Mayabhushan wrote: >Panaji:Bullied by a herd of wild elephants and down to their last rations,
>Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway, his wife and a pilot were >rescued by an Indian expat after their plane crashed in east central Africa >in the 1950s, the savior's son has said. ------------------------------------------------------- Mayabhushan Nagvenkar, This article of yours has jogged my memory. Thanks. Some random points: 1) Hemingway crashed twice on that Ugandan trip. After he was was rescued from the first one (the one you recounter) another plane that was sent to rescue him, crashed too i.e. before he returned to the Ugandan capital. 2) The fact that he was picked up by a Ugandan tourist boat is well documented. 3) If I am not mistaken, I actually met this Goan captain in 1964. I have a movie film of the boat on this Nile trip and hopefully will be able to find it and convert it to the current electronic formats. 4) The tourists boats above Murchison Falls were more like tugs. The were built of steel with a large diesel engine in the center. They were specifically designed to travel thru hippo infested areas. Hippo's, then and now, have this nasty habit of surfacing beneath boats, capsizing the smaller ones. 5) The area below Murchison Falls is one of the wildest areas in Africa. It is part swampland and part grassland as the rainfall is heavy and the Nile often floods. The reeds there are 8 ft tall and the elephant grass is even taller. The soil itself, though very fertile, is soft and it is difficult to build roads or penetrate in these areas. It is Africa in its most natural form. My late dad used to tell the story of the time he pulled up onto a ferry ramp with his VW Beetle. He got out of the car and saw the ferry approaching so he went to talk to the other drivers in the three car convoy. When he returned to his car, five minutes later, he saw a friend of mine and me on the concrete ferry ramp. 20 ft away were two crocodiles sunning themselves on the ramp. Mouths open. 6) I still have a rock that was picked up from a few feet before the Murchison Falls. When left in the sunlight, the copper in it sparkles. The copper % deemed it insufficient for a commercial mine then. The western govts will never allow the Ugandans to build a copper mine in that ecological area today. 7) One of these days, something will prod me to write about a hunting incident and an almost crash I had on a light aircraft in Tanzania. We were laughing at the time but looking back at my mis-spent youth, I almost believe that I have a very powerful guardian angel. Here is one of the pictures from that Ugandan trip of 1964. http://www.flickr.com/photos/45002663@N00/6988581645/in/photostream/ Mervyn