The inspiring first sight of Kilimanjaro from a light plane. Kibo, the 19,340-foot summit, is on the right.
With Richard Bonham (like Hemingway, an Honorary Game Warden), taking a look at the constipated cheetah. When it’s well enough Richard will release it back into the wild. It’s ‘half-tame’ according to Richard, but it turns half-wild when I try to pat it on the head.
The day of a circumcision ceremony at a Masai village.
The grandmother of the circumcised boy mixes blood and milk outside his hut.
Lighting a fire with sticks for the feast later in the day.
Blood is taken from one of the cows.
Comedy spear-throwing. Young Masai warriors cracking up.
Inside the hut: grandmother and mother tend to the boy (behind the curtain) who will take two weeks to recover.
Rescuers at the Hemingways’ plane after it crash-landed beside the Murchison Falls, Uganda.
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.
CUBA
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.
One of the sacred typewriters being lovingly cleaned by the staff.
Hemingway on the driveway followed by one of the fifty-seven cats. The house was found for him by his third wife, Martha Gellhorn.
Hemingway’s favourite boat, the Pilar, enshrined in the grounds of Finca Vigia. He left it to his captain Gregorio Fuentes, who in turn left it to the government.
On the outside looking in. Because of the delicate state of Hemingway’s perfectly preserved possessions you have to be stuffed, or working for the BBC, to get inside the house.
Hemingway working the Gulf Stream.
Memorial on the waterfront at Cojimar is a tribute from the locals.
A concrete fisherman in the grounds of ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ Hotel, Marina Hemingway.
No marlin today, which is why they call it fishing, not catching.
A luckier fisherman.
Gregorio Fuentes, 101, tells me of the heydays with Hemingway at Cojimar (overleaf) where Hemingway kept his boat.
AMERICAN WEST
Bison herds were once so big that it took early explorers ten days to ride through them. Now the sight of a solitary bison brings cars to a halt on the road.
Yellowstone National Park. Thermal energy bubbles up at Fountain Paint Pot.
Pre-hunting breakfast at the Corral Bar. The men talk of the liberties and responsibilities of the hunter. These are not trophy hunters; they may take days to stalk one elk.
The Big Country. My first time in Montana and Wyoming and I feel swallowed up by the landscape.
Montana; rolling, uninhibited and expansive country.
My one-ton Ford pick-up truck is dwarfed by the forests of Yellowstone National Park, scorched by the huge fires of 1988.
A bison for the wall at the taxidermist in Outlaw Drive.
The first time I’ve felt comfortable on a horse. Riding a Palomino at the Hargrave Ranch, Montana.
The front office and recent clients (including stuffed author).
Leo and Ellen - our heavenly hosts at the Hargrave Ranch.
‘Wrist and elbow’. All you need to remember when throwing a lasso, according to Ken, my rope coach.
The Magnificent Six bring the cattle back home. Less of a stampede, more like rounding up a creche. But it was our first day.
Hemingway’s last home, in Ketchum, Idaho.
The sitting-room at night. With big picture window and stairway to bedroom at right of fireplace.
Tragic history but a magnificent setting. Clouds rise over the Sawtooth Mountains to the north.
Late daylight spills on to the entrance porch where Hemingway took his own life on 2 July 1961.
Hemingway’s physical and mental health deteriorated fast in his last years out west.
Wrought-iron work above gates of Ketchum cemetery.
The end of the journey. Hemingway’s grave at Ketchum. Mary, his wife for fifteen years, lies beside him under the spruce trees.
KEY WEST
In the late nineteen twenties a gently rising tide of fame was beginning to lap around Ernest Hemingway and he was not altogether happy about it. Paris had changed. There were too many tourists pointing him out on the street. Too many tourists in Paris, period
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He had a new wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, and he wanted to come home, but to somewhere where he would not be bothered. His friend, the writer John Dos Passos, recommended Key West, the southernmost city of the USA. No more cold European winters, a tolerant, relaxed atmosphere and plenty of deep-sea fishing. On top of all this, Pauline’s rich Uncle Gus lived not far off, in Arkansas. When Ernest and the second Mrs Hemingway arrived in Key West he promised to have a brand new car waiting for them. A generous gift, but not absolutely essential. In 1928 there was no road connecting Key West with the rest of America. As Hemingway wrote to Dos Passos in February 1929: ‘45 mile water gap still and the County Treasurer absconded with all funds and they’ve closed the schools - let alone build the road.’