

Finally, we came to a path that led to where she said her grandma lived, and the girl parted from me. A ways farther, my trail ended, became a narrow track in the bush, then disappeared among the rocks before my eyes, and I feared that with one more step I would be lost. With no choice in the matter, I turned back, staggering along the pathway to the single-track roadway, the sun beating straight down on me. I slogged on, dizzy and rapidly nearing the point of exhaustion and dangerous dehydration, genuinely frightened now, when suddenly a beat-up red pickup truck rattled along, coming from God-knows-where behind me, with a bunch of teenage boys in back. Was it a hallucination, too? It was red, after all.

But no, it was real—spewing exhaust and blatting and skipping along the rough seacoast road with the radio blasting and the boys in the back banging loudly on the roof of the cab in time to Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry.” Never so glad to see a motor vehicle in my life, I hailed the truck, the driver brought it to a stop, and I climbed aboard and rode back to Réunion, surely saved from serious sunstroke.

Two hours later, showered in my first-class air-conditioned bathroom, two to three quarts of water in my belly, and a short nap behind me, I was fully recovered and ready for action. There wasn’t much action on La Digue, however. After dinner at the hotel restau
rant, I walked in the dark down to Choppy’s, a bar located in an old movie theater called the Odéon, where I talked awhile with a local fisherman named Michael and his German girlfriend, Karen, who’d been out here for eleven months now. At Michael and Karen’s urging, and the bartender’s compliance, I tried
baka,
a fermented fruit brew with a very high alcohol content, a local favorite since colonial days. The bartender kept it in a jug in a cooler behind the bar and offered “samples only,” as she had no license to sell it. It wasn’t bad, but very dangerous, like a strong planter’s punch.

Later, Michael and Karen took me to
le disco
at the cinder-block community center, where we all danced furiously to very loud, very good dance music, mostly U.S. rap and Jamaican reggae, in a nearly dark hall lit by a single yellow bulb.

The next day was the day I sighted the paradise flycatcher out by the old French graveyard, and afterward, as if to recover my senses, I spent the afternoon reading Henry James alone at a beach. Coming back to Réunion, I noticed at the side of a small house a wire cage holding what appeared to be three house cats but on closer inspection turned out to be fox bats. They are regarded as a delicacy here and are eaten grilled, baked, or in a pâté. I stopped and examined them for a long while, fascinated to see them up close like this. Their bodies were indeed the size of a house cat, but when they spread their black, silky wings, they were as big as eagles. They had small canine faces with reddish hair covering their bodies, except for their wings. They hung upside down inside the cage, watching me alertly, keeping their faces toward me as I circled outside the cage, their claws clattering against the wires as they turned. They yawned now and then, like bored dogs, but their eyes were black and watchful, as if they knew what was in store for them.

That evening, I was standing by the hotel pool having a loony conversation with a bald-headed Russian who looked like Yul Brynner and was teaching his five-year-old daughter to write Roman numerals in the sand. He kept uttering pronouncements
like “Twentieth-century literature is the literature of suicide” and “Christianity is only the second of the five levels of understanding,” like a character out of Dostoyevsky. In exasperation, I rolled my eyes skyward and saw swooping over the tops of the trees, silhouetted against the rose-colored evening sky, four, five,
six
fox bats, stunningly graceful in flight. They were so much more exciting and beautiful than when caged, and powerful, frightening—flying like land animals with wings, not at all like birds. They flew exactly as we do in our dreams of flying—controlled floating, wheeling overhead, safely watching everything going on below.

To catch the six o’clock ferry to Praslin the next morning, I was up at five and arrived at the jetty just as the boat was pulling away—even though it was only five thirty-five. I leaped aboard, just making it, to the delight and laughter of the crew and the handful of local people on board. They do have schedules here, but nobody seems to pay much attention to them, and they’re as often early as late. As we left the bay, the sun rose behind the black silhouette of La Digue, and the sky went from cream to pale rose to turquoise. The water turned glossy black, and the island was a purple carbon color. I watched in awe while the earth simply behaved as it must.

Coming out here, I’d had only a vague idea of the effect the natural world could have on me. I had been thinking beaches, mountains, a few serious hikes in the rain forest, flowers, ferns, birds—the usual set of tropical-island clichés. I’d been a little curious about the people, about society, politics, history, racial attitudes. But I hadn’t been very curious about the place itself, the land and the sea and the sky above and what lived in them and on them. But with all this hiking, with my visits to the untouched reef and the schools of protected fish, the shifting white mists of Trois Frères, the spotless, solitary beaches, putting
myself
in and on the land and sea, with the sighting of the paradise flycatcher
my first full day on La Digue and fox bats soaring above the palms against the evening sky—these sights, almost like visions, had deeply affected the quality and intensity of my emotions, radically altering the overall relation I bore to this place in particular and to the environment in general.

The natural world has been preserved here, yes, but seeing it this close makes you aware of your absolute need for it, and that can break your heart. The preservation of this tiny bit of the planet makes you realize that the rest of the planet has been destroyed and can’t be made to come back. For me, the big event was seeing the paradise flycatcher.
That
did it—broke my heart. I couldn’t get over the fact that there are only forty pairs left on the earth, all of them on the remote island of La Digue, and that one of the birds was twittering on a poinciana branch right in front of me.

And now I was headed to Praslin, home of the Vallée de Mai, where the legendary coco-de-mer palm tree grew and where the last twenty-six black parrots on earth were to be found. How many by today? Twenty-three? Up to twenty-eight, maybe? Did it matter? Peter Matthiessen trekked to the high Himalayas to see one of the last snow leopards on earth. For me, I guess, it’s the last paradise flycatcher, the last black parrot. More modest, I suppose, than Matthiessen’s quest, but no less significantly moving to me for that. Standing eye-to-eye with that little black bird in an old French colonial cemetery amid crumbling, sinking stones at the edge of the shore—that’s adventure enough for my heart.

About as much as I can handle, actually. But that’s what one needs, isn’t it? Enough heartache, not to
save
the world, for that’s simply no longer possible, but merely to keep from helping in its destruction. The elegiac mode is the only appropriate form for our attention now. The only one available to me, anyhow. Up to now, I’d not been wrong, just unimaginative, about the fate of the earth, and in that sense, which is an important one, I had been wrong. Those T-shirts worn by Seychellois teenagers with the
motto
BE AN EXAMPLE TO THE WORLD!
don’t look so chauvinistic and provincial anymore. Just too late.

At Praslin, after settling in at La Réserve Hotel, I took the bumpy local bus out to the end of the line at Anse Boudin, walked two miles farther to Anse Lazio, reputedly the best beach on the island, and, after a long swim, had a pleasant lunch at a little beachfront restaurant, the Bonbon Plume. There was more of the wonderful woodwork that I’d seen all over La Digue and in the rural parts of Mahé and that had come to seem the characteristic and most distinctive Seychelles art form.

That evening I walked out again from my hotel, where a Chinese buffet was being served, for a creole meal instead. A place called Café des Arts was recommended to me by an Italian couple I’d talked to on the boat from La Digue. I passed through a mile and a half, two miles, of tropical dark, with no light from houses, for there was no electricity out there, no streetlights, no passing cars. It was a palpable darkness, like being inside a black tent. I walked down the dirt road through the village and on out, past a seaside house walled against the road, when suddenly I heard the unmistakable sound of a tenor sax. John Coltrane playing “Giant Steps”! For a long while, as long as the tape or record played on the other side, I stood next to the wall and for the first time on this journey felt truly homesick. I’d obtained whatever I’d come out here looking for, and now I wanted to take it home with me, to apply it there.

The next day would be my last on Praslin, my next to last in Seychelles. I rode the bus over bumpy winding roads to the famed Vallée de Mai, where I got out and began the two- to three-hour walk through the park, following the trail markers and my guidebook.

The Vallée was truly Edenic—as advertised, as predicted, as reported and chronicled by awed visitors for the last two centuries. I expected to see a brontosaurus munching among the tree-size ferns, to look up and see pterodactyls instead of fox bats soaring overhead. The hundred-foot-tall coco-de-mer was as truly erotic as everyone had said, its nut the largest seed in the world, weighing up to forty pounds and shaped like a Brancusi sculpture of the female torso, anatomically exact, with the male plant owning a huge black penis, the two of them pornographic comic book versions of female and male genitalia. One could only gape.

I had never seen any place this densely green, with primitive plants blocking out the sun and a wall-of-sound of birdsong. I could understand why General Gordon, hero of Khartoum, having stopped here on the way home from his post in Mauritius, decided that the earlier visitors and theologians were right, this was indeed the original Eden, and rushed on to London with the news.

Then, once again, great luck! Just as I came to the end of the winding path through the park, I looked up at the umbrella top of a huge cola nut tree and spotted, jerking along a branch in characteristic parrot-walk, as if pulling themselves ahead by their beaks, two small smoke-gray parrots that were nothing special, of course, except for what I knew about them, which intensified them, literally singled them out—for these were two of the last twenty-six black parrots in this garden, on this island, on this planet. In this universe.