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

FAXed the travel agency in York, and raised bloody hell. They assured me that we would have no
further problems with our vouchers, and they were right (which is not to say that we had no
further
problems in other areas.) We went to the airport -- Maun consists of nothing but the airport,
three
gift shops, a few houses, a few huts, and Riley's -- and took our chartered 5-seater to Jedibe
Island
Camp, in the heart of the Okavango Delta, where, after more than 4 days, we finally stopped
traveling and started vacationing. Jedibe is a small island, with ten tents, two ablution blocks
(a
euphemism for bathrooms, which consist of a toilet and a shower, surrounded by a rather shakey
reed fence and no roof), a bar, and a dining tent. It's run by Tony and Pam, a second- generation
Kenyan and Zambian, respectively, who migrated down to Okavango when their own countries got
too civilized, and there was only one other guest there when we arrived. If there is a better way
to
decompress after a long trip than riding in a mokoro, I don't know what it is. The mokoro is a
dugout
canoe, and while you sit up front and watch the Okavango go by, a strong young man stands at the
back and poles you along. We went out in mokoros in mid-morning, and stayed out until dinnertime.
Carol, the bird expert in the family, tells me it was the best single day of bird-watching she's
ever
experienced. The Okavango Delta is some 1,600 square miles of swamp, with about 200,000 miles
of very narrow, winding channels. By the time we were twenty minutes out from camp, I figured
that,
left to my own devices, I might, with luck, be able to find my way back in something less than
eight
months...yet our polers always seemed to know exactly where they were, and you got the feeling you
could set them down anywhere in the Okavango and they'd be able to find their way home with no
problem. I remarked about that to Pam, who agreed that they were death and taxes in the
Okavango, but added that three of them went to Johannesburg for Christmas and got hopelessly lost


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in half an hour.

September 2: We went out on a powerboat in order to see more of the swamp (mokoros are many
things, but fast isn't one of them), packed a box lunch which we ate on a totally uninhabited
island,
and returned to camp in time to meet Franco and Masimo, a pair of Italians who work for
Mondedori, my Italian publisher, and were making a documentary film about the Okavango.
Masimo, a perfectionist, had wanted an overhead shot of the Delta, and refused to photograph it
through the window of the plane...so they opened the door and he and his camera hung out, upside
down, while Franco held onto his feet. The result: exceptional footage and an exceptional inner-
ear
infection. They also wanted footage of a fish eagle swooping down and snaring a fish out of the
water. Tony had trained a local fish eagle to do just that when baited, and we went along while
the
fish eagle went through his paces about a dozen times and we all got some fabulous footage. That