Few claim actually to have seen a tiger, but everyone believes in their continued existence. In the village of Sumber Ayu, a coffee grower called Nahrawi, 32, described two sightings last year, both during the durian season, when tigers are said to especially active. Another local man produced half-a-dozen long whiskers, sold to him for five thousand rupiah (30p) each, said to have been shed by tigers at a jungle feeding area. On his wall was a huge faded skin, the trophy of his father “Tiger” Suharto, who slayed a man-eating Javan tiger 33 years ago.Officials of the local branch of the Forestry Protection and Natural Preservation Department (PHPA) believe recently gathered samples of fur and faeces support this anecdotal evidence.

Ali’s jungle encounter was the equivalent of a meeting a Tasmanian wolf, or a dodo.According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the last authenticated sighting of a Javan tiger was in the early 1970s. But Ali’s story verges on the miraculous, for by the best scientific reckonings there are no tigers left in this part of Indonesia. After decades of depletion by hunting and the encroachment of humans upon their natural habitat, the Javan tiger died out more than 10 years ago Panthera tigris sondaica is officially extinct. “I looked at the tigers ahead of me on the path,” he says, “and I asked them to be good to me.”To encounter a family of tigers at close range is amazing, and to walk away unharmed is remarkable. THREE years ago, a forester named Ali was walking through the jungle of the Meru Betiri National Park when he had some bad luck. He chanced on a group of Javan tigers, Indonesia’s fiercest predatory mammal, up to seven feet long and weighing 140kg.

Worse, they were a family group, a tigress and her young tiger cubs. “The father tiger is dangerous,” says Ali, “but nothing is more dangerous than the mother tiger when she is with her children.”
Ali, 56, was on a expedition to gather durians, the famously smelly tropical fruit, armed only with a sickle. Lung cancer deaths among women have risen by 150 per cent in 15 years, and by 22 per cent among men.When young Spanish women get together, it is rare to see a single one not elegantly twirling a cigarette. No-smoking signs in the Metro are ignored, smokers exhale over food displays in shops, and proposed no-smoking areas in restaurants are howled down as ruinous for business.