Angel Falls, Venezuela. There was nothing there except the waterfall when I arrived in 1994. We were a party of twelve, in two canoes, plus four staff. It took eight hours to travel upstream. That included two portages from the nearest settlement, an abandoned army camp at Canaima. This was adventure, not the tourist-grade helicopter ride you get today. The camp itself is worth a visit to see the blood red water and hundreds of smaller waterfalls. If you go to Angel Falls now, your view will be ruined by some jock hang-gliding off the tepui [flat-topped mountain]. I was one of the last people to see Angel Falls in its natural state.The base of the falls is a tremendous experience. The drop is so high that much of the water turns to mist on the way down. We parked the canoes at a clearing and walked in carefully stepping on exposed slippery tree roots the final few miles. It would be too dangerous to actually get to the water, but five (of the original twelve) of us got closer than would ever be allowed since. There is a silent blast of mist and wind hundreds of yards away from the falling stream. Dead silence, weird.
The staff had roasted chickens on sticks ready when we got back down; I believe every one of us devoured an entire chicken each, no bread or gravy let me tell you. Returning down river takes merely two hours. The five who made it to the falls were an Italian couple (he 81, she 28), two girls from the Polish Army and me. All of us required nearly twenty hours of sleep to recover, well into the following afternoon. For the seven quitters who turned back, there are always the helicopters. They fly past the billboards.
Taking my own advice that it is often wiser to change what you do to match the software, I finally decided on printing half-page booklets instead of quarter page. This is where you fold a single sheet over and get four pages of booklet, where I wanted to fold it twice and get eight pages. The point is, I got it to work and so I’ll see what I can do with it. It is accomplished by going into page setup and fooling around with the multiple pages setting. It figures that the duplex print feature of a Brother printer gets it in exactly the wrong order, so you have to sort the pages before printing the second face.
The good news is there were people waiting for me to play when I walked in to Jimbo’s tonight. Including California Johnny. The bad news is they’d been waiting since two in the afternoon. My DVD player, recently fixed, let me down again. Will said he had a player, which is true, but it was encased in a $1500 HP laptop. Like all laptops, the output jack has weak midrange (because they are intended for headphone use). There is a dual birthday party at the pub tomorrow. That is my incentive to get something working between now and then.
Adam was over to gab about the situation and there are rumors about staying on. I wouldn’t count on it. Jose was also looking for me because he found the power supply for that Dell printer he insists I gave him a year ago (except I would not ever own a Dell printer or give it to a friend).
