I read portions of the book in comfortable hotels or cars in Tanzania, often whizzing by the abject poverty. He does it on the cheap: he reports from wretched-smelling train cars, rat infested hotel rooms, and dusty, poor villages where clean water is nowhere to be found. It’s the travelogue of his overland journey - car, bus, animal - from the northern tip of Africa to the bottom. Dark Star Safari was excellent and I recommend it for anyone taking a trip to the giant continent. Theroux is probably America’s most famous travel writer yet I had not read any of his books until now. Dark Star Safari is one of his bravest and best books.While traveling to Africa a few weeks ago, I read Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux. In fact, my trip was a delight and a revelation." Seeing firsthand what is happening across Africa, Theroux is as obsessively curious and wittily observant as always, and his readers will find themselves on an epic and enlightening journey.
I got sick, I got stranded, but I was never bored. It is an assortment of motley republics and seedy chiefdoms. "Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it," he writes, "hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you cant tell the politicians from the witch doctors. He finds astonishing, devastating changes wherever he goes.
Now he stops at his old school, sees former students, revisits his African friends. Almost forty years ago, Theroux first went to Africa as a teacher in the Malawi bush.
This is travel as discovery and also, in part, a sentimental journey. Going by train, dugout canoe, "chicken bus," and cattle truck, Theroux passes through some of the most beautiful and often life-threatening landscapes on earth.
In the travel-writing tradition that made Paul Therouxs 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.
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