大腳怪遇上喜劇派：杜姆·喬利的環 球尋怪之旅
拾趣
I’m probably not the first person you’d choose to send off round the world looking for monsters. There’s the credibility problem to start with. I’m best-known for dressing up in silly costumes and playing practical jokes on people on TV. What if I actually came across one of these beasts and announced the fact to the world？ I don’t think I would make the most believable of witnesses.
Nevertheless， I did spend a lot of the past year doing just this. I was Dom Joly， Monster Hunter， and I printed off a business card to prove it. First I had to decide on my destinations. Some were obvious： the Himalayas， for the Yeti， a hairy beast who wanders their upper slopes， harassing mountain climbers and Tintin. And Loch Ness， for our very own Nessie， who lures tourists into much purchasing of tat.
As I’m married to a Canadian I had heard of that country’s own monster—Ogopogo， a Nessietype creature that lives in Lake Okanagan in British Columbia. The lake is bordered by vineyards and peach orchards and was a most pleasant place in which to go monster-hunting.
I discovered another couple online. Explorers have written for several centuries about mokele m’bembe （blocker of rivers） a dinosaur-type creature said to live in Lake Tele， in the north of the Congo. This was by far the most difficult of my trips， with days in a canoe and trekking through forest before meeting a particularly tricky tribe whose permission I needed to get to the lake. Things went pearshaped as everyone got drunk on “jungle gin”and spears and machetes suddenly made a very unwelcome appearance.
The second was in Japan. I’d read about the hibagon that roamed the hills around Hiroshima and was reputed to be a man who had been irradiated by the atomic bomb. This seemed unlikely but my dad， who was in the Fleet Air Arm， flew over Hiroshima the day after the bomb had been dropped， and I had always been fascinated by the place.
Then of course， there was Bigfoot， rumoured to roam the coast from California to British Columbia， with hundreds of sightings a year. Bigfoot was the main reason I got interested in monsters in the first place.
I can still remember the excitement of seeing the Patterson-Gimlin footage for the first time. This was a shaky 16mm film taken in a place called Bluff Creek， northern California， in 1967. The footage shows a large ape-like creature， walking on two legs in a jerky manner and staring back at the cameraman. Some hail this as conclusive proof； others claim it is a fake. There is a Bigfoot museum in Willow Creek， Humboldt County—“Ground Zero” for Bigfoot hunters—and that was where I decided to head.
I love northern California： as soon as you drive over the Golden Gate Bridge and up Highway One， you are in a very special place. First you hit Hitchcock country： Bodega Bay is where he filmed The Birds， and there were some particularly large and scary looking seagulls hovering above my car.