• Complain

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

Here you can read online Paul Theroux - The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2013, publisher: McClelland & Stewart, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    McClelland & Stewart
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2013
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

For all Theroux travel writing fans and particularly the legions of lovers of Dark Star Safari and Eastern Star. Acclaimed travel writer Paul Theroux resumes the African trip recounted in his brilliant Dark Star Safari, from Cairo to Capetown down the right-hand of Africa. For ten years he longed to return Capetown, and travel up the the left-hand side to Congo. After 50 years of travel and past retirement age, this is the last trip of this kind the author will take, and this is the story his fans have been waiting for.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 worlds 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.

Paul Theroux: author's other books


Who wrote The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Books by Paul Theroux FICTION Waldo Fong and the Indians Girls at Play - photo 1
Books by Paul Theroux

FICTION

Waldo

Fong and the Indians

Girls at Play

Murder in Mount Holly

Jungle Lovers

Sinning with Annie

Saint Jack

The Black House

The Family Arsenal

The Consuls File

A Christmas Card

Picture Palace

London Snow

Worlds End

The Mosquito Coast

The London Embassy

Half Moon Street

O-Zone

My Secret History

Chicago Loop

Millroy the Magician

My Other Life

Kowloon Tong

Hotel Honolulu

The Stranger at the Palazzo dOro

Blinding Light

The Elephanta Suite

A Dead Hand

The Lower River

CRITICISM

V. S. Naipaul

NONFICTION

The Great Railway Bazaar

The Old Patagonian Express

The Kingdom by the Sea

Sailing Through China

Sunrise with Seamonsters

The Imperial Way

Riding the Iron Rooster

To the Ends of the Earth

The Happy Isles of Oceania

The Pillars of Hercules

Sir Vidias Shadow

Fresh Air Fiend

Dark Star Safari

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The Tao of Travel

The Last Train to Zona Verde

Copyright 2013 by Paul Theroux Published simultaneously in the United States by - photo 2

Copyright 2013 by Paul Theroux

Published simultaneously in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication available upon request

eISBN: 978-0-7710-8522-2
Maps by Jacques Chazaud

McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited
One Toronto Street
Suite 300
Toronto, Ontario
M5C 2V6

www.mcclelland.com

v3.1

To Albert and Freddy,
Sylvie and Enzo,
with love from Grandpa

When my father used to travel, he didnt fear the night. But had he all his toes?

Bakongo (Angola) proverb

God almighty said to Moses, peace be upon him: Take an iron staff and wear iron sandals, and then tour the earth until the staff is broken and the shoes are worn out.

Muhammad bin al-Sarraj, Uns al-Sari wa-al sarib (A Companion to Day and Night Travelers), 1630, translated by Nabil Matar

Contents
Among the Unreal People I N THE HOT - photo 3
Among the Unreal People I N THE HOT FLAT BUSH in far northeast Namibia I - photo 4

Picture 5
Among the Unreal People

I N THE HOT FLAT BUSH in far northeast Namibia I crossed a bulging termite mound of smooth, ant-chewed sand, and with just the slightest elevation of this swelling under my foot soles the landscape opened in a majestic fan, like the fluttered pages of a whole unread book.

I then resumed kicking behind a file of small-bodied, mostly naked men and women who were quick-stepping under a sky fretted with golden fire through the dry scrub of what was once coarsely known in Afrikaans as Boesmanland (Bushman Land) pouch-breasted women laughing among themselves, an infant with a head like a fuzzy fruit bobbing in one womans sling, men in leather clouts clutching spears and bows, nine of us altogether and I was thinking, as Id thought for years traveling the earth among humankind: The best of them are bare-assed.

Happy again, back in Africa, the kingdom of light, I was stamping out a new path, on foot in this ancient landscape, delighting in a palpable imaginable visitable past in the nearer distances and clearer mysteries. I was ducking among thornbushes with slender, golden-skinned people who were the earths oldest folk, boasting a traceable lineage to the dark backward and abysm of time in the Upper Pleistocene, thirty-five thousand years or so ago, the proven ancestors of us all, the true aristocrats of the planet.

The snort of a startled animal out of sight stopped us. Then its hindquarters swishing through brush. Then the leaping clop of its hooves on loose stones.

Kudu, one of the men whispered, bowing to listen to its departure without glancing aside, as though saying the familiar first name of someone he knew. He spoke again, and while I didnt understand, I listened as if to new music; his language was preposterous and euphonious.

That morning in Tsumkwe, the nearest town but not a town, just a sun-scorched crossroads with many hovels and a few shade trees I had heard on my shortwave radio: World financial markets are in turmoil, facing the worst crisis since the Second World War. The Eurozone countries are approaching meltdown as Greece is expected to collapse into bankruptcy, its government having turned down a $45 billion loan to write down its debt.

The people I was following were laughing. They were Khoisan-speaking, a subgroup of !Kung people who called themselves Ju/hoansi a clucking, hard-to-pronounce name meaning Real People or Harmless People. Traditional hunter-gatherers, they had no history of using money. Even now, pushed to the margins of so-called Bushman Land (they knew this part of it as Nyae Nyae) and irregularly settled, with some cattle and crops these people seldom saw money and hardly used the decaying stuff. They still supplemented their diet by hunting and grubbing and foraging and accepting pitiful handouts. They probably did not think about money, or if they did, they knew they would never have any. As the Greeks rioted, howling against their government, and Italians cried poverty in the streets of Rome, and the Portuguese and the Spanish stared hollow-eyed at bankruptcy, and the news was of failure, worthless currencies, and austerity measures, the Ju/hoansi were indestructible in all their old ways, or seemed so to me in my ignorance.

The young woman in front of me dropped to her knees in the sand. She had the lovely, elfin, somewhat Asiatic face but also suggesting the face of an extraterrestrial that most San people possess. That is to say, pedomorphic, the innocent and fetching face of a child. She traced her fingers around a threadlike vine sprouting from the sand, crouched, leaned on one elbow, and began digging. With each scoop and handful of sand her eyes brightened, her breasts shook, and her nipples trembled against the earth, one of the minor titillations of this excursion. Within a minute she extracted a finger-shaped tuber from the dark, strangely moist hole shed made and cradled it in her hand. As she flicked dust from the root, it paled beneath her fingertips. Smiling, she offered the first bite to me.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari»

Look at similar books to The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.