Dark star safari : overland from Cairo to Cape Town

"Safari" in Swahili means a journey, typically a long one.

In "Dark Star Safari", Theroux's itinerary is African, from Cairo to Cape Town - down the Nile, through Sudan and Ethiopia, to Kenya, Uganda and beyond to South Africa.

Journeying by train, boat and cattle truck, he passes through some of the most beautiful - and often life-threatening - landscapes on earth.

This is travel as discovery, but it is in part a sentimental journey.

Almost 40 years ago, Theroux first travelled in Africa as a teacher in the Malawi bush.

Now he stops at his old school, sees former students and revisits his African friends.

Seeing first-hand what has happened in Africa in those four decades of independence, Theroux is obsessively curious and wittily observant.