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Paul Theroux

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The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari Kindle Edition

by Paul Theroux (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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The acclaimed author of Dark Star Safari journeys across western Africa in this “thoroughly engrossing [and] at times tragic” travelogue (Washington Post).

Paul Theroux’s best-selling Dark Star Safari chronicled his epic overland voyage from Cairo to Cape Town, providing an insider’s look at modern Africa. Now, with The Last Train to Zona Verde, he returns to discover how both he and Africa have changed in the ensuing years. Traveling alone, Theroux sets out from Cape Town, going north through South Africa, Namibia, then into Angola, encountering a world increasingly removed from tourists’ itineraries and the hopes of postcolonial independence movements.

After covering nearly 2,500 arduous miles, Theroux cuts short his journey, a decision he chronicles with unsparing honesty in a chapter titled “What Am I Doing Here?” Vivid, witty, and beautifully evocative, The Last Train to Zona Verde is a fitting final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers.

“If this book is proof, age has not slowed Theroux or encouraged him to rest on his achievements . . . Gutsy, alert to Africa's struggles, its injustices and history.” — San Francisco Chronicle

Print length

373 pages
Language

English
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Publisher

Mariner Books
Publication date

May 7, 2013
File size

2796 KB
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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Having traveled overland from Cairo to Cape Town in Dark Star Safari (2003), Theroux intended, 10 years on, to resume the trip, this time heading north up the west side of Africa, avoiding the “safe and well-trodden routes.” Though he found some happy moments in “the kingdom of light,” the journey was to be darker, harder, and, a rarity for Theroux—unfinished. He does find hopeful change in Cape Town, beautiful desolation in Namibia, and elegance in the bush in Botswana (albeit at extortionate prices). But when he crosses the border into Angola: chaos. After witnessing scene after scene of disorganization, poverty, and despair; after decrying the disconnect between the country’s oil-rich rulers and its unemployed, idle citizens; after finding “cities that were indistinguishable from one another in their squalor and decrepitude,” he concludes there is nothing more he can learn from their suffering. Ending what seems an impossible trip, he heads for home. Ultimate in the subtitle means not best but final. As Theroux, in an autumnal state of mind, ponders his own mortality, it will be difficult for readers to imagine the world of letters without him. His ability to map new terrain, both interior and exterior, and to report from places that seldom make the news, remains undiminished. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Theroux’s back-to-Africa novel, The Lower River (2012), was Booklist’s Top of the List. But any book by the eminent author draws interest, and a national tour is planned. --Keir Graff

Review

• "[Theroux's] ability to map new terrain, both interior and exterior, and to report from places that seldom make the news, remains undiminished." -- Booklist, starred
• "Theroux's prose is as vividly descriptive and atmospheric as ever and, though a bit curmudgeonly, he's still wide open to raw, painful interactions between his psyche and his surroundings." -- Publishers Weekly, starred
• "In this intensely personal book, Theroux honestly confronts racism, stigma, privilege and expectations . . . Reading this enlightening book won't only open a window into Theroux's mind, it will also impart a deeper understanding of Africa and travel in general." -- Kirkus, starred

From the Inside Flap

Following the success of the acclaimed Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and The Great Railway Bazaar, The Last Train to Zona Verde is an ode to the last African journey of the world's most celebrated travel writer.

Happy again, back in the kingdom of light, writes Paul Theroux as he sets out on a new journey through the continent he knows and loves best. Theroux first came to Africa as a twenty-two-year-old Peace Corps volunteer, and the pull of the vast land never left him. Now he returns, after fifty years on the road, to explore the little-traveled territory of western Africa and to take stock both of the place and of himself.

His odyssey takes him northward from Cape Town, through South Africa and Namibia, then on into Angola, wishing to head farther still until he reaches the end of the line. Journeying alone through the greenest continent, Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the itineraries of tourists and the hopes of postcolonial independence movements. Leaving the Cape Town townships, traversing the Namibian bush, passing the browsing cattle of the great sunbaked heartland of the savanna, Theroux crosses the Red Line into a different Africa: the improvised, slapped-together Africa of tumbled fences and cooking fires, of mud and thatch, of heat and poverty, and of roadblocks, mobs, and anarchy. After 2,500 arduous miles, he comes to the end of his journey in more ways than one, a decision he chronicles with typically unsparing honesty in a chapter called What Am I Doing Here?

Vivid, witty, and beautifully evocative, The Last Train to Zona Verde is a fitting final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Paul Theroux

Relentlessly engaging . . . Theroux demonstrates how a traveler s finely wrought observations . . . sometimes offer the best political and social analysis. Washington Post

Much of [Theroux s] writing reflects affection for the people in whose midst he is apt to find himself, and a spirit of inquiry that is part anthropological and part autobiographical. Wall Street Journal

Few writers can so precisely capture the strange qualities of travel. Outside

[Theroux s] work is distinguished by a splendid eye for detail and the telling gesture; a storyteller s sense of pacing and gift for granting closure to the most subtle progression of events; and the graceful use of language. Chicago Tribune

Reading Theroux may make you cancel your plane tickets and settle in at home instead for a great read. Entertainment Weekly

One of our most original and agile writers. Minneapolis Star Tribune

$27.00
ISBN 978-0-618-83933-9
Travel
0513/694105

About the Author

PAUL THEROUX's books include Dark Star Safari, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Elephanta Suite, A Dead Hand, The Tao of Travel, and The Lower River. The Mosquito Coast and Dr Slaughter have both been made into successful films. Paul Theroux divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian islands.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B008P94QDA
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books (May 7, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 7, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2796 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 373 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #377,193 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #8 in West Africa Travel
- #41 in General South Africa Travel Books
- #255 in General Africa Travel Books

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Paul Theroux was born and educated in the United States. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled first to Italy and then to Africa, where he worked as a Peace Corps teacher at a bush school in Malawi, and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. Throughout this time he was publishing short stories and journalism, and wrote a number of novels. Among these were Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers, all of which appear in one volume, On the Edge of the Great Rift (Penguin, 1996).

In the early 1970s Paul Theroux moved with his wife and two children to Dorset, where he wrote Saint Jack, and then on to London. He was a resident in Britain for a total of seventeen years. In this time he wrote a dozen volumes of highly praised fiction and a number of successful travel books, from which a selection of writings were taken to compile his book Travelling the World (Penguin, 1992). Paul Theroux has now returned to the United States, but he continues to travel widely.

Paul Theroux's many books include Picture Palace, which won the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Pillars of Hercules, shortlisted for the 1996 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; My Other Life: A Novel, Kowloon Tong, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Fresh-air Fiend and Hotel Honolulu. Blindness is his latest novel. Most of his books are published by Penguin.

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The last train to so a verde

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2024

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Interesting and insightful. What courage to undertake such a trip! It is so sad how some of the world is evolving. Praise to an adventure who could report on the experiences and people he encountered . Basically, it was a quite depressing and, hopefully, not a glimpse into the future of mankind.

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James Barton Phelps

A Trip to Hell as His Valedictory

Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2013

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There is an end to every trip. The traveler is safely home; and, back among the familiar creature comforts of his life, he can tell us where he has been, what he has seen and what if anything it has meant to him and what if anything he has learned from his journey. So it is with Paul Theroux in this book. He's commenced his trip up the East Coast of Africa from Cape Town. He's seen the Cape Town slums. He's travelled North the width of Namibia (half again the size of Texas), walked with the Bushmen seen, the bitter and the better in that part of Africa and, finally, in Angola (twice the size of Texas) he's had enough - the "broken, unspeakable cities" with chronic food shortages, no plumbing, no clinics, no schools, no security and no hope; and with his onward journey to Timbuktu blocked by armed gangs and with no security in Nigeria and Islamist rebels out of control in the Congo, he finally says "What am I doing here?" and he gives his soiled traveling clothes to a lonely lady in the market who tells him "these will fit my husband") and feels "beckoned home".

There was no train - ever. There was really no "Zona Verde" (the Bush) any more at the geographical point where he was when he felt the "beckoning home".

So after more than forty years of travel, more than forty years of telling us in some of the finest writing of any genre about what he has seen and where he has been, this book is his valedictory. And we shall miss him. Yes, he could be difficult, picky, opinionated, sulky at times, but he was an optimist - always was looking ahead, always ready for the next trip. He had an eye and an appreciation for beauty in the earth and goodness in its people. He could always see, sense, discern and tell us what lay beneath the surface; and he had no patience for cant, the false, the fake or the fatuous. He always traveled alone, unscheduled; he traveled with the ordinary travelers of whatever country he was in as his companions. No tours, no fancy stuff for him. And he was sentimental, a loving man. He loved trains. If one was available he would be on it. Above all he was (this is starting to read like an obituary!) - and is - a man of letters. In nearly every country he would take time out to conduct classes in English literature and composition; and, in reading all of his travel books, I was constantly amazed to learn that he always seemed to have with him some out-of-the-way book specifically relevant to where he was. He was a traveling reference room!

Not only is he a man of letters, I think his heart is in teaching. That's how he started out fifty years ago - as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in Malawi and Uganda - and I think an argument can be made that at least a part of his his heart has always been in Africa. When he made his trip ten years ago down the East Coast of Africa which was the basis for his Dark Star Safari he stopped again to teach at the school which had seen his first efforts; and he has frequently alluded to this happy period in his writings. So when his trip into Angola crashed and burned, when he saw and experienced nothing but chaos, poverty, trash, hunger and desuetude in the societal and governmental and economic train wreck that is now Angola I think a case can be made to he effect that he just said "enough". It was looking like an old friend who had fallen on hard times, drunk too much, lived it up (and now down) and had reached bottom. There was nothing there - for Mr. Theroux or any of his readers.

This really being a book review I should say something about the trip into Angola. It was a trip into "the Africa of cheap, despised, unaccommodated people of seemingly unfixable blight, so hideous, really, it is unrecognizable as Africa at all. But it is, of course - the new Africa. ... Angolans lived among garbage heaps - plastic bottles, soda cans, torn bags, broken chairs, dead dogs, rotting food, indefinable slop, their own scattered twists of excrement - and in one town a stack of dead cows, bloated from putrefaction" (p.297)

Angola has a problem - or problems - typical of a majority of African countries - poverty, disease, hunger, corruption, lack of infrastructure, lack of education and, above all the lack of a tradition of stable government. As an example, Angola was for Portugal the dumping ground of its underclass for four hundred years, never a country to be "developed" in the conventional sense but one to be pillaged; and I don't think anybody ever gave it a thought. Following a domestic revolution in Portugal in 1972 Angola achieved "independence" only to be thrust into a Civil War waged between three local and independent forces, two of which were supported by foreign powers. That, Civil War lasted more than 25 years. Nobody "won'. It left the country infested with land mines and disease. It broke apart whatever chances the natives had of maintain their traditional existence in the Bush and brought them into the cities which have expanded exponentially with grim poverty and grimmer futures for all. The game has gone from the Bush. There is no tourist industry. Nobody comes to Angola - and for good reason. There is nothing to see any more, nobody really interesting to talk to, no "natives" to gawk at. They are all in town in the slums trying to exist.

If you think this is a dystopian view of present day Angola you a right, but this is what Mr. Theroux walked into (and I mean this literally - he had to walk across the border.)
Only a master craftsman like Theroux could describe it accurately. But he has done it and done it well.

Bottom line. The book is a real downer of a travel tale because of the subject matter. The upside: Paul Theroux is, I think, the best, the most eloquent, the most insightful, most descriptive writer working today; and if for on other reason than to enjoy and envy his use of the written word, his last travel book is worth reading.

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MJ

A Trip to the End of the World

Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2015

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Travel with Paul Theroux is always an enlightening, but rarely uplifting, experience. He is a gifted writer whose prose unlocks vivid images and portraits of exotic places and peoples, this time in southwest Africa. In "The Last Train to Zona Verde" (a term used in parts of Africa to describe the "bush"), Mr. Theroux refuses to let the reader turn a blind eye to the desperation, hopelessness, and plight of the swath of Africa through which he journeys. And that is precisely what we can most appreciate in him. Few would go where he has gone, and even fewer could write with such elegance and veracity about the experience.

Mr. Theroux was no stranger to Africa when he journeyed there for his final adventure chronicled in "Zona Verde". As a youth, he spent many years in Africa; as a traveler, a schoolteacher, and a writer. In this final saga, he makes a nostalgic return to the continent almost a half a century later for what he senses from the outset will be his final journey there.

Mr. Theroux struggles with what he characterizes as his own"voyerism of gawking at poverty". He starts out in Cape Town, eschewing the glamorous side of this fashionable town and clambering to "go slumming" in the outskirts of the city. High society and the beautiful side of life seem to bore him. He rationalizes that his desire to travel is not like other "tourists" (he calls himself a "traveler"): he is a writer looking for mutability, what has changed over time, and to opine on whether change has been for the better. He rarely seems to conclude that it has.

Who, according to Mr. Theroux, is a traveler? Ideally, it is one whose journey is a laborious quest into the unknown. Mr. Theroux admonishes that reading one of his books, although stimulating, is no substitute for travel. He takes us via every conceivable mode of public transportation and on foot, dragging us through the mud, so to speak, across hostile borders. I am no armchair tourist, but I think I will skip the fly-infested chicken legs and endless garbage heaps he describes, but am happy to experience all he encounters vicariously.

From sterility in the aftermath of the civil war, to the slow but steady ascendency of the new Chinese colonialism, Mr. Theroux, undeterred by warnings and, indeed, somewhat stimulated by them, takes us on a journey through one of the most corrupt and godforsaken countries on earth - Angola. He peels back layer after rotten layer of corruption and destitution in a country nonetheless dripping in gold, oil, and diamonds. This is Mr. Theroux at his best, and humanity at its worst.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Theroux is not a huge enthusiast of the multitude of NGOs and other humanitarian efforts in Africa and their attempts to raise the bar in education and living standards. He sees such efforts as largely having failed in their quest. He perceives corruption as the main impediment to success despite billions in aid poured into the continent.

On his journey, Mr. Theroux finds one bright spot in remote Tsumkwee, in northwest Namibia. There he visits NGO-sponsored schools where he is invited to speak. But impressed as he is in this remote village by the cleanliness of the children, the level of their English, and eagerness of their desire to learn, he nonetheless expresses skepticism about the ability of these children to find future opportunities in their own country. Here, at least, foreign aid dollars appeared to be making some difference.

Mr. Theroux is nostalgic in "The Last Train to Zona Verde", not just for his earlier days of travel, but also for his youth. "As a young man, I never entertained this idea of death in travel. I had set off for Africa almost fifty years ago with the notion that my life had at last begun." But time inevitably transmutes his perception, "During my last few long trips I often thought that I might die. I was not alone in that fear; it is the rational conjecture of most travelers I know, especially the ones about my age."

With this swan song, Mr. Theroux is at his zenith as a travel writer, but also as a travel philosopher now more in touch with his own mortality. "This is what the world will look like when it ends," he writes as he nears his final destination outside Luanda, Angola. It is as though he traveled to the end of the earth to render the final strokes of his pen.

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Barbara Wenger

We all should know about what is happening in and to Africa

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 6, 2021

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After having read his first travel account through part of Africa in "Dark Star Safari" I needed to read his last trip into his African past. I was shocked , appalled and suffered with the writer . The situation for most of its population seems hopeless . How can the life of the population improve if a rich in oil, gold and diamond country like Angola is not using its richness to do something for its people. It seems that all the riches go into the pockets of just a few. It is apalling and makes me doubt the effectiveness of all our NGO's and giant donations and makes me think twice before making any donations. myself. Thank you Paul Theroux for going through this and putting your life and sanity at risk daring to do this trip. it really opened my eyes and I am stopping some of my romantisising friends to do a back packing trip through Africa.

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camino rosemarie

Libro in perfette condizioni

Reviewed in Italy on March 16, 2021

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Perfetto ricevuto anche se col covid c era il solito ritardo. Grazie

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J. Raach

Paul Theroux at his best

Reviewed in Germany on September 9, 2017

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Nachdem das Vorgängerbuch "Tief im Süden" durch ständige Wiederholungen (wie häufig werden doch immer nach dem gleichen Muster Waffenshows geschildert und Begegnungen mit hilflosen Helfern geschildert) enttäuscht hat, ist dieses Buch wieder eine großartige, vielfältige Schilderung durch das Elend Afrikas. Das Schicksal vieler unter extremer Armut und Gewalt leidender Menschen, die Theroux kennen lernt, geht unter die Haut.

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Capt. Ken

A must read book.

Reviewed in Canada on February 13, 2017

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Another excellent book from the desk of Paul Theroux. The pessimistic traveller . Africa is one place that
I have no desire to visit. He did have one hell of a journey and well told. This guy has more guts than
Dick Tracy ( if there is anyone out there that remembers him) !

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Christiaan Van Ast

The Last Train to Zona Verde

Reviewed in Spain on April 13, 2018

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Depressing repetition of misery in South Africa, superficial overview of Namibia and mind-boggling corruption in Angola. Only chapter about Okavango safari on elephants was a joy to read.

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