num_pages: 353
description: 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 world's 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 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 2500 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.
language: English
title: The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari
publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt