The journey in this book was conceived as a followup to Dark Star Safari, when he travelled from Cairo to Capetown. This time his intention was to travel up the west side of Africa, heading north from Capetown. The idea had a pleasing symmetry to it and would be the capstone of his long association with Africa, where he spent some of his happiest years. As the trip begins he writes, "I was hurrying away from my routine and my responsibilities and my general disgust with fatuous talk, money talk, money stories, the donkey laughter at dinner parties.... It was travel as rejection, as though in leaving I was saying to those fatuous people, Take that."
At first he is happy to be back in Africa, and from Capetown he heads north by bus into Namibia, where he joins a group of people he was keen to meet, the !Kung who live at the western edge of the Kalahari. He visits the Hoba meteorite, a 60-ton hunk of iron that did not shatter when it impacted, and the Veterinary Fence (aka the Red Line) which stretches across the entire width of northern Namibia to stop the threat of rinderpest. He slips across the border into Botswana to visit a posh tourist resort called Abu, located close to the Okavanga delta. The cost is $4000 a night, and though he is often scornful of tourists and has a hatred of "the taming of wild animals, especially large ones," he finds riding an elephant "a transcendent experience and an unexpected thrill." The owner is a friend of his, and its ultimate purpose is to restore orphaned elephants to the wild. Later one of the trainers was crushed to death by his favourite elephant.
The trip turns bad at the border crossing into into Angola. Although he does not realize it at the time, his credit card is cloned and runs up a bill totalling US $40,000. It's just a foretaste of what's to come, for Angola is a country that was ravaged by civil war from 1975 to 2002. A former Portuguese penal colony, it thrived on the slave trade which later was transformed into "forced labour," a practice that continued into the 1960s. Now "Angolans lived among garbage heaps," and the government was "corrupt, predatory, tyrannical, unjust, and utterly uninterested in its people." In the capital, Luanda, xenophobia was "on an official scale, institutional alien-hating." The streets of the "joyless" city are filled with "thousands of homeless children" and "countless numbers of war amputees." The penultimate chapter is entitled "This is What the World Will Look Like When It Ends."
In the final chapter -- "What Am I Doing Here? -- Theroux, in his 70s and suffering from gout, justifies his decision to discontinue the trip, which had become a "toxic tour through the bowels of West Africa, along the Côte d'Ordure." To travel there needed the "skills and temperament of a proctologist." It was only then that I became aware of the full meaning behind the book's title. "Zona verde" refers the bush, and he turns down an opportunity to travel by train into the bush on the Benguela Railway. The word "ultimate" in the subtitle did not mean, as I had assumed, "the very best," but "the last." I have no doubt that Theroux, often a sly writer, was fully aware of the potential confusion. He's having a little joke at the reader's expense.
This is not to say I did not enjoy the book. As usual, I enjoyed Theroux's great curiosity, his focus on details, his vast reading, his caustic comments. For example, he dismisses Laurens van der Post as "a posturing fantasist and fake mystic" and "an unreliable witness." He says the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy was anachronistic and "made anthropologists apoplectic with rage." He compares the herds of tourists unfavourably with wild animals placidly drinking at a waterhole. "Don't get between a tourist and the buffet," observes a friend.
I'm looking forward to his newest book, Bwana Sahib, about another of my favourite writers, George Orwell.
