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.

The Great Railway Bazaar

Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar. Mariner, 1975.

“Speed puts some people to sleep; others it makes breathless. It doesn’t enliven conversation. I missed the slower trains with the lounge cars and the rackety wheels.” (p. 291)

Paul Theroux wrote those lines on the Hikari Super Express to Kyoto, Japan, towards the end of his four months on the rails in Europe and Asia. At this point, the reader is beginning to notice that

Theroux is travel-weary. Four months is a long time to be on a train, and that he had to arrange each leg of the journey as he arrived at each new destination have made the trip an adventure. He chats with people on the train, at the stations, and in the places he visits. The variety of people and places is truly a ‘bazaar,’ (a Railway bazaar), and this reader feels as if she’s simultaneously taken the trip with Theroux and time-traveled 40 years back in time. The journey is described in detail in The Great Railway Bazaar from 1975.

The quote above caught my eye and caused me to reflect on some train trips I’ve taken. Madrid to Granada, Spain: similar to Theroux’s descriptions in that the changing views out the window (weather, local clothing, city vs. country) contrast the train’s interior situations (characters, conversations, behavior, ambient light). My exterior view changed from urban to rural (with windmills and olive trees), and the scruffy interior of the train was populated by an assortment of travelers. There was a movie to entertain us (Theroux didn’t have movies!), and a dining car from which my companion brought me a surprisingly delicious ham sandwich. Most of Theroux’s rides were more colorful and exotic than this, but my experience helped me understand him. Towards the end of his adventure when he had become weary, he described the Japanese Super Express which blasted through dull suburbs populated by silent passengers. This train reminded me of the German bullet train on which I traveled from Cologne to Berlin, Germany, also through blah suburbs with travelers and commuters wrapped-up in their own work or reading. It was cool to speed through the country on such a fast train, but the ride did not supply much in the way of travel adventure. The Spain train had character.

In Spain, the train approaches the plain.

Theroux had ample time to come up with astute observations during his four-month trek. I copied six pages of interesting sentences that might be quotable in future train-themed essays. He’s quotable even when he gets cranky on the Trans-Siberian Express and has to walk through below-freezing temperatures in-between cars in order to get to the dining car three cars away. He has bad dreams and feels guilty about leaving his family so long: “Once I had thought of a train window as allowing me freedom to gape at the world; now it seemed and imprisoning thing and at times took on the opacity of a cell wall,” (p. 323).

On the last page he reveals what he has learned from the trip: “…the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows,” (p. 342). I thought that sentence was particularly interesting because Theroux writes both travel and fiction, and I wonder how he thinks differently when creating each.

I would not have been disappointed by his ending if he had left it at that, but the crafty Theroux then worked in the book’s first sentence as its last, about how he “seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.” That’s true for me, too, and I would add that I have never heard a train song and not wished I was on it (with the possible exception of the Grateful Dead’s).