# Quote — Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

> There is no “tropical island paradise” I know of which remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It’s natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn’t surprise us much any more.
>
> So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travelers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it’s in now is only the result of what we’ve done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it’s a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we’ve lost. The people who do understand what we’ve lost are the ones who are rushing around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left.

- Author: [Douglas Adams](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams.md)
- Book: [Last Chance to See](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see.md)
- Page: 202
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Last_Chance_to_See#Chapter_6:_Rare,_or_Medium_Rare%3F) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see/there-is-no-tropical

## More from this book

> Until 1987 Fiordland was the home of one of the strangest, most unearthly sounds in the world. For thousands of years, in the right season, the sound could be heard after nightfall throughout these wild peaks and valleys.
>
> It was like a heartbeat: a deep, powerful throb that echoed through the dark ravines. It was so deep that some people will tell you that they felt it stirring in their gut before they could discern the actual sound, a sort of wump, a heavy wobble of air. Most people have never heard it at all, or ever will again. It was the sound of the kakapo, the old night parrot of New Zealand, sitting high on a rocky promontory and calling for a mate.

p. 111 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see/until-1987-fiordland.md)

> [On the kakapo’s tendency to freeze in confusion when faced with a predator:] It’s frustrating to think of the difference that language would make. The millennia crawl by pretty bloody slowly while natural selection sifts its way through generation after generation, favouring the odd aberrant kakapo, which is a little twitchier than its contemporaries, till the species as a whole finally gets the idea. It would all be cut short in a moment if one of them could say, “When you see one of those things with whiskers and little bitey teeth, run like hell.” On the other hand, human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

p. 116 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see/on-the-kakapos.md)

> I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

p. 38 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see/i-have-a-well-deserved.md)