The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (7 page)

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.

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 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.

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, 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 Barrier 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.

“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.

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 try out 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.

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 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.

I realised that when I got the films back.

Please—I really don’t want to say any more, except to say thank you very much, Nikon. It really is an awesome camera and I hope very much that you will let me borrow it again one day. I won’t mention the camera again in this article. We took a small dinghy out to a tiny deserted island about ten minutes away.

Ian and I spent a happy hour or so pootling around with the Bug. We dealt with a couple of problems—a grain of sand in a valve, and so on. We worked out that the Bug didn’t work too well in very shallow water when it had to work against a tide. Well, we’d take it deeper tomorrow. Jane lay in the sun on the beach and read a book. After a while we got back in the dinghy and went back to Hayman. Not much of a story in all that, I suppose, but the reason I mention it is that I remember it very vividly, and one of the shortcomings, I sometimes feel, of somewhere like, for instance, Islington, is the lack of any immediately accessible tiny islands that you can spend the afternoon pootling around with Sub Bugs on.

Just a bit of a poignant thought, really. We don’t even have any decent bridges you can deface.

There were about ten of us on the dive boat the following morning. The hotel is so spacious and rambling that you don’t often get to see many of the other guests, but it was interesting to begin to realise how many of them were Japanese. Not only Japanese, but Japanese who held hands and gazed into each other’s eyes a lot. Hayman, we discovered, was a major Japanese honeymoon destination.

The Sub Bug sat up on the back of the boat, and I sat looking at it as we made the hour’s journey out to the reef. Hardly any of the Barrier Reef islands are actually on the reef itself, except for Heron Island.