Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

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It is a journey of discovery and of rediscovery -- of the unknown and the unexpected, but also of people and places he knew as a young and optimistic teacher forty years before.

It is Theroux in his element — a trip where chance encounter is everything, where departure and arrival times are an irrelevance, and where contentment can be found balancing on the top of a truck in the middle of nowhere. Dark Star Safari,'' his latest travel book, charts the author's arduous journey through Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town, by truck, bus, ferry, train and bush taxi.Yet he does take us where we - tender visitors on river cruises and to safari lodges - would fear to go. It's the foreigners that make for the quirkiest stories: the aid workers, especially (encountered almost everywhere), or the odd Rastafarian exiles in Ethiopia. Paul Theroux’s books include Dark Star Safari, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Elephanta Suite, A Dead Hand, The Tao of Travel and The Lower River. Everyone else, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion. Surely the heritage of that school would seem to lie with its pupils - the people that Theroux taught in younger and perhaps more idealistic days.

Theroux appears to think, furthermore, that the descendants of Picts are his only readers (having graduated, presumably, from woad to white Land Rovers). 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.

A genuinely unbiased book which gives a very fair and balanced view and without belittling others, just the facts. He manages to procure a Sudanese visa,with considerable difficulty and thus begins his trip to the real Africa. There are compelling episodes, when the author's prejudices melt away and the spirit of place asserts itself. In Tanzania, still in those culpably white cars, they "travel in pairs, in the manner of cultists and Mormon evangelists".