Hemingway Adventure (1999) (21 page)

Hemingway made camp on high ground beside the Nile to avoid local wildlife, such as sunbathing crocodile.

Hemingway after the second crash, when he suffered burns and internal injuries from which he never fully recovered.

On the Nile Francis picks his way through dangerous whirlpools and foam from the falls ahead.

Butiaba: at the site of Hemingway’s second air crash in two days. With Abdul and pieces of the wreckage.

At barber’s shop in Masindi I have a style, Number 8, named after me. On-the-spot portrait makes me look startlingly like Colonel Gaddafi.

Havana hand.

The city is a transport time warp. I’m riding a motorcycle side-car taxi.

Private cars are a luxury and so there’s plenty of room for pedestrians on Havana’s famous seafront thoroughfare, the Malecon.

American cars seem to have survived Castro’s Communist revolution, though many of them now have Russian engines. Alfredo (filling the tank) remembers seeing Hemingway driving through Havana in a jeep.

Hemingway sits between his fourth wife, Mary, and Spencer Tracy at the Floridita, his favourite Havana hostelry. The daiquiri was its speciality, but Hemingway insisted on a stronger version which they called the
Papa Doble.

Forty years on Hemingway’s gone, but the
Papa Doble
lives on.

The Finca Vigia, ‘Look-Out Farm’, Hemingway’s Cuban home for twenty years.