Beyond the Last Village

"Alan is a wildlife zoologist and his book takes us a half-century ahead, on a different kind of journey: a harrowing 500-mile trek from Putao, in the Kachin hills of Burma, to a no-man’s land at the foot of Himalayas. It’s difficult to say which is the greater feat: the author’s travels themselves, or his success in winning government cooperation for a scheme to establish a vast national park in that remote region. The 1993 expeditionary force led by Rabinowitz consists of Burmese soldiers, porters, scientists (including an orchid collector) and a Buddhist monk who develops a touching crush on their leader. Forging through a wilderness of ecologically varied life zones, through an area ‘where the sun bear overlapped with the Himalayan black bear’, the party ends up in the snowy environs of the very ‘last village’ in the Adung Wang valley. Along the way, Rabinowitz spots the red goral, the golden takin, the wild serow – creatures almost mythic in their rarity. In the rugged highlands of the great boundary divide (where Tibet, Assam, and Burma meet), he encounters a world where the earth is ploughed by human beasts of burden, and the main source of meat is a primitive species little known outside the region. He discovers no less than four as yet unclassified mammals – including a species of deer completely new to science – and comes into contact with such solitary peoples as the world’s only Asian pygmies, a tribe poignantly aware of its impending extinction from in-breeding. Like all ‘scientific’ expeditions, the journeys in Beyond the Last Village turn out to be as much about the human species as about wildlife. Both are accorded compassion and respect in this deeply moving report of ‘a world that might have disappeared before we even knew it existed’."