The Salmon of Doubt

My childhood holidays were pretty modest. The highlight was a fortnight in the Isle of Wight when I was about six. I remember catching what I was convinced a plaice, though it was only the size of a postage stamp and probably died when I tried to keep it as a pet.

Have you been back there since you were a child?

I’ve been back to the Isle of Wight about once. I stayed at a hotel where the evenings’ entertainment was to turn off the lights in the restaurant and watch as a family of badgers played on the lawn. Where did you go the first time you went on holidays without your parents?

I hitchhiked around Europe when I was eighteen.

What did you get up to? I went to Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Turkey, staying in Youth Hostels and camp sites, and supplemented my diet by going on free tours around breweries. Istanbul was particularly wonderful, but I ended up with terrible food poisoning and had to return to England by train sleeping in the corridor just next to the loo. Ahh, magical times.

Have you been back there since?

I returned to Istanbul once. I was flying back from Australia and arbitrarily decided to stop off in Istanbul on the way back. But getting a taxi in from the airport and staying in a nice hotel instead of getting a ride in on the back of a truck and sleeping in the back room of a cheap boarding house somehow robbed it of its magic. I wandered around for a couple of days trying to avoid carpet sellers and then gave up.

Where is the most remote or bizarre place you have ended up?

Easter Island is, of course, the most remote place on Earth. Famous for being further from anywhere than anywhere else is. Which is why it is odd that I ended up there completely by accident and only for about an hour. I learned a very important lesson from this which is read your ticket.

I was flying from Santiago to Sydney and was a bit tired, having spent the previous two weeks looking for fur seals, and didn’t wake up to what the plane’s itinerary was until the pilot mentioned that we were just coming in for our one-hour stopover on Easter Island.

There was a little fleet of minibuses at the airport, which whisk you away for a quick peek at the nearest statue while the plane refuels. It was incredibly frustrating because if I had been paying attention the day before, I could easily have changed my ticket and stayed over for a couple of days. What’s your favorite city? What fascinates you most about it?

In my imagination, it’s Florence, but that’s only because of memories of traveling there as a student and spending days on end blissed out on sun, cheap wine, and art. Recent visits have overlaid those earlier memories with traffic jams and smog.

Now I think I’d say that my favourite city is just a small town—Santa Fe, New Mexico. I love the high desert air, margaritas and guacamole, the silver belt buckles and the sense that people sitting at the next table to you in the cafe are probably Nobel laureates.

When was the last time you hitchhiked?

About ten years ago, on the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean. Hitchhiking was the only method of getting around the island. There was no public transport, but a couple of people owned Land Rovers, so you just had to hope they’d be passing. I ended up in a forest at dusk wearing shorts, but having left my mosquito repellent behind. As a result I endured the most agonising night of my life.

Where was your favourite place when you were on the road of Last Chance to See?

Madagascar—though in fact that was a kind of prelude to Last Chance to See. I loved the forest and the lemurs and the warmth of the people. What do you consider the most interesting man-made structure in the galaxy?

The dam they are building at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse. Though perhaps “baffling” would be a better word. Dams almost never do what they were intended to do, but create devastation beyond belief.

And yet we keep on building them, and I can’t help but wonder why. I’m convinced that if we go back far enough in the history of the human species, we will find some beaver genes creeping in there somewhere. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. Have you ever been there?

I haven’t been to the Yangtse since construction started. I never want to see the thing.

And the most interesting natural structure?

A giant, two-thousand-mile-long fish in orbit around Jupiter, according to a reliable report in the Weekly World News. The photograph was very convincing, and I’m only surprised that more reputable journals like New Scientist, or even just The Sun, haven’t followed up with more details. We should be told. If you were to name a place that “looks like it’s just been dropped from outer space,” where would you think of?

Fjordland in South Island, New Zealand. An impossible jumble of mountains, waterfalls, lakes, and ice—the most extraordinary place I think I’ve ever seen. If you could go anywhere in the universe right now, where would you go, how would you get there, and who and what would you take with you?