 Katharine Hepburn (qv), in her written account of the films  production entitled "The Making of "The African Queen," or How I  Went to Africa with Bogie, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My  Mind", described the first day of shooting, which required five cars  and trucks to take the cast, crew and equipment three and a half  miles from Biondo to the Ruiki river, at which point they loaded  everything onto boats and sailed another two and a half miles to the  shooting location. Press materials and contemporary articles detail  the various perils of shooting on location in Africa, including  dysentery, malaria, bacteria