“No, Mr. Kent, we’re flying to Iguazú!” I note his emphasis on the last syllable, which sounds to me like the place people go to view wild animals when they don’t have time for a safari.
“Igua-soo, Igua-zoo—I don’t follow you, what’s the problem?”
“We’re about to land in Argentina.”
“Argentina!”
“Yes—Mr. Kent, this is the only place in the world that has almost the exact same name for two different airports in two different countries.”
No. This can’t happen with Jeffrey Katzenberg. I feel a sweat break across my forehead; I lean myself against the cabinet of the galley and take it all in: the flight planners have sent us to Argentina, while our helicopter, trucks, boats, guides, and security for the day sit waiting for us in Brazil. “We have to change the flight plan!”
“It’s too late to change the flight plan, Mr. Kent. We land in less than thirty minutes. We’re already making the descent.”
“Jesus Christ . . .” I pace for a moment, considering what we can possibly do. This will throw off the whole day—and then it hits me: there’s only one solution, and it will work only because we just so happen to have visas to stop in Argentina for dinner. “I’ll tell you what,” I say to my guide. “Run all the cars immediately from Brazil. Have them meet us in Argentina. Dispatch everyone immediately.” I exit the galley and sit down in my seat. “Jeffrey, unfortunately there’s been a mistake.”
He looks at me calmly.
“We’re headed to the wrong airport.”
Jeffrey removes his glasses, always very patient. “What do you suggest?”
“We’re going to land in Argentina and the cars will meet us there. I’m anticipating just a few minutes’ drive from this airport across the river to the Brazilian side of the falls.”
“That should work fine.”
When we touch down, our handlers unload our bags and we pile fast into the car that’s waiting for us on the airstrip. “Go go go!” I tell our driver. He takes off and drives like crazy, wheeling out of the airport’s parking lot and heading for the bridge from Argentina to Brazil—a few miles that feel like an eternity, with a line of tourist buses idling in front of us. I stare out the window, thinking how our first view of the Iguaçu River is a total panic instead of the peace and perfection that it was supposed to be. Planning a fast-paced custom expedition like this is minute-to-minute, and if we can’t recover the time we’ve just lost, we’ll have to cut our helicopter and white-water rafting short—and we still might not make it in time for our grand finale dinner in Argentina tonight.
As we near the Brazilian side of the bridge, there’s one final moment for me to hold my breath: customs and immigration. Our driver stays cool and in control and rolls down his window. The Brazilian customs officer collects our passports and glances over his sunglasses into the back of the car, where Jeffrey and I are sitting. He exchanges words with our driver, who sighs, pins the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, and then turns in his seat to face me. “They want to check the car,” says the driver.
“Check the car? For what?”
“Drugs.”
“Drugs!”
“Sir, you’re two well-dressed men approaching the Brazilian border inside a nice SUV. He says he has to search the car, or no entry.”
This is unbelievable.
In unfazed cooperation, Jeffrey exits the SUV. I climb out on the opposite side. “Go on, get on with it,” I tell the official. “We’ve got a helicopter waiting for us.”
He looks me over in disgust, but it’s clear he doesn’t understand English. His shoulder nudges mine as he leans inside our vehicle, and his colleague begins to go through Jeffrey’s things on the other side. I want to bury my face in my hands. The scene is mortifying.
Through our things they rifle, probing into bags, digging around the pockets of our jackets, and examining our electronics. The first officer reaches for my Louis Vuitton briefcase and sets it on the dirt road, and I nearly lunge after him before I recognize the gun that’s holstered inside his belt. I shrug and raise my arms in the air, desperate and resigned. “Come on, man!”
“I look,” he says, pointing to it.
I crouch to the ground and scramble for my key to unlock it. With a click the briefcase opens, and the officer waves me out of his way. He pulls out two of my phones, turns them over in his hands and studies them. He sets a pile of papers on the ground, and the pages take off in a gust of wind. “My God!” I cry out, bolting after them like a lunatic.
{A&K staff}
Jeffrey Katzenberg and I in a power boat that went right up to the base of the falls, covering us with spray.
Finally the officer rises, eyes our driver, and lackadaisically steps aside. He nonchalantly gestures for us to get back inside the vehicle and then flags us through.
Our driver peels off. Behind us, the customs officer waves away the cloud of dust that’s kicked up in his face.
Our helicopter waits, propeller spinning, and the spinning increases when we climb inside. I turn to Jeffrey and clench my fist in victory. We’re here.
“Made it!” he hollers to me over the whip of the helicopter blades.
In an instant we’re off, ascending fast over the expanse of trees, the river winding through it. Within just three minutes we have a bird’s-eye view of the falls, a half-dozen endless baths pouring into the canyon. The land underneath us is loaded with bushes and pines. It forms around the falls in curves and rigid angles, the water shining up at us in greens and blues as it absorbs the hues of the trees and the open sky. Then, the moment, just as we move in above the tallest fall, the Devil’s Throat: directly over its horseshoe-shaped curve, a rainbow rises in a perfect arc. Our pilot hovers here, and with no words, we all absorb the moment. Jeffrey looks to me, allows the slightest smile, and shakes his head. The image is almost impossible to believe.
The day rolls on according to the original plan. Even with our life preservers on and head-to-toe in rain gear, we still find there’s not an inch of us that’s dry after the boat ride near the falls. The highlight, however, is the white-water rafting. “The rapids are usually considered level three,” our guide explains, “but today with the way the wind is interacting with the falls, we’re at a level four. Are you sure you’re ready?”
Jeffrey turns to me. We both nod.
Our guide climbs onto the very helm of the inflatable boat, a choice I find so defiant of nature that I can’t help but love it. I give Jeffrey a smirk: Only in Brazil. Two rowers climb in with us and we push off onto a gentle river . . . only for the first few seconds, then “Forward!” our guide yells. The rowers row madly, and we face a foamy wave head-on, bumping and splashing over it, trying to salvage some composure in its aftermath. “Forward!” yells our guide again. The rowers’ arms go fiercely, and we are both one with nature and against it. “Forward!” he orders again, and we yell as our boat rises with each wave; we laugh like schoolboys when the water calms enough for our heads to recover. The water sways gently toward and away from the riverbank’s rocks, and then suddenly we are plunging toward the next set of rapids.
I once told a reporter that the best travel partner is someone who can always go with the flow—but my good friends know that when they travel with me, the flow is the fastest in the world. The trip is such a thrill that a short while later, we plan a return trip for more South America, top to toe. This time we bring along our wives, Marilyn and Otavia, as well as our good friend Mark Burnett, the television executive who created the Survivor reality series (and who was a highly trained paratrooper in the British Army), and his lovely wife, Roma Downey. Both Mark and Jeffrey rely on travel to inform their work—Mark and Roma’s massively popular series The Bible was heavily influenced by their travels, and a while back, Mark asked me, “Okay, Geoff, where’s the most impossible place in the world to go where we could do Survivor?”
So this is a group that needs my utmost attention to planning. We aim to
leave on a Friday and return to Los Angeles the following Sunday, ten days in all—this trip has to be logistically perfect.
Off we go on Jeffrey’s jet. The first stop is in Quito, Ecuador, where we take over a wonderful restaurant for dinner. The next day I take them to the Galápagos, where we’ve booked two nights’ stay in the most beautiful home in the islands. Each day, our guide takes us out on a boat and we view the wildlife—blue-footed boobies, seals, giant tortoises—and Mark and I take a snorkeling expedition to see the stingrays. Again, I refuse to let him down . . . but on the boat ride out, I am somewhat nervous: I was once stung by a stingray, though not as critically as the sting that killed the beloved Steve Irwin in 2006.
I was windsurfing in Florida with Prince Michael of Kent and I jumped off my board straight onto a stingray and it wacked me—just like a bullet going in. Blood started pumping out, and I remembered the horror of this injury: for a man, the venom travels right into his male parts. My son Joss hooked my arm around his shoulder and rushed me to the hospital. “What did you use on the way here?” the doctor asked me.
“Ice.”
{Fernando Amer}
I always told Otavia, who is Brazilian, that the Victoria Falls in Africa has to be the greatest falls in the world. Now I’m not so sure.
“That’s one of the worst possible things you could’ve done,” he told me. Apparently on the end of the stinger is a piece of bone, and on the end of the bone is an extremely toxic acid. They used hot water as an antidote to dissolve the venom, and I recovered quickly and lived to surf another day—but on this occasion I stayed very close to the surface snorkeling in the Galápagos with Mark Burnett.
From the islands, we fly straight into Iquitos, Peru, to do the upper Amazon. We charter a boat for two nights, spending our days viewing the wonderful parrots and pink boto dolphins and then we cruise down to the mouth of the main Amazon, where there’s a rainforest with ridiculously high canopy walks that we all have to navigate individually. “Go carefully, Geoff!” Jeffrey calls. “It’s very slippery.”
“Go slowly, darling,” I tell Otavia, who’s taking the bridge steps in front of me. “This is very hairy.” In that very instant, her feet go straight out, and whap!
She falls on the slippery slats of the bridge and slides on her bottom until she is caught by the net that runs alongside the railing, stopping her before she falls three hundred feet into the jungle below. After I make my way down to check that she’s okay (thank goodness, she is; she’s utterly fearless), we go to scout out the anacondas and baby caiman and capture some photos of them.
We are sitting on our riverboat waiting to be picked up for our return flight to Iquitos. I’ve worked to secure arrangements with the Peruvian government to let us use a Cessna 208 Caravan, an amphibious air force plane with capacity for a maximum of seven people that can land in the middle of the Amazon River. But today rain is pouring down and the river is hazardously choppy. “Mr. Kent!” the pilot radios. “We can’t switch off the engines, it’s too dangerous!”
To reach the plane, facing upriver into the current, we board a small launch that pulls up alongside. As the boat and the plane bob up and down, the crew manhandles us one by one onto a pontoon and into the plane. Our wives are hanging in there, but rather nearing the end of their ropes. We’re hardly strapped in when the pilot announces, “We’ve got to go!”
The minute we are all onboard, he revs the engine and gathers speed. I see that the river is full of small logs and jetsam, which he somehow avoids. I hold my breath until he gets up enough speed to lift the plane above the swollen river below.
“Well,” I tell Jeffrey. “That was interesting.”
“It sure was,” he says. “That was one for the books.”
Once we’re safe, I pull out my itinerary—always in my pocket and loaded with logistics notes. As I review it, the details going forward are nice and tight: In Iquitos, we’ll meet Jeffrey Katzenberg’s G5 for the flight to Cusco, then catch the train to Machu Picchu for an anthropologist-led private tour of these ancient ruins, built by the Incas around 1450 and then abandoned roughly a hundred years later before being rediscovered in the early twentieth century by American historian Hiram Bingham. From Machu Picchu, we’ll return by train to Cusco and then fly to Lake Titicaca. But, as we are about to take off, my office radios that there are demonstrations in Bolivia and it is too dangerous.
{Graeme Bull}
We hiked the trails of Torres del Paine National Park and were stunned by the spectacular views of the forest, the beautiful lakes, and pristine glaciers.
We quickly regroup and file a new flight plan—directly to Patagonia, one of my absolute favorite destinations. The southernmost region of the South American continent, it’s one of the least populated places in the world.
Torres del Paine National Park itself has it all: incredible mountains, glaciers, lakes, and the Serrano River (which makes for a thrill of a Zodiac ride), as well as a plethora of untouched ecosystems.
Explora Patagonia Lodge is located in the center of the park on the shores of Lake Pehoe, with breathtaking views of the Paine ridge and the granite towers.
The park can be explored by vehicle, horseback, or boat with trips across Lake Grey to see its namesake glacier. But because our group are all in excellent physical shape, we’ll go on foot. The weather is beautiful and on the first day we trek for about six hours to Grey Glacier and witness the amazing sight of it calving into Lake Grey.
Mark and Roma Burnett, the fittest of all of us, get up at 4 a.m. on the last day and trek to the base of Paine Towers, nearly eleven miles over eight hours. They come back tired but triumphant.
On our way to the airport, we all rave about our days in the wilderness. I take it all in, content with another successful South American adventure with fantastic clients and friends.
{Garth Hovell}
Sharing Jabu with my friend Ted Turner.
Chapter 19
BOTSWANA
2000
In 2014 I am featured in an episode of In Pursuit of Passion, a PBS television series that airs in the United States and around the world. The episode focuses on how Abercrombie & Kent started out as a mom-and-pop safari company that took clients into the wilderness, comfortably, delivering a travel experience par excellence, and growing into one of the world’s leaders in luxury travel. During filming, I experience a few of my own firsts: I sit directly on the edge of the Victoria Falls and swim in the Devil’s Pool, which the UK’s Daily Mail has nicknamed “the world’s ultimate (and most dangerous) infinity pool.” Then I fly a microlight aircraft with a small “lawnmower” engine right over the falls, all the way down the gorge. We take a helicopter up with the doors off and do the scariest level-five white-water rafting in the world in the Zambezi River below the falls. When the first huge wave hits me, I fall out . . . and there I am swimming down the falls with the crocodiles. Otavia, my ultimate travel partner, was anchored into the back of the raft—so fitting that she was trying to keep me anchored, as usual, and keeping everything around us in balance. She cheers me on when the boat catches up and rescues me, and today it’s one of the travel memories we laugh about the most.
During a calm and reflective moment on camera for that production, I share one of the most significant conclusions I’ve come to in the course of my career. Perhaps our neighbor at our new house in Brazil put it best when Otavia stopped to greet his dog on the beach. “It’s nice to meet you both,” he said. “What do you do?” When I told him, he was shocked. “You know,” he said, “I’ve traveled on your holidays many times. Your company is the only place where I spend money and get richer instead of poorer.”
(This has stuck with me just as much as the time decades ago when a client thanked me because the sound of a roaring lion outside his tent caused his wife to jump out of her bed and into his, which was the first time he had slept with her for twenty-five years!)
In all seriousness, it’s true. No matter whom you’re hostin
g or where you are, the most important effect of travel is that it does in fact change a person’s life and their perspective on the world. Often this comes at a very crucial time in an individual’s personal development . . . and sometimes it even comes at a critical moment in history.
One journey exemplifies this perhaps better than any other in my life.
On the morning of September 1, 1997, I wake up to news so surreal that it jolts me: the night before, on August 31, Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris. I was in Florida and saw the news on CNN. It was almost as if I went on autopilot, dialing Prince Charles. I thought it highly unlikely that he would answer my call on such a tense day . . . and as the phone rang, my mind raced.
I thought of his boys, those joyful, kindhearted boys, whom I’d taken on safari in Kenya with their father in earlier years. I remembered thinking on that trip how as young teenagers, Prince William and Prince Harry visibly shared their father’s appreciation for wildlife and curiosity to know nature. They were close brothers growing into fine young men with an understanding of their roles in the world—roles they both took very seriously.
I recall the time in 1992 when I traveled with Prince Charles and Princess Diana on a state visit to India—the very trip where Diana had posed very somberly on a bench for the press outside the Taj Mahal, shortly before they announced that they were about to divorce.
And I think of Prince Charles, my extremely revered friend . . . and in that very moment, he answers the phone.
“Sir,” I say. “It’s Geoffrey Kent.” I search for more words, but only the obvious came out: “I’m so very sorry . . .”
He is deeply saddened about the situation and of course very concerned for his sons.
I say what else was burning in my throat. “If there is anything I can do—really, I mean that—”
“Actually,” he said, sounding somewhat relieved for the first time in our conversation, “Harry’s half-term at Ludgrove is coming up in October. He was meant to spend it with his mother . . .” Prince Charles went on to explain that he had a state visit planned to South Africa, and by that time, Prince William’s half-term at Eton would have concluded. “For Harry, though . . . I think perhaps it would do him good to get away on safari for a few days and meet up with me in South Africa later. What do you think?”
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