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

September 7: After a 3-hour walk in search of game that simply didn't exist, we happily took our
leave of Linyanti, and went next to the most luxurious hostelry in Africa. (Yeah, I know I've said
in
print that that honor belongs to the Mount Kenya Safari Club. So sue me: I was wrong. The Chobe
Game Lodge has it beat all hollow.) Chobe National Park is the crown jewel of Botswana's parks. It
possesses 30,000 elephants, almost three times the total that remain in all of Kenya. It has
150,000
buffalo, in herds of up to 5,000. It has hundreds of lions. It also has the Chobe Game Lodge. We
had arranged to stay in the same suite where Richard Burton and Liz Taylor honeymooned after their
second marriage (Suite 210, for anyone who wishes to experience it themselves.) It was immense,
elegant, air-conditioned...and it had a 75-foot terrace and its own private swimming pool -- so
private, in fact, that we never bothered with our swimsuits. After all those days of tents and


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outdoor
bathrooms, it was so luxurious that it took a real effort of will power to leave long enough to
look at
animals. The food was on a par with the accomodations. Our first night there, dinner consisted of
Eggs Florentine as an appetizer, ragout of impala (the best game meal we've ever had) as a main
course, and trifle with custard sauce for dessert. Lunch was a buffet that covered five tables,
with so
many delicacies that you could go on tilt trying to pick and choose from among them. There were
numerous lounges and bars, a fabulous outdoor dining terrace, the best gift shop we'd seen in the
country, and there was even a room with a large-screen TV and a selection of videotapes, each a
documentary on some aspect of Botswana and its wildlife. The Chobe Lodge is much the largest
lodge in Botswana, though it holds less than 100 people and is at best medium-sized by East
African
standards. The reason for this is that Botswana, which is 87% Kalahari Desert and which nobody
seemed to want -- not Britain, not South Africa, not anybody -- suddenly discovered the world's
two
largest diamond mines in the early 1980s. As a result, they have more money than they need, and
have decided to keep their tourist industry small rather than ecologically degrade their parks by
running too many cars and tourists through them. We took a boat out on the Chobe River in the
afternoon and watched as hundreds of elephants and thousands of buffalo came down to drink, then
picked our way among the hippos and crocs and returned to our suite, wondering why we had
bothered with all those other locations when we could have spent the entire Botswana section of
our
safari right here.

September 8: Another day of luxury, punctuated with a pair of game runs. In the morning, we
managed to find a pride of lions on a kill, and to see some cheetahs, which are quite rare in
these
parts. In the afternoon, we saw literally thousands of elephants, as well as 30 or 40 other
species of
mammals (as well as one of the lions from the morning, carrying a buffalo leg in her mouth as
proudly
as a puppy carries a toy). It's a damned good thing we did, too, as I deeply resented any time