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

spent
away from that suite. Dinner was freshly-caught bream, kudu in cream sauce, and good old hot fudge
sundaes. I'm a teetotaler, but Carol tells me the wine was superb.

September 9: Another morning game run, and the elephant and buffalo were so numerous than I was
beginning to feel jaded. Then we got into a van and were driven some 50 miles to the Victoria
Falls
Hotel in Zimbabwe, where we picked up the luggage we had stored there, checked into a room, and
promptly slept the afternoon away. (All that luxury exhausted our systems, I guess.) We woke up
just
in time for their nightly spectacular, a lavish pageant of native dances, which turned out to be
more
authentic and less tourist-oriented that we had feared.

September 10: We stopped by a native crafts village, not knowing quite what to expect, and were
pleasantly surprised to find that it, too, was more educational than tourist-oriented. >From there
we
went to the Falls, truly one of the wonders of the world. The Zambezi River was the lowest it's
been
in 40 years, which actually was to our benefit, as when the river is high the Falls create such a
spray
that you can't make out the features, let alone photograph them. We took the much-hyped
Sundowner Cruise in the afternoon. Very disappointing, if you're not heavily into booze. The boat
never got near the Falls (or anything else worth seeing), and most of the passengers were three
sheets
to the wind before the cruise even started.

September 11: We took a noontime flight to Hwange National Park, where we were escorted to the



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Hwange Game Lodge, perhaps half a star down in luxury from the Chobe Game Lodge. Though we
had requested a room, we were given an enormous suite at no extra cost. (Upon leaving I asked the
manager why; he replied that it was sitting empty, he had recognized my name on the guest list, he
had read Ivory and Paradise and Adventures, and since I was obviously on a research trip, he hoped
that I would remember him kindly when I got around to writing a novel about Zimbabwe.) Our guide
was a young man named Mark, who asked what we would like to see that afternoon. Well, I said,
giving him what I thought would be a totally impossible task, we haven't yet seen sable, roan,
kudu,
or rhino. Within 45 minutes we had seen them all, plus a couple of hundred elephants and some
exceptionally rare eagles. This is some park, this Hwange. It's the largest in Zimbabwe, and has
just
about every species of mammal you could wish for. It's also paved -- something that I thought
existed nowhere outside of South Africa's Krueger National Park -- and the rangers have created a
number of huge, artificial water holes, so that the game doesn't migrate. The park is immaculate --
you would swear they mow and rake it every day -- and except for Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater,
we have never seen such a large number and variety of animals in one place. Dinner (eland and