Everett Potter's Travel Report

Paul Theroux

Interview by Everett Potter

I can’t think of a better guide to Africa than the travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux. He went to Malawi in 1963 as a Peace Corps volunteer when he was 22 and traveled extensively through the eastern half of the continent to write the bestseller Dark Star Safari a decade ago. Now he’s back after a trek through West Africa, through some of the most hellish places on earth, writing about it in his new book, The Last Train to Zona Verde. The author of The Great Railway Bazaar and Riding the Iron Rooster discovers “cities that were indistinguishable from one another in their squalor and decrepitude.”  As in the best of his many books, Theroux convincingly takes you along for every manic bus ride. His wonderment is yours, whether he’s contemplating eating a flyblown leg of chicken, dealing with a ferocious Angolan border guard, or deciding that this time, he’s had quite enough. It’s a remarkable, teeth-gritting tale, and I caught up with him this week to ask him a few questions.

EP: Paul, has any other place you’ve traveled been quite as hellish as Angola?

PT: Yes – many but the place that stands out is Vietnam in 1973, when I took the train to Hue, the war was still hot but US troops had mostly withdrawn. A period of suspense and violence, which I wrote about in The Great Railway Bazaar.

EP: One of the revelations of “The Last Train to Zona Verde” is that all is not what it seems with the Jo/’hoansi in Namibia. But are there tribal peoples in Africa still living a life in the bush that is closer to the stone age than the 21st century?

PT: Not really. Virtually all peoples in Africa have contact with the delights of civilization, such as soldiers, missionaries, tax collectors and dictators.

EP: Early in the book, you say that “If I had a sense of foreboding about this trip, it was because travel into the unknown can also be like dying.” Is Africa an extreme version of this foreboding, since three people you meet in the course of writing the book do, in fact, die?

PT: I did have an eerie feeling, and it;s true that three people I came to like, who befriended me died. And now that number is four, because Vicki, a woman who ran a tiny guest house in a township outside Cape Town – she welcomed me – was stabbed to death by her husband not long ago.

EP: The singer Bono of U2 comes up for some barbed comments in the book – a “ubiquitous meddler,” you call him — and other do-gooders, charities and aid agencies fare no better. Why do these types get under your skin so much?

PT: Because to improve their image they present themselves as saviors in places that are quite capable of saving themselves, and they distort the reality of life in Africa. I wish they would either join the Peace Corps or else go away.

EP: You travel through parts of South Africa, Namibia and Angola on this trip, and visit “… futureless places … of stupefying disorder.” You also make an impassioned argument towards the end of the book about why enough is quite enough, that it’s time to go home and not continue further along the West African coast. But you also state early on that “Africa drew me onward because it is still so empty, so apparently unfinished and full of possibilities…” Do you still believe that?

PT: Yes, the great green heart of Africa is largely in its natural state, and there is always hope in wilderness.

EP: “The Last Train to Zona Verde” ends with you remarking on similarities between the red clay roads of the African bush and the  American South, and of the poor people who live in both places. Will you write about these Americans, and this part of the United States?

PT: I have a longing to look deeply into the rural south, the Deep South, and hope to find something to write about.

EP: You mention traveling in Africa with a shortwave radio, something I used to do years ago. I gave it up in the age of the Internet but do you still rely on BBC World Service and other stations to keep you connected when you’re off the grid?

PT: A small shortwave radio is a great friend, when you are in an outof the way place and want to know whats happening in the world. I am speaking of places without TV or internet connections, and there are many in Africa.

EP: I’m curious to know what you did upon leaving Africa. Did you go somewhere for R&R?

PT: Home is always R & R for me – after all, I live in Hawaii half the time and Cape Cod the rest.

EP: Are you still kayaking? I really enjoyed “The Happy Isles of Oceania” and shorter pieces you’ve done on kayaking off Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.

PT: I was paddling off the North Shore of Oahu just the other day and in fact sighted some humpback whales in the distance. And it’s a satisfaction to me that The Happy Isles is still in print and finding new readers.

EP: This may be your last book on Africa, but will you write another travel book?

PT: I hope so, because the ambition to write one is an excuse to go to the ends of the earth.

Reviewed by Richard West

“Perils he sought not, but ne’er shrank to meet:

  The scene was savage, but the scene was new;

  This made the ceaseless toil of travel sweet.” (“Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Byron)

For 50 years Paul Theroux has been a traveling man, and as dean of American travel writing, chronicled his wanderings in fifteen best-selling books. Like Childe Harold, for Theroux it has not been a question of happiness but the happiness of the quest. Occasionally, as in “The Kingdom by the Sea,” he has come across as ornery as a bunkhouse cook, but, for me, that has been part of the great charm found in his writings. Lovely prose, displaying the curiosity of great explorers, opinions!, chronicling the Sisyphrustrations of hard daily travels absent in “tourism” have been the admirable hallmarks of his travel narratives.

Ten years ago in “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town” Theroux explored the right-hand-side of Africa. In his new “The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari” he resumes his trip in Cape Town and “after seeing how that city had changed in ten years, travel north in a new direction up the left-hand-side until I found the end of the line, either on the road or in my mind.” Both it turns out in this bitter-sweet wonderfully-crafted book that takes him from South Africa north through Namibia to the dreadful abyss of Angola. Energetic Paul Theroux has aged very well (he is 71), but much of the Africa he found in this new book is a violent trashcan of MRE’s (morally repugnant elites) or living-on-the-edge poor folk.

It starts well in Cape Town– improved townships, a booming economy, the enduring beauty of Table Mountain which holds more plant species than all of the British Isles—and lovely towns to the northwest like Citrusdal and Springbok. Namibian cities like Windhoek and Swakopmund are clean and orderly, reflecting their Germanic heritage. But look on their outskirts: hardscrabble gatherings  like Swakopmund’s Mondesa bleak township with its poverty, high HIV/AIDS infection rates, unemployment, and general neglect.

 And it gets worse the closer Theroux gets to Angola, the only African colony that began as a penal settlement. “Portugal’s Siberia” Theroux calls it, now obscenely rich ($40 billion annually) from off-shore oil and diamonds, yet remains a brutalized landscape with stumps of deforestation, burned-out tanks from a decades-long civil war, poisoned streams, no wild animals (all killed in the fighting or eaten by the hungry populace).  He gamely endures the squalor, an ATM fraud of $48,000, the rudeness and contempt of officials, the deaths of three friends (one beaten to death), inedible food, what sociologists call “challenging urban environments” and we call bad neighborhoods, as he sinks into a Lear-like lamentation at the ruination of his beloved Africa. By the end you picture our seasoned traveler with his head in his hands like Van Gogh’s portrait of Dr. Gachet.

“Zona Verde” is a euphemism for the bush, the non-urban outback Theroux loves the most. Yet this train-loving traveler refuses the trip: “Not this time. I had no desire to board the train. And, thinking it, I was joyous—a great relief to conclude that this was the end of my trip. No more…I felt beckoned home.” OWAWA, oh well, Africa wins again.

   Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters

Reviewed by Richard West

Somewhere in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” Will Ladislaw airily posits that some places should remain unknown, “preserved as hunting grounds for the poetic imagination.” I don’t believe Paul Theroux got Will’s message. In the 50 years since he first spread his canvas to the gale, Theroux has been almost everywhere  and turned his travels into thirteen non-fiction travel narratives. Oh yes, with the success of his first, “The Great Railway Bazaar (published in 1975), and those that followed, he became the father of modern American travel writing.

In his fourteenth travel book, “The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road,” Theroux gathers advice, wisdom, reminiscences, philosophy, and miscellany from his own books and those of previous great travelers. He begins  with his own echolalia,  wise, hard-earned counsel that defines authentic travel: “Luxury is the enemy of observation…tourists will believe almost anything as long as they are comfortable…my ideal of travel is just show up and head for the bush…a train journey is travel; everything else—planes especially—is transfer.”

Paul Theroux, in motion.

Subsequent chapters gather travel wisdom from legendary wanderers like Dervla Murphy, Samuel Johnson, Evelyn Waugh,  Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh Fermor.  The great Victorian traveler, Sir Francis Galton, in his “The Art of Travel” advises us on sleeve-rolling: “Sleeves must be rolled inwards, toward the arm, not the reverse way.” Ms. Murphy suggests  learning as much as possible about religious and social taboos, then respect them.  Robert Louis Stevenson sighs, “Sightseeing is the art of disappointment.”  Oddly, Theroux’s book doesn’t mention England’s Colin Thubron, arguably the greatest living travel writer, or anything from the  luminous younger Theroux’s: Tim Mackintosh-Smith, William Dalrymple, or John Gimlette.

Theroux fans will delight in his final chapters in which he reveals  his miss or hit  parade: the top 10 dangerous places (Port Moresby, Newark, downtown Nairobi, post soccer match England); top 10 happy places (Bali, Orkney Islands, Costa Rica); alluring places (Greenland, Angola, Timor), and his Five Travel Epiphanies. Finally his own Tao of Travel:

1. Leave home.
2. Go alone.
3. Travel light.
4. Bring a map.
5. Go by land.
6. Walk across a national frontier.
7. Keep a journal.
8. Read a novel that has no relation to the place you’re in.
9. If you must bring a cell phone, avoid using it.

10.  Make a friend.

To which I would only add: when you’re lost, follow a dog.

Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters.