The Last Train to Zona Verde Read Free

objects I see,” Goethe wrote in his
Italian Journey
. “Nothing, above all, is comparable to the new life that a reflective person experiences when he observes a new country. Though I am still always myself, I believe I have been changed to the very marrow of my bones.”
    Africa drew me onward because it is still so empty, so apparently unfinished and full of possibilities, which is why it attracts meddlers and analysts and voyeurs and amateur philanthropists. Much of it is still wild, and even in its hunger it is hopeful, perhaps an effect of its desperation. “Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,” Thoreau wrote in “Walking,” “as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.” Travel in Africa was also my way of opposing the increasing speed of technology — resisting it and dropping back, learning patience and studying the world that way.
    Africa had changed, and, ten years on, so had I. The world had grown older too, and the nature of travel itself had continued to alter and accelerate. It is said that the known world has never been so well known or so easily within reach. In 2011, the year I was on the road, Namibia had a million foreign tourists, and South Africa had almost twice that number. But these visitors stayed on safe and well-trodden routes. Many places in South Africa rarely saw a tourist, and in Namibia tourists kept to the game parks and the coast, seldom daring the far north, the inhospitable borderland of Angola. As for the hardier travelers, the backpackers and wanderers, I had yet to meet one who had actually crossed the border into Angola.
    While the known world is well traveled and distant places appear on the tourist itinerary (Bhutan, the Maldives, the Okavango Delta, Patagonia), there are places where no outsider goes. The rich travel to remote airstrips in Africa in chartered planes, with their own gourmet chefs and guides. The rest go on package tours or randomly backpack. Yet there are places that are slipping from view, inaccessible or too dangerous to travel to. Many bush tracks lead nowhere. And some countries are closed until further notice. Somalia, in a state of anarchy, is on no one’s itinerary except that of arms dealers. Zimbabwe, a tyranny, is unwelcoming. And others — the Congo is a good example — have no roads to speak of. But even if roads existed, much of the Congo is a hostile no-go area of militias, local chiefs, and warlords, just as it was when Henry Morton Stanley traversed it on foot and by river.
    In the course of my planning I kept reading that militant Islamists were busy killing unbelievers or raising hell in Niger and Chad, and in Nigeria the so-called Boko Haram gangs — Muslims who could not abide the sight of Westernized Nigerians — were killing any man who wore pants and a shirt, or a woman in a dress. These groups were looking for soft targets — backpackers, wanderers, people like you and me.
    So I left on this trip with a sense of foreboding. A man who has been on the road for fifty years is an easy mark: alone, past retirement age, and conspicuous in a country like Namibia where the average life expectancy is forty-three. I consoled myself by thinking that the unlikely sight of an old man traveling alone in Africa meant that anyone who saw me would laugh me off as a crank. Dressed as I was in faded clothes, with a $20 wristwatch and cheap sunglasses, carrying a small, plastic $20 cell phone — how could I be worth mugging?
    I also suspected that this trip would be in the nature of a farewell. For many older writers, and some not so old, a spell in Africa was a valedictory trip. The last serious journey Joseph Conrad embarkedon, his twenty-eight days piloting a boat up and down the Congo River, formed the basis of the powerful novella
Heart of Darkness
, which he wrote eight years after returning from Africa, describing the book as “experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the