"Mike Resnick - Between the Sunlight and Thunder (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Mike%20Resnick%20-%20Between%20the%20Sunlight%20and%20Thunder.txt

between the sunlight and the thunder


Copyright (c) 1996 by Mike Resnick. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without the
express permission of the author.


Like all my safari diaries, this one appeared originally in the Hugo-winning fanzine Lan's
Lantern.

by Mike Resnick

August 28, 1990: Between the bright sunlight of East Africa's safari countries, and the ominous
thunder coming out of the Republic of South Africa, there exist four nations: Zimbabwe,
Mozambique, Malawi, and Botswana. We had originally hoped to visit all four on this extended
safari, but Mozambique is in the throes of a brutal civil war, so we confined ourselves to the
other
three countries, where I would be researching Purgatory and Ophir, a pair of novels I'll be
writing in
the next couple of years, and hopefully coming up with some more ideas. This was a unique safari
for
us, in that we did not arrange to go with a single guide, as we always do in Kenya, nor did we
care to
join a package tour. Instead, we made a list of all the locations we wanted to see in all three
countries, then hunted up a travel agency (we found it, finally, in York, England) that was able
to
arrange our itinerary. The first step, as always, was the 8-hour flight to London, during which
time I
did my best not to feel bitter over losing the Hugo after leading for the first five ballots. I
didn't quite
pull it off.

August 29, 1990: We landed at Gatwick at seven in the morning, took a bus to Heathrow after
clearing customs, and waited around the airport for almost 12 hours for our 10-hour flight to
Zimbabwe to take off. I love Africa; it's the process of getting there that I hate.

August 30, 1990: We landed in Harare (formerly Salisbury), the capital of Zimbabwe (formerly
Rhodesia), and dragged our exhausted (formerly energetic) bodies to Meikles Hotel, a large, luxury
hotel in the city center right across from Cecil Square. While Carol took a nap, I went out
walking,
and found that there is an enormous difference between Harare and its Kenyan counterpart, Nairobi.
One gets the feeling that if the tourist industry vanished, 98% of the people you see in Nairobi
would
find themselves out of work; whereas if it vanished from Harare, no one would know the difference.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that Harare is a working city, with very little to interest
the
casual tourist. In fact, we soon came to realize that Zimbabwe is a working country. President
Robert