Last Chance to See

20 years ago, my good friend, Douglas Adams,

spent a year tracking down endangered animals, together with the zoologist Mark Carwardine.

Now it's my turn.

Mark and I are heading off to find out exactly what happened

to those species that he'd seen dangling on the edge of extinction two decades ago.

It promises to be exhausting...

Exhilarating...and exasperating...

But I wouldn't miss it for the world.

Mexico, at first glance, is not the most promising-looking landscape for wildlife watchers.

But, of all the adventures Mark and I have shared, this is the one he has most been looking forward to.

There is no better place to come.

I think Baja has to be my favourite place in the world for watching whales

because there are several different species that come here to breed,

and we're coming right in the middle of the breeding season.

We've come in search of one whale in particular -

the largest animal to have ever existed on earth.

The blue whale can grow over 100 feet long and can weigh over 190 tonnes.

It is said that the blue whale has a heart the size of a small car

and a tongue the weight of an elephant.

In the first half of the last century, whaling ships reduced the number of blue whales by 99%,

leaving the species officially classified as vulnerable to extinction.

We have come to Baja California - the Westernmost part of Mexico,

and we are starting the journey at the decidedly remote San Ignacio Lagoon.

This is a collection of huts in the middle of a desert, far from the nearest town, isn't it?

It's very isolated. It's great, don't you love it?I do.

Do you, yeah? Do you, really? Well, it's different.

'Before heading in search of unpredictable blue whales, Mark has decided my introduction to whales

'should be with something smaller and easier to find.

'The grey whales of San Ignacio Lagoon are said to be the friendliest whales in the world,

'which, Mark is hoping, will allow us a very close whale encounter indeed.'

Have you seen what I'm wearing? My whaling shorts.Oh, no!

So hopefully this is where you can get the closest encounters possible with whales,

and there are mothers and calves here, grey whales, and the thing is they're bored, I think.

There's not very much to do except grow older and bigger,

and so they like distractions. And people are a good distraction.

'I've had many challenges in life, but providing distraction for a bored infant whale is a new one.'

Oh, there, look! Look. They're huge.

We're right amongst them. You're getting really excited. I am!This is great.

This is extraordinary. Oh, my goodness.

That's quite close.

We hope that one of these whales, that are close to us,

actually want to come even closer and investigate and come and have a proper look.

It's one of those things that nothing prepares you for. You know you'll be pleased to see them,

but when you do you're completely overwhelmed.

That rainbow is gorgeous. It's simply lovely.

'For the adults, this is the mid point of a 10,000 mile round trip to mate and have their young,

'one of the longest migration routes of any mammal on earth.

'And there's something about being in the presence of an animal of such size and power

'that is truly impressive.'

Most of these will be about 45 feet long, so they're still big animals, you know -

it's half a length of a blue whale.

So they're not big in whale terms, but they're probably twice as long as our boat.Goodness me.

They don't upturn boats, do they?No, hardly ever!

You've got to start splashing, Stephen.

With what?With your hands.

Just roll your sleeves up.Right.

And there are great white sharks in the water, too.

Oh, he's here, look. He's here, yeah.

Oh, hello!

Come on.Checking us out.Yeah.

They didn't see my shorts, that was the problem.

If they'd seen my shorts...

'Because, for a few weeks each year,

'these grey whales gather to breed in this small bay,

'they are the one whale encounter that is more or less guaranteed.

'100 years ago they also provided guaranteed opportunities for whaling boats.'

The whalers had a field day, and they killed thousands and thousands of them.

In those days they were called devil fish

because they didn't just lie by the boats and let themselves be killed.

They fought back.Did they?

And the whalers, the old whaling ships used to wait out at sea, outside the lagoon here,

and little whaling boats, this sort of size, would be rowed in,

and the whales, once they get hurt or harpooned, they would whack the boats with their tails

and breach on them, and killed many whalers. So they've changed their character a lot.

'Since a clampdown on whaling in the 1930s, the grey whale numbers have started to recover.'

Oh, my goodness.

'Once again, this lagoon is an active nursery for many grey whale mothers and calves every year.'

You can just see a smile there. Look at you!Did you see the eye?

Yeah, the eye, clear as anything.

He just wanted to have a look at us.

Yeah.Oh, he likes that!

Oh, my God!

Pushing the boat.

Yeah!

Whoa!

Here we go.Oh, there he is! I touched him!Did you?

With my finger, there. Felt like PVC.

There he goes.

Wonderful.Oh, my word, it's just extraordinary.

The most distinctive thing that whales do, I suppose, is the blowing, you know,

this kind of geyser that comes out, of water, and these two slits, are they the equivalent of nostrils?

Yeah, they're the blow holes, they're called.

They're like our nostrils, and through evolution

they've migrated to the top of the head.

Otherwise imagine if it was still where we have our noses.

They'd have to stick their heads up like that all the time to breathe,

so they just have to surface, and what happens is...

Cor, you don't know where to look next.

What happens is, as they surface,

they start to blow out and the water that's caught in the blow holes is blown up in that big plume.

And then you can hear them, they blow out and they take a breath, and then they drop back down again.

So they're having to come up to the surface to breathe at regular intervals like we would.

Sorry, you're right. Blowing.

What an amazing creature.

Wow, that's rather beautiful.

Whoa.

Oh, yeah.

Wow.

'This is one of Mark's favourite places in the world, and I can see why.

'All the same, I have been flicking through the book of his original journeys with Douglas Adams,

'and there is a noticeable absence of the words "Mexico", "blue" and "whales",

'and a significant chapter on China - a country we appear to have missed out on completely.'

When we were planning this whole series, I imagined one of the places we would go would be China,

cos a very memorable part of the book you and Douglas wrote was about the Yangtze river dolphin.

But we're not there, we're looking at dolphins and whales in Mexico,

and I'd rather hoped that we would go to China.

Well, so would I, to be honest, I'd hoped we would as well.

When we first started talking about it, the Yangtze river dolphin still existed, as far as we knew,

and it was the plan to go and find one.

But since we started planning all the trips it's been officially declared extinct.

Why did it become extinct?

It picked probably the worst place in the world to live - the Yangtze river.

The Yangtze river basin is home to about 10% of the whole world human population,

so it faced every possible threat from pollution, agricultural run-off from farm land,

pollution from factories and towns to over-fishing.

And I suppose the best we can do now is make sure it doesn't happen to other species like it.

Exactly. The Yangtze river dolphin was the first whale, dolphin or porpoise

to become extinct in historical times, and it won't be the last,

and so we'll go and look for the blue whale.

Even though it's so well known, it's facing many of the threats that the Yangtze river dolphin faced,

it was very heavily hunted for many years, and so that's another species that's on the brink.

'As the world's human population rockets to seven billion, I wonder if it is inevitable

'that other species must simply be swept aside.

'We are hoping that a search for the iconic blue whale will reveal

whether lessons have been learned from the demise of the Yangtze river dolphin.

'We're crossing the peninsula to hunt for blue whales in the Sea of Cortez.

'But on the journey across land, there's something Mark wants to show me.

'The bad news is that it involves mules.'

I like the chaps.Como esta?

I like what they're wearing as well. Ola!

Good girl.

Come on.

Andale.

Oh, Christ, you've really got to lean back, haven't you?

Gee whiz, that was scary.

'Having mastered the transport, I finally get a chance to really take in the landscape.'

So this is it. 'But Mark has a surprise.'

It's enormous.They're huge, much bigger than I was expecting.

That's really impressive.

'Thousands of years ago, long before the first Europeans arrived in Mexico,

'this was home to the Cochimi Indians, a community that lived and died,

'leaving no trace except for these pictures.'

It's amazing, isn't it? What a wild, desolate place to do this.Extraordinary.

What gets me is, that they would have seen a place like we're seeing now, pretty much, pretty unchanged,

virtually no water. How they survived, I don't know.

It's phenomenal. And the same sort of wildlife.

I mean, it's interesting they've got turtles, they obviously went to the coast.

Which we're quite a way from. Yeah, we're right pretty much in the middle of the peninsula.Yeah.

I can't see any whales here.

Oh, actually, funnily enough, to the extreme right it looks exactly like a whale.

'No one knows when the Cochimi came to this valley,

'but we know they survived with little impact on the landscape for many hundreds of years.'

They were still around when the Jesuits arrived.

They were the first people to see this, and I suppose after the Jesuits

there was just a great influx of westerners and gringos, people like us and the Spaniards,

who came for the gold and the copper mines.

That's the story of all our travels, it's people coming in and that's causing the problems everywhere.

I mean, that's the Yangtze river dolphin story through and through,

because there were so many people living in theYangtze river basin that it's gone.

The population of Baja is increasing exponentially, and has been for a number of years.

There are not many places in the world where you can stand high up and look around,

and for 180 degrees you don't see a human habitation or a pylon,

or electricity, or cell phone mast or anything.

And that's good, is it? Well, I usually regret the lack of cell phone masts,

but in this case I'm prepared to make an exception, being very glad.

You're changing gradually.

'Maybe I am changing just a little.

'I won't pretend that I'm not a creature of the modern world,

'but I am at least aware that a price has been paid to achieve it.'

'It's hard to imagine this landscape as anything other than an endless wilderness,

'but if the human population continues to rise, then who knows how it might be developed and tamed,

'and the strange, hostile world of the Cochimi will finally exist only in their pictures.

We are heading for La Paz - the best place to go looking for blue whales -

and very much a return to the 21st century.

CARNIVAL MUSIC

'It's a change of pace and a chance to recharge the batteries

'before heading out to encounter the biggest animal that ever lived on earth.'

Stephen is sort of assuming that our next stop is blue whales and we're guaranteed to see them,

and I must admit I'm a little bit worried,

because I sort of know how difficult it is, even though a blue whale is roughly the length of a Boeing 737,

it's an amazingly difficult animal to find.

I've got various friends with boats out in the Sea of Cortez who are looking for me,

and I'm hoping I'm going to get a phone call or a radio message in the next day or two

to say they've found them.

'In the meantime we are not, it seems, destined to kick back and enjoy carnival.

'Mark has brought us to meet Fernando Elorriaga, a man with a mission - and a means to get there.'