Cairo to Capetown via Curmudgeon

I once rented from Netflix a documentary series starring Michael Palin in which he traveled from Cairo to Capetown overland. It was warm and funny and humane and fascinating. The roads were shit (and worse), the boats and trains were dilapidated and slow, the food looked awful, and the nations through which one must travel in such a journey were (and still are) in terrible condition socially, politically, economically, environmentally, and medically. Still, Michael Palin's charms and Africa's splendors are such that I was envious of him and of his adventure. So it was with that interest intact, along with my own limited experience with the continent, that I dived with gusto into Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari.

There are really only so many ways one can go from Cairo to Capetown overland (it is, afterall, a journey in only one direction), so Theroux and Palin visited many of the same locales. The two men's journeys could not, however, have been more different or more differently portrayed.

Palin is an affable traveler most of the time. He is, of course, a famous funnyman, British, and possessed of a calm, sunny disposition. Theroux is none of those things; he is the most famous misanthrope in the bookstore. He seems, at times, to hate everyone - especially fellow travelers, westerners, and intellectuals. At literally every opportunity he reminds the reader how much he loathes his life in the west, with its telephones and computers and familial obligations and how much he prefers the worst hovels and mudholes of a backwater village in the middle of nowhere. He hates beuraucrats with a passion, and loves the authenticity of decay, disorder, and defeat. Almost the only thing he and Palin have in common is their abiding love for their subject. Theroux, at the end of all of it, loves Africa deeply and personally and because of (not in spite of) its faults.

Theroux, for all his bile and condescension, is a fabulous writer. He can capture a place and a moment and a populace in a thousand ways, and none ever repeated or overused to the point of stereotype or cliche. He goes places most people don't want or feel safe to go and he goes there traveling routes noone would take - almost gleefully traveling wherever he is warned not to travel.

Reading the book, you get chaotic Arabic Africa, truly weird Ethiopian Africa, defeated and dangerous east Africa, failing central Africa, and prosperous (if emotionally dead) South Africa. You get the flavor of each of these places whole clove, and you get the sort of vignettes that you don't soon forget, though you're glad they aren't yours.

I hate Paul Theroux. Or anyway, I'd hate to be trapped in an elevator or a dinner party with him, but I dearly love his writing and his nomadic spirit. He's Anthony Bourdain without the self aggrandisement and posturing. He's V.S. Naipaul with a bias against his own culture instead of that he visits. He's mean spirited, cantankerous, ironic, keenly observant, and a really wonderful travel writer. If you have a thing for Africa, or just for travel books in general, this is one of the best.