To really see Africa, Theroux contends, you have to cross its borders, you have to eat its food, you have to smell its smells, you have to feel its fear, you have to be seduced by its magic, and you have to understand why it is the way it is. In trucks that get shot at by bandits, in taxis notorious for high-speed, head-on collisions, and on ancient, overcrowded ferries that have a propensity for sinking with all hands. On trains, which hardly ever leave on time and have a habit of stopping in the middle of nowhere for no good reason. With the exception of a flight from Khartoum, Sudan, to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Theroux traversed the length of the continent on the ground, the way Africans do it.īy bus, standing for countless, bumpy hours pressed against his fellow travelers in an aromatic mass. On the ground it becomes quickly and painfully evident that the vast majority of the multitudes who inhabit the land are invisible only because they literally, and figuratively, do not have the power to signal their existence. From 33,000 feet, at night, the continent is indeed the Dark Star Theroux calls it - seemingly unpopulated, empty, devoid of life save the wild kind that most foreign travelers go there to see. Major airlines fly into all the popular places in Africa. 'Overland' is the key word in the title of this engrossing book. But I know and have traveled in Africa, so I can proclaim with admiration that Theroux, the disheveled, often grumpy, sometimes euphoric sojourner who shares his latest adventures in Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town, is an intrepid traveler worthy of the reputation that precedes him. I must admit to being largely unfamiliar with the wanderings of this heralded, peripatetic American. Those are the travelers lucky enough to experience the true Africa. Those who have the stomach to suffer the always bad and sometimes nonexistent roads, the endless delays, the filth, the poverty and the relentless misery, and are rewarded with glimpses of the awesome resilience of the human spirit. Those brave enough to cross the lines that demarcate its 54 countries as well as the countless invisible tribal boundaries within them. The real Africa reveals itself only to travelers willing to hit the road, such as it is. That is the Africa without borders, the amorphous continent, the exotic destination. It is a place reached by air and cushy buses that whisk khaki-clad explorers to comfy hotels and game lodges so fast they could just as well have driven to a Disney theme park in Florida and saved themselves a ton of money. The Africa we know from the brochures - where lovely leopards drape themselves over the limbs of thorn trees and snowcapped Kilimanjaro looms over a teeming equatorial plain - that is the Africa that lures most Western travelers.

Dark star paul theroux