Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

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No objects I had seen in any African museum (Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, and Harare) could compare with the African objects in the museums in Berlin, Paris, or London. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

It’s the travelogue of his overland journey — car, bus, animal — from the northern tip of Africa to the bottom. It's unfortunate that it was a strictly eastern African trip; a comparison to Northern and Western Africa, including Francophone and more Arabic-speaking countries, would also have been of great interest.The whites, teachers, diplomats, and agents of virtue I met at dinner parties had pretty much the same things on their minds as their counterparts had in the 1960s.

He wanders war-torn Sudan with a guide who sleeps in the sand, looking for pyramids; watches a man feeding hyenas mouth-to-mouth outside the ancient walls of an Ethiopian city; explores the hot engine room of a ferry crossing Lake Victoria, and meets an engineer doing complex algorithms in only his underpants and earplugs.The next best thing to going to Africa is to read (compulsively) this account by Paul Theroux of his overland expedition from Cairo to Capetown. Yet he does take us where we - tender visitors on river cruises and to safari lodges - would fear to go. Early on Theroux mentions reading Conrad's Heart of Darness -- "which I was to read twelve more times before I reached Cape Town" -- but it's not a guiding text for most of the book. A genius of the witty insult -- ''At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom'' -- Theroux regales us with the humor of ill humor, maintaining a tricky balance of crankiness, curiosity and charm.