Paul Theroux's The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

We had a Nor'Easter Friday. A Nor'Easter is a specific kind of storm that travels from the southern Atlantic coast to the north and is often dangerous. This one was--I heard on the news that nine people died in this storm, and most of them from falling trees. As the windy storm circled above my home and work, there were strong wind gusts and lots of precipitation. At work I removed from my car about two inches of heavy snow, but at home, thirty minutes away, there was only rain. Lots of rain. At my top-secret seashore location, wind gusts were reported at 68 miles per hour. Talk on Facebook among local friends centered around sump pumps and lost power. I was lucky in that I did not lose power this time or find a soggy basement, but nonetheless found myself seeking escapist entertainment as a distraction. First, an Oscar-nominated movie with an element of ridiculous fantasy but good acting, and then an old-fashioned, print-on-paper, hefty, intellectually-inspiring, book. I thought of my powerless friends and hoped they took this opportunity to read a book since I think not enough people seek book-companionship on a regular basis. Some are still without power, so if they happen to have car-charged their phones, here's a suggestion I predict will take their minds off the inconvenience of the loss of electricity.

Paul Theroux, The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari (NY: Mariner, 2013)

Theroux begins this journey in comfortable Cape Town, South Africa, and moves Northwest through Namibia, across the border to Angola. As he moves north, and as I follow in my atlas, he moves away from comfortable civilization and becomes aware of profound poverty and despair. The border crossing between Namibia and Angola is particularly difficult, harassing, and brutal, but Theroux

finds a guide who helps him navigate the crooked agents and their monetary expectations. Once across, he finds another guide to shepherd him to his hotel in Ondjiva. As he did almost forty years earlier in The Great Railway Bazaar in Europe and Asia, Theroux has speaking engagements along the way which keep income flowing. In Lubango in Angola, Theroux becomes a part-time teacher at the university: “Nothing is more satisfying in travel than to land in a place and assume an occupation, even a temporary one, as a teacher; to cease being a voyeur and have a purpose and routine, especially one that involved interacting with intelligent students.” (p. 259)

Unlike in the earlier book, Theroux is now concerned about his age. In 1975 he navigated the obstacles of travel nimbly and with a hopeful sense of adventure. The sense of adventure is still with him in Africa in the 2013 book, but it is less hopeful and increasingly hopeless. He admits that. He’s preoccupied with his age (70) and questions the wisdom of such a trip frequently throughout the book. He takes gout pills. He is concerned about his own mortality now, and often updates the reader about people he met along the way who died soon after. He wonders if this will be his last big solo trip. “There was a finality in my way of looking now, a gaze with more remembering in it.” (p. 80) At one point his identity is stolen and over $40,000 is charged to his credit card, maxing it out and making it useless to him. He describes the experience as demoralizing.

This book is less a train book and more of a transportation book. There are railroad journeys in Africa, but he sometimes connects with buses and hired Land Cruisers. One of these Land Cruisers breaks down in a desolate bush village where there is nothing to eat but an old woman’s leathery chicken legs covered with black flies that she’s selling from a pail. Although he had resigned himself to going without food, he eventually relents and consumes the chewy meat. It’s a sad scene, but Theroux claws his way out of the funk by asking about the distant drumbeats he hears coming from the next village. It turns out to be a four-day festival for girls entering womanhood, and he finds a local expert to interview and an interpreter who can translate from the local language into Italian for him. Before the Land Cruiser is fixed he has the opportunity to go to the village and meet some of the young women. The travel writer found an exclusive story, but it didn’t come easy. Theroux stated that this was his purpose in coming to Africa, to spend a night and day like that. It was rewarding for him and it’s a compelling part of the book.

Ultimately, Theroux is headed for Luanda, on Angola’s Atlantic Coast. He calls Luanda an ‘improvised’ city. “Going deeper into Luanda meant traveling into madness.” (p. 304) It’s uncomfortable reading because it is such a risky place for our 70-year-old hero. He recognizes that Angola is a rich country, rich from diamonds, gold, and oil, but its corrupt government ignores its poor people. Although he had hoped to travel to Timbuktu on this trip, he realizes he has had enough in Luanda. Political issues in Mali and between Angola and Mali prevent him from completing that itinerary. He’s not even tempted by the new Chinese-built train to Malanje, and decides to skip additional slummy cities (he admits he hates cities anyway and prefers rural landscapes with people in them) and head back to Cape Town and then home: “As I grow older, the consolations of home take on a deeper meaning.” Boy, do I know what he means. One of my writing students chose this book as her Creative-Nonfiction-which-includes-research assignment, and I can't wait to find out how this twenty-something navigates Theroux's thoughts on age.

While there are portions of this trip that Theroux finds fulfilling, the girls’ festival in the village, and his teaching, there are many more that he finds challenging, demoralizing, and uncomfortable. A younger Theroux may have found these same things to be delicious challenges. He admits he often thought he might die in his last three trips. In his last paragraph he hints at what’s coming next, a look at the poor in the American South.