In January 1954, Ernest Hemingway chartered a small plane to show his wife the falls from above, meaning it as nothing more than an unremarkable sightseeing flight. What followed instead became one of the odder episodes of his life, and it played out on the very stretch of river now visible from the lodge.
The plane struck a telegraph wire in the bush near the falls and went down. Hemingway and his wife survived with injuries but nothing fatal, and spent the night camped near the wreckage waiting for rescue. By his own later account, an elephant stood close enough to their camp that night to be seen clearly in the moonlight, an animal entirely indifferent to the two strangers sheltering nearby.
Word of the crash outran word of the survival. Newspapers across the world ran his obituary before he had made it out of the bush alive to read it for himself. The next day, attempting to fly out toward medical care, the second plane he boarded caught fire on takeoff and went down as well, a second crash inside twenty-four hours.
Hemingway lived another seven years past that trip, and carried the injuries from it, quite literally, for the rest of his life. The episode remains one of the more thoroughly documented collisions between literary history and this particular stretch of the Nile, and a reminder that whatever pulls people toward this landscape is not a recent invention of marketing. It has been pulling people here, sometimes at real cost to themselves, for a very long time.
Read more about this ground in the Older Ground section on the About page.
