The Salmon of Doubt

Over the border lies Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in the world. It is to the peak of Kilimanjaro that the expedition is intending to climb—a small bunch of Englishman out walking miles a day in the midday sun and taking turns at wearing a large rhino costume. Mad dogs have thrown in the towel long ago. What’s all this, I expect you’re thinking, about “the tallest mountain in the world”?

Everest, surely, deserves at least an honourable mention in this category? Well, it all depends or your point of view. Certainly, Everest stands a sturdy 29,028 feet above sea level, which is, in its way, impressive. But if you were going to climb Everest, you would probably start, if you were using a reliable guide, somewhere in the Himalayas. Anywhere in the Himalayas is pretty damn high to start with and so, to hear some people tell it, it’s just a smartish jog to do the last little bit to the actual top of Everest. The way to keep it interesting these days is to do it without oxygen or in your underpants or something.

But Kilimanjaro is not part of a widespread upheaval like Everest. It was a long time before people managed to work out which bit of the Himalayas was actually the highest, and the discovery was finally made, as I recall, on a desk in London. No such problem with Kilimanjaro. It’s volcanic and stands on its own, surrounded by a few footling little hills. When you finally get to see Killy, searching among the befuddling clouds on the horizon, your blood suddenly runs cold. “Oh,” you say at last, “you mean above the clouds.” Your whole head tilts upward. “Oh my god ...” From base to apex, it is the tallest mountain in the world. It’s certainly a hell of a thing to climb in a rhino costume. This crackpot idea was first put to me months earlier by the founders of Save the Rhino International, David Stirling and Johnny Roberts, and I didn’t realise at first that they meant it. They raved on for a bit about having acquired a whole set of rhino costumes that Ralph Steadman had designed for an opera, and that they would be just the thing for making the ascent of Kilimanjaro in. They had already been used, David told me by way of reassurance, for running in the New York Marathon. “It’ll have enormous impact,” they said, “believe me. Really.” I began to realise the truth of this as we approached our first village of the day, and perhaps now would be a good point to explain what the purpose of the whole expedition was. It was not, in fact, to raise money directly for rhino conservation. Rhinos, which used to be plentiful on the plains of East Africa, are now hideously rare, but in Kenya they are about as well conserved as they can be anywhere in Africa.

Richard Leakey’s Kenya Wildlife Service consists of eight thousand well-trained, well-equipped, well-armed, highly motivated soldiers, and represents a formidable force. Too formidable, some of his opponents feel. Poaching in Kenya is, officially, “no longer a problem.” But conservation is a continually evolving business, and we have begun to realise that just wading into Africa and telling the local people that they mustn’t do to their wildlife what we’ve done to ours, and that we are there to make sure they don’t, is an attitude that, to say the least, needs a little refining. The communities that live along the margins of the great national parks have a tough time. They are poor and undernourished, their lands are restricted by the parks, and when from time to time the odd lion or elephant breaks out of the park, they are the ones who suffer. Arguments about preserving the genetic diversity of the planet can seem a little abstract to someone who has just lost the crops he needs to feed his family or, worse, has just lost one of his family. In the long run conservation can’t be imposed by outsiders, overriding the needs of local people. If anyone is going to take care of the wildlife, then, in the end, it must be the local people—and someone must take care of them.

As we were approaching our first village of the day, the rhino with Todd Jones inside it, was in the lead.

All the walkers took turns at wearing the thing for an hour at a time, and you quickly learned to tell who was in it at any moment from the way in which it moved. If the rhino sauntered, then it was Giles inside.

Giles was an ex-Gordonstoun Hugh Grant lookalike who had spent the last few years hitchhiking languidly around Africa with his own parachute. His technique was to turn up at airfields with this parachute, find someone who was flying in the general direction he wanted to go, hitch a lift, and then, when the fancy took him, just jump out of the plane. Apparently his girlfriend was a top supermodel who, every few months, would find out where he was, fly out there, and then (I’m guessing here) have him washed and sent up to her hotel room.