Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

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He visits old friends (he was in the Peace Corp), makes new friends, hangs out with hookers, and generally appreciates the pace, beauty and “otherness” that is Africa. In his first new travel book in eight years, the endearingly irascible Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry and train.

Half way into his journey through Africa, Paul Theroux is standing by the roadside in northern Kenya, looking, by his own account, a little down-at-heel. Although Mengistu killed a large number of government ministers, some of whom were related to Haile Selassie, and imprisoned his daughter, most of the royal family survived.Theroux's] witty observations and obvious love and curiosity for Africa should help make this entertaining epic a yardstick for future travel writing. Catching a flight to Khartoum, Theroux watches indigenous dervishes and rides Osama bin Laden's highway to Sudan's pyramids. Theroux is an ideal sort of traveller: curious, passionate and well-served by his motto of "try anything twice". In Zambia,everyone seems to be infected with AIDs,as girls as young as ten are forced into prostitution. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The rhetoric is so offensive and plain bizarre to anyone making her or his life in “Africa” that I had no option but to pretend that we were in a different genre, to keep imagining the book as a comic novel with a deliberately unlikeable narrator. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. Some of the writing in Safari is particularly cheesy, and his best works, his travel writings (I’ve never read the novels), are largely based on a formula and gimmick. In Tanzania, still in those culpably white cars, they "travel in pairs, in the manner of cultists and Mormon evangelists".Theroux, one suspects, could be a headache to travel with; resourceful, courageous and indefatigable, as well as crusty, opinionated and contradictory. It is currently my bed-time book and it has been total pleasure to have what feels like a chin-wag with this interesting man, who is opening my eyes in such a well written way.

The 20 stories in the 30th work of fiction from Theroux (The Mosquito Coast) grapple with the all-too-human desire for ownership—of art, of people, of places, even of stories themselves. 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. In the travel-writing tradition that made Paul Theroux’s reputation, Dark Star Safari is a rich and insightful book whose itinerary is Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town: down the Nile, through Sudan and Ethiopia, to Kenya, Uganda, and ultimately to the tip of South Africa. Neither a sensationalistic reveler in the pain of others, nor a hopeless romantic, Theroux chronicles a journey through an Africa full of decay and beauty, fear and joy, misery and perseverance.A trip through some of the most threatened and beautiful land in the world, by train, dugout canoe, chicken bus and truck. And this, without a phone or blackberry, not as a 25 year old or a 34 year old (Great Railway Bazaar), but at the age of 60…! It is Theroux in his element -- a trip where chance encounter is everything, where departure and arrival times are an irrelevance, and where contentment can be found balancing on the top of a truck in the middle of nowhere. Most of these vehicles are in a decrepit state – and likely would not be allowed on roads in a First World country.