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Of all the literary greats who enjoyed a drink or two in their time, Ernest Hemingway is among the most storied. After all, this is a man whose list of quotations on the art of drinking tallies almost as high as his published works. (Though, “Write drunk, edit sober,” is actually a misattribution.) But to this day, one of Hemingway’s most outrageous encounters with booze goes all but forgotten.

In the 1950s, when he and his wife Mary were on safari in Africa, the couple survived not one but two plane crashes over the course of just two days. When the couple resurfaced from the incredible set of events, Hemingway emerged holding a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin.

In the first crash, on January 23, 1954, their plane was flying over the jungles of Uganda near the Nile when the pilot took a nose dive to avoid a flock of large birds. Hemingway later told the New York Times that the single-engine plane had to “land either on a sandpit where six crocodiles lay basking in the sun or on an elephant track through thick scrub.” The pilot chose the latter.

The writer, his wife, and their pilot survived the crash and spent the rest of the night in the jungle surrounded by elephants. When they didn’t return, search pilots flew overhead and reported the wreckage with “no signs of life.” Word spread of the crash and headlines reported the famous writer’s death.

After their night in the jungle, the group was picked up by a boat full of tourists and brought to the town of Butiaba in the western region of Uganda. There, the Hemingways boarded another small plane, with a new pilot. Upon takeoff, the aircraft went down in a fiery crash.

On January 25, Ernest and Mary Hemingway reappeared, 170 miles southeast of where they crashed, in Entebbe, Uganda. It’s here where it’s said that Hemingway emerged — head wrapped and bandages and carrying a bottle of gin — and cracked, “My luck, she is running very good.”