The Salmon of Doubt Page 7

  In between the squalls of rain and trumpets I fell into conversation with an engaging fellow who turned out to be my sister’s next-door neighbour up there in Warwickshire, which was where the sodden field was. His name was Martin Pemberton, and he was an inventor and designer. Among the things he had invented or designed, he told me, were various crucial bits of tube trains, a wonderful new form of thinking toaster, and also a Sub Bug.

  What, I asked politely, was a Sub Bug?

  A Sub Bug, he explained, was a jet-propelled underwater buggy sort of thing. A bit like the front half of a dolphin. You hold on to the rear and it pulls you through the sea at depths of up to thirty feet. Remember that bit in the movie of Thunder-ball? A bit like those things. Great for exploring coral reefs.

  I’m not sure if that’s exactly what he said. He may have said “azure sea” or “limpid depths.” Probably not, but that was the picture in my brain as I sat in the blustery rain watching an escaped umbrella totter past the bandstand.

  I had to try one. I said so to Martin. I may even have wrestled him to the ground and knelt on his windpipe, everything was a bit of a blur to be honest, but anyway he said he would be delighted to let me try one. The question was where? I could try it anywhere, even just in the local swimming pool. No. The trick was to get to try it in Australia, on the Great Barrier Reef. I needed an angle, though, if I was going to get some hapless magazine to stump up a trip for me to try it which, believe me, is the only way to travel.

  Then I remembered my unfinished business in Australia.

  There’s an island I had visited briefly once ten years ago in the Whitsundays, at the southern end of the reef. It was a pretty dreadful place, called Hayman Island. The island itself was beautiful, but the resort that had been built on it was not, and I had ended up there by mistake, exhausted, at the end of an author tour. I hated it. The brochure was splattered with words like “international” and “superb” and “sophisticated,” and what this meant was that they had Muzak pumped out of the palm trees and themed fancy-dress parties every night. By day I would sit at a table by the pool getting slowly sozzled on Tequila Sunrises and listening to the conversations at nearby tables which seemed mostly to be about road accidents involving heavy-goods vehicles. In the evening I would retire woozily to my room in order to avoid the sight of maddened drunk Australians rampaging through the night in grass skirts or cowboy hats or whatever the theme of the evening was, while I watched Mad Max movies on the hotel video. These also featured a lot of road accidents, several of which involved heavy-goods vehicles. I couldn’t even find anything to read. The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I’d written both of them.

  On one occasion I talked to an Australian couple on the beach. I said, “Hello, my name is Douglas, don’t you hate the Muzak?” They said they didn’t, as a matter of fact. They thought it was very nice and international and sophisticated. They lived on a sheep farm some 850 miles west of Brisbane, where all they ever heard, they said, was nothing. I said that must be very nice and they said that it got rather boring after a while, and that a little light Muzak was balm to them. They refused to go along with my assertion that it was like having Spam stuffed in your ears all day, and after a while the conversation petered out.

  I made my escape from Hayman Island and ended up on a scuba-diving boat on Hook Reef, where I had the best week of my life, exploring the coral, diving with a wild variety of fish, dolphins, sharks, and even a minke whale.

  It was only after I had left Hayman Island that I heard of something really major that I had missed there.

  There was a bay tucked round on the other side, called Manta Ray Bay, that was full, as you might expect, of manta rays: huge, graceful, underwater flying carpets, one of the most beautiful animals in the world. The man who told me about it said that they were such placid and benign creatures that they would even allow people to ride on their backs underwater.

  And I had missed it. For ten years I fretted about this.

  Meanwhile I had also heard that Hayman Island itself had changed out of all recognition. It had been bought up by the Australian airline Ansett, who had spent a squillion dollars on ripping the Muzak out of the palm trees and transforming the resort into something that was not only international and superb and sophisticated and so on, but also breathtakingly expensive and, by all accounts, actually pretty good.

  So here, I thought, was the angle. I would write an article about taking a Sub Bug all the way to Hayman Island, finding a friendly manta ray, and doing, effectively, a comparative test drive.

  Now any sane, rational person might say that that was a thoroughly stupid idea, and indeed a lot of them did. However, this is that article: a comparative test drive between an underwater propeller-driven, blue and yellow one-person Sub Bug, and a giant manta ray.

  Did it work out?

  Guess.

  The sheer fatuous unreality of the idea struck me forcibly as we watched the huge forty-kilogram silver box containing the Sub Bug being wheeled across the tarmac at Hamilton Island airport. There was, I realised, a huge difference between telling people in England that I was going to Australia to do a comparative test drive between a Sub Bug and a manta ray, and telling people in Australia that I had come to do a comparative test drive, etc. I suddenly felt like an extremely idiotic Englishman whom everyone would hate and despise and point at and snigger about and make fun of.

  My wife, Jane, calmly explained to me that I always became completely paranoid when I had jet lag, and why didn’t I just have a drink and relax.

  Hamilton Island looks like a pretty good example of what not to do to a beautiful subtropical island on the edge of one of the great wonders of the natural world, which is to cover it with hideous high-rise junk architecture, and sell beer and T-shirts and also picture postcards of how beautiful it used to be before all the postcard shops arrived. However, we would only be there for a few minutes. Sitting waiting for us at the jetty by the small airport was the Sun Goddess, which was the sort of glamorous gleaming white boat that James Bond always seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time on, considering he was actually supposed to be a civil servant. It had been sent to meet guests going on to Hayman Island, and was the first indication of how much the place had changed.

  We were ushered graciously aboard. One attendant offered us glasses of champagne while another stood guard by the sliding glass doors that led into the air-conditioned interior.

  His job was to push them open for us. He explained that this had become necessary because unfortunately the doors didn’t open automatically when you approached them, and some of their Japanese visitors would often just stand in front of them for whole minutes getting increasingly bewildered and panic-stricken until someone slid them open by hand.

  The journey took about an hour, streaking effortlessly over the dark and gleaming sea under a brilliant sun. Smaller lush green islands slid past us in the distance. I watched the long wake of water folding back into the sea behind us, sipped at my champagne, and thought of an old bridge that I know in Sturminster Newton in Dorset. It still has a cast-iron notice bolted to it that warns anybody thinking of damaging or defacing the bridge in any way that the penalty is transportation. To Australia. Now, Sturminster Newton is a lovely town, but it astonishes me that the bridge is still standing.

  Jane, who is much better at reading guide books than I am (I always read them on the way back to see what I missed, and it’s often quite a shock), discovered something wonderful in the book she was reading. Did I know, she asked, that Brisbane was originally founded as a penal colony for convicts who committed new offences after they had arrived in Australia?

  I spent a good half hour enjoying this single piece of information. It was wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we wished to punish most severely to sit in bright sunlight on the coast of the Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barr
ier Reef and maybe do some surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they reserve exclusively for use on the British.

  From offshore, Hayman Island looks deserted, just a large, verdant hill fringed with pale beaches set in a dark blue sea. Only from very close to can you spot the long, low hotel nestling among the palms. There is hardly anywhere you can get a good look at it from, since it is virtually smothered with what look like giant feral pot plants. It snakes and winds its way through the greenery: pillars, fountains, shaded plazas, sun decks, discreet little shops selling heart-stoppingly expensive little things with designer labels you’d have to carefully unpick, and indiscreetly large swimming pools.

  It was pretty fabulous. We adored it immediately. It was exactly the sort of place that twenty years ago I would have despised anybody for going to. One of the great things about growing older and getting things like freebie holidays is that you can finally get to do all those things that you used to despise other people for doing: sitting around on a sundeck wearing sunglasses that cost about a year’s student grant, ordering up grotesque indulgences on room service, being pampered and waited on hand and foot by—and get this, this is a very important and significant part of what happens to you on Hayman Island—staff who don’t just say “No worries” when you thank them for topping up your champagne glass, they actually say “No worries at all.” They truly and sincerely want you, specifically you, not just any old fat git lying around in a sun hat, but you personally, to feel that there is nothing in this best of all possible worlds that you have come to for you to concern yourself about in any way at all. Really. Really. We don’t even despise you. Really. No worries at all.

  If only it were true. I had my Sub Bug to worry about, of course. This huge great thing that I had lugged ten times farther than Moses had dragged the children of Israel, just in order to see how it compared with a manta ray as a means of getting about underwater. It had been quietly removed from the boat in its huge silver-coloured box and discreetly stored at the dive centre where nobody could see it or guess at its purpose.

  The phone rang in our room. The room was extremely pleasant, incidentally. I’m sure you’re keen to hear what the room was like, since we were staying in it at your expense. It was not enormous but it was very comfortable and sunny and tastefully decorated in Californian pastels. Our favourite item was the balcony that overlooked the sea because it had an awning that you lowered by pressing an electric switch. The switch had two settings. You could either turn it to AUTO, in which case the awning lowered itself whenever the sun came out, or you could set it to MANUEL [sic], in which case, we assumed, a small, incompetent Spanish waiter came and did it for you. We thought this was terribly funny. We laughed and laughed and laughed and had another glass of champagne and then laughed some more and then the phone rang.

  “We have your Sub Bug,” said a voice.

  “Ah yes,” I said. “Yes, the, er, Sub Bug. Thank you very much. Yes, is that all right?”

  “No worries,” said the voice, “at all.”

  “Ah. Good.”

  “So if you like, why don’t you come down to the dive centre in the morning. We can check it out, see how it works, see what you need, take it out for a spin, whatever you want. We’ll just do whatever we can to help you.”

  “Oh. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “No worries at all.”

  The voice was very friendly and reassuring. My jet-lagged paranoia began to subside a little. We went and had dinner.

  The resort had four restaurants, and we chose the Oriental Seafood Restaurant. Seafood in Australia mostly seems to consist of barramundi, Morton Bay bugs, and everything else.

  “Morton Bay bugs,” said our smiling Chinese waitress, “are like lobsters, only this big.” She held her two forefingers about three inches apart. “We smash their head in. Is very nice. You will like.”

  We didn’t like that much, in fact. The restaurant was very smartly decorated in Japanese-style black and white, but the food looked better than it tasted and they played Muzak at us. For a moment I felt the ghost of the old, naff Hayman Island stalking through its glamorously tasteful new home. The other restaurants available were Polynesian, Italian, and the one to which they gave top billing, La Fontaine, a French restaurant that we decided to keep for the last of our four nights, though we had nagging doubts. I tend to like local cooking unless I’m in Wales, and the thought of French haute cuisine transported here did not fill me with confidence. I wanted to keep an open mind, though, because as it happens one of the best meals I ever had was steamed crab and chateaubriand of zebu cooked by a French-trained chef in the south of Madagascar. But then the French had infested Madagascar for seventy-five years and bequeathed it a rich legacy of culinary skills and hideous bureaucracy. We decided at least to look at La Fontaine that night. As we prowled our way toward it, we traversed acres of beautifully laid carpet, passed grand pianos, chandeliers, and reproduction Louis XVI furniture. I found myself racking my brains for any memory I might have of perhaps some schismatic eighteenth-century French court that might have been set up, however briefly, on the Great Barrier Reef. I asked Jane, who is an historian, and she assured me that I was being extremely silly, and so we went to bed.

  We were woken at precisely seven-thirty the following morning and indeed every morning by a seagull that perched on our balcony and performed our regular early-morning wake-up screech. After breakfast we went to the dive centre, which was about half a mile from the hotel, and met Ian Green.

  It was Ian who had called the previous evening. He was in charge of all the diving stuff on Hayman, and a more helpful and friendly person would be hard to imagine. We got the Sub Bug unpacked, and examined it as it stood gleaming in the sun.

  It is, as I have said, shaped like the front half of a dolphin. The body of it is blue, and toward the front there are two small yellow fins, one on each side, that can rotate through a few degrees and direct the Sub Bug upward or downward. At the back are two large handles that you hold on to as the Sub Bug pulls you through the water. Within reach of your thumbs are buttons that make the thing go, and control its ascent and descent. Inside the Bug is a cylinder of compressed air—a normal scuba cylinder—and this provides power to spin the two propellers that push the Bug forward, and also supplies air down a flexible tube to a free-floating regulator. A regulator is the thing you stick in your mouth that gives you your air when you’re diving. The point of this arrangement is that you only need your mask and flippers; you don’t need to carry a scuba tank on your own back, because you’re getting your air direct from the Sub Bug. The Bug is designed in such a way that you can set a maximum depth beyond which it will not go. The very maximum anyway is thirty feet.

  Ian had received a flurry of faxes from Martin Pemberton about setting up the machine, and was pretty confident about it.

  “No worries at all,” he said, and asked me what I planned.

  I said it might be an idea to take it for a shallow local tryout before taking it out into deep water.

  “No worries,” he said.

  I said that we could then take it with us on the proper diving expedition that was going out from the island the following morning.

  “No worries,” he said.

  “So I will then spend a little time trying it out, getting used to it, and putting it through its paces around the reef.”

  “No worries,” he said.

  “And then, er,” I said, “for the purposes of this article I have to write, which is by way of being a sort of comparative test drive, I want to try the same thing on a manta ray.”

  “No chance,” he said. “No chance at all.”

  I suppose I should have foreseen this.

  Or perhaps it was just as well that I hadn’t foreseen it. If I had foreseen it, I wouldn’t have been standing there half in a wet suit looking out at the glittering Tasman Sea and thinking, “Oh damn.” I would have been sitting fiddling in my office in Isl
ington wondering if I’d done enough “work” yet to justify going out and getting a bun.

  The issue was very simple. As someone who has spent over two years working on ecological projects, the very first thing I should have realised was that you don’t disturb the animals. It might have been all right to try and mount a manta ray ten years ago when I first heard about it, but not now. No way. You don’t touch the reef. You don’t take anything. No shells, no coral. You don’t touch the fish, except maybe a few that it’s okay to feed. And you certainly don’t fuck about trying to ride manta rays.

  “Hardly any chance you’d even be able to get near one anyway,” said Ian. “They’re very timid creatures. I guess some people have managed to get to ride on a ray in the past, but I would imagine it would be very difficult. But now we just can’t allow it.”

  “No,” I said, rather shamefacedly. “I understand, believe me. I just hadn’t really thought it through, I guess.”

  “But we can go and have some fun with the Sub Bug,” said Ian. “No worries. We can take some pictures too. That’s a hell of a camera you’ve got there.”

  We now come to another rather embarrassing part of the story about which I have so far been extremely silent. Some very nice people at Nikon in England had lent me for this trip a brand-new Nikonos AF SR underwater autofocus camera, which is about £15,000 worth of the most sexy and desirable and fabulous camera equipment in the world. The camera is just wonderful, brilliant technology. Really. You want to take a photograph underwater, this is the perfect thing. It’s an astounding bit of kit. Why am I going on about it like this? Well, I spend a lot of time working on a computer, and because I am used to using a Macintosh, I hardly even bother to read manuals and so—I didn’t really bother to read the manual for this camera.