is an obscene feature of African life that is not likely to disappear,” he writes at the end of this grim journey, which Theroux, now 72, makes clear will be his last through Africa. “The murderous, self-elected, megalomaniacal head of state with the morals of a fruit fly. Yet much of this trip is a dispiriting slog through squalid bus stations and urban slums, enlivened by Theroux’s vivid evocations of misery as well as by his moral outrage. Theroux’s peevish mood lifts occasionally - on an elephant-back safari in the Okavango Delta and during a serendipitous meeting with three “birdlike and beautiful” teenage girls who have just finished an efundula, or initiation ceremony, in rural Angola. In sparsely populated Namibia, Theroux finds poverty and desperation lurking behind the pretty, German-flavored resort of Swakopmund, and joins a tattered remnant of the Ju/’hoansi, an ancient tribe of hunter-gatherers who have “gone from a fleet-footed bush-dwelling people who chased down game to sedentary town-dwellers plagued by drunkenness and hunger.” The journey begins in the squatter camps of the Cape Flats, where an ever increasing tide of newcomers thwarts efforts to improve the people’s lot: “No sooner had a solution been found than a new solution was needed.” A sequel to “Dark Star Safari,” his 2003 account of a troubled overland trip from Cairo to Cape Town, Theroux’s latest misadventure takes him up Africa’s southwest coast. In THE LAST TRAIN TO ZONA VERDE: My Ultimate African Safari (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27), Paul Theroux sets out on a valedictory journey through the continent that has enthralled and repelled him since he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi in the 1960s. Yet their own stumbles and setbacks prove that older doesn’t always mean wiser.
At the other end of the spectrum stand three recently minted septuagenarians with more than a century’s worth of globe-trotting among them. Three footloose writers in their 30s and 40s probe the back alleys of Ho Chi Minh City, the bike-choked streets of Amsterdam and the Taliban-haunted steppes of northern Afghanistan - sometimes paying a price for their curiosity. I say: continue to endure what you can, you blessed old wanderer, and keep reporting back to us.The best of this season’s travel books are marked by a generational split. experience.” The reader becomes glad for his discomfort and rightly suspicious of Theroux’s existential what-am-I-doing-here routine.
Later, he reports that as a traveller “intending to write a book,” his nasty border crossing into Angola “could not have been a richer. Of a tour around the magnificent coast near Cape Town, he confesses, “It was all so undemandingly pleasant there was nothing to write about.” Poor guy. The journey is more bleak than not, but Theroux the writer revels even when Theroux the tourist suffers.
Zona verde cracked#
Implicitly, Theroux embeds an overriding argument in favour of travel in “the old, laborious way into the unknown.” He adds: “If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay home and be brilliantly witty and insightful.” Alas. We benefit from his keen eye and sharp critiques, but never absent is an abiding self-awareness of his status as a “romantic voyeur.” He finds some good news in South Africa, ambivalence in Namibia and a hellhole in Angola. No matter: he packed in enough voyage to fill 368 rich pages.Īlong the way, we follow Theroux atop an elephant for a cushy safari in anthropologist-infested Namibian bush, along war-scarred Angolan roads.
Confronted with an “itinerary of urban squalor” and finding facsimiles of slum horror, he calls it quits in Luanda. His account is a delight, though things are rarely very pleasant for our hardy guide, who meets his match in miserable and ubiquitous African slums. This time, he’s en route from Cape Town, South Africa, to Luanda, Angola. Theroux is back on the rough road at age 70, still resolutely committed to land travel and scornful of the heedless speed of an airplane.
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