The African Queen | Masindi Hotel, Masindi — Room 3, Room 5, and a case of Scotch

The road north from Kampala runs through sugar and tobacco country and stops, more or less, at Masindi. In 1951 the trucks of John Huston's unit stopped there too. The Masindi Hotel — a low white colonial building with a deep verandah, the oldest hotel in Uganda — became the production's last address before the bush.

Humphrey Bogart took Room 5. Katharine Hepburn took Room 3. The hotel still calls that wing the African Queen block.

What happened there has outlived the picture. Bogart refused the local water and drank imported Scotch instead, and told anyone who asked that whenever a fly bit him or Huston, the fly dropped dead. Hepburn drank the water. She spent much of the shoot violently ill with dysentery and still kept asking after the Latin names of everything growing outside her window. Huston, meanwhile, kept disappearing to hunt a bull elephant, which delayed filming and infuriated most of the crew.

The hotel is still open, still trading on that fortnight, and the rooms are still numbered. Sit on the verandah in the late afternoon and the arithmetic is simple: this was the last night of clean sheets before the river.

Photo: Masindi town, via Wikimedia Commons.