The Last Train To Zona Verde

Having traveled down the right-hand side of Africa in Dark Star Safari, he sets out this time from Cape Town, heading northwards in a new direction, up the left-hand side through South Africa and Namibia, to Botswana, then on into Angola, heading for the Congo, in search of the end of the line. Journeying alone through the greenest continent in what he feels will be his last African journey, Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the intineraries 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 savannah, 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. A final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers, "The Last Train to Zona Verde" is Paul Theroux's ultimate safari.