At the same time he tires to take the long view: They pester him for baksheesh and dollars until he begs them to stop saying the word ‘money’. Theroux begins his journey in Egypt while he waits for visas and is hassled to death by relentless Egyptian hustlers. I desired to be unattainable.” He identifies with Mr Kurtz of Joseph Conrad and throughout the book he continues to hark back to the Heart of Darkness. “Travel in the African bush is also a sort of revenge on mobile phones and fax machines, on telephones and the daily paper, on the creepier aspects of globalisation that allow anyone who chooses to get their insinuating little hands on you. He is ‘shot at, delayed and robbed’ but is happy to be out of the reach of the world. It made me want to go there.” He begins the book, “There I had lived and worked, happily, almost forty years ago in the heart of the greenest continent.”Įducating us to the real meaning of the word ‘ safari’, as ‘ journey’ in Swahili Theroux strikes out on the ultimate safari through some of the most dangerous territory in the world by road. Assailed by images of reporters showing civil wars, famine and poverty and close up camera shots of starving children with the caption ‘and these are the lucky ones’, Theroux finds himself stirred to investigate. He sets out to journey from Cairo to Cape town shortly before his 60th birthday in a bid to escape the modern world and see what has happened to the continent he had lived in as a young man. Dark Star Safari is one of Paul Theroux’s best travel books to date.

Dark star safari review