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the same landscape as I was, I have to allow that it might all simply have been my imagination, half-baked as it was in the Indonesian sun.
    We moored at a long, rickety, wooden jetty that stuck out from the middle of a wide pale beach. At the landward end the jetty was surmounted by an archway, nailed to the top of which was a wooden board which welcomed us to Komodo, and therefore served slightly to diminish our sense of intrepidness.
    The moment we passed under the archway there was suddenly a strong smell. You had to go through it to get the smell. Until you’d been through the archway you hadn’t arrivedand you didn’t get the strong, thick, musty, smell of Komodo.
    The next blow to our sense of intrepidness was the rather neatly laid-out path. This led from the end of the jetty parallel to the shore toward the next and major blow to our sense of intrepidness, which was a visitors’ village.
    This was a group of fairly ramshackle wooden buildings: an administration centre from which the island (which is a wildlife reserve) is run, a cafeteria terrace, and a small museum. Behind these, ranged around the inside of a steep semicircular slope, were about half a dozen visitors’ huts—on stilts.
    It was about lunchtime, and there were nearly a dozen people sitting in the cafeteria eating noodles and drinking 7UP; Americans, Dutch, you name it. Where had they come from? How had they got here? What was going on?
    Outside the administration hut was a wooden sign with regulations all over it, such as “Report to National Park office,” “Travel outside visitors’ centre only with guards,” “Wear pants and shoes,” and “Watch for snakes.”
    Lying on the ground underneath this was a small stuffed dragon. I say small because it was only about four feet long. It had been modeled in completely spread-eagled posture, lying flat on the ground with its forelimbs stretched out in front and its back limbs lying alongside its long tapering tail. I was a little startled to see it for a moment, but then went up to have a look at it.
    It opened its eyes and had a look at me.
    I rocketed backward with a yell of astonishment, which provoked barks of derisive laughter from the terrace.
    “It’s just a dragon!” called out an American girl.
    I went over.
    “Have you all been here long?” I asked.
    “Oh, hours,” she said. “We came over on the ferry from Labuan Bajo. Done the dragons. Bored with them. The food’s terrible.”
    “What ferry?” I asked.
    “Comes over most days.”
    “Oh. Oh, I see. From Labuan Bajo?”
    “You have to go and sign the visitors’ book in the office,” she said, pointing at it.
    Rather ruffled, I went and joined Mark and Gaynor.
    “This isn’t at all what I expected,” said Mark, standing there in the middle of our pile of intrepid baggage, holding the four chickens. “Did we need to bring these?” he asked Kiri.
    Kiri said that it was always a good idea to bring chickens for the kitchen. Otherwise we’d just have to eat fish and noodles.
    “I think I prefer fish,” said Gaynor.
    Kiri explained that she was wrong and that she preferred chicken to fish. Westerners, he explained, preferred chicken. It was well known. Fish was only cheap food for peasants. We would be eating chicken, which was sexy and which we preferred.
    He took the chickens, which were tethered together with a long piece of string, put them down by our baggage, and ushered us up the steps to the park office, where one of the park guards gave us forms and a pencil. Just as we were starting to fill them in, giving details of our passport numbers, date, country, and town of birth, and so on, there was a sudden commotion outside.
    At first we paid it no mind, wrestling as we were to remember our mothers’ maiden names, and trying to work out who to elect as next of kin, but the racket outside increased, and we suddenly realised that it was the sound of distressed chickens. Our chickens.
    We rushed outside. The