The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Theroux pauses for a moment: “But, you know, I do love travelling by train. The idea that you can get on a train in London and go to Paris, or you can get on a train in London and go to Hong Kong, for that matter, if you have a lot of time on your hands, it’s really quite wonderful.” Traditionally the Esquel to Nahuel Pan trip runs Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 10 a.m. and returning at 12:45 p.m. depending on the season. The Old Patagonian Express is one of the most famous historic trains in the world. It adds to the particularity of its minimum gauge, the unique landscape that it traverses. La Trochita – Esquel The Railroad is now open over its whole length of 402 km, but steam trains for the public run currently only in three sections.

The book has been praised for its depth and understanding about the people, the culture, giving a flavor of the various South American countries. [3] See also [ edit ] A witty sharply observed journey down the length of North and South America.Beginning his journey in Boston, where he boarded the subway commuter train, and catching trains of all kinds on the way, Paul Theroux tells of his voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts and Illinois to the arid plateau of Argentina’s most southerly tip. Sweating and shivering by turns as the temperature and altitude shoot up and down, thrown in with the appalling Mr Thornberry in Limon and reading nightly to the blind writer, Borges, in Buenos Aires, Theroux vividly evokes the contrasts of a journey ‘to the end of the line’. The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas by Paul Theroux – eBook Details He travels two to three months in the year 1978. He leaves the snow and cold up in the north, arriving in the dusty desert and plateau lands in Patagonia. He travels on Amtrak through the US, continuing through Mexico, Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica up and Panama), through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and finally into Argentina. Down to Buenos Aires where he met up with Jorge Luis Borges. The two could not stop talking; day after day they had to meet again and talk and talk some more. But the trip had to be continued, so off Theroux goes, off further south to the endpoint destination, Esquel, Patagonia, the end of the rail.This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen.

Commuting is a parody of travel; it is a bloodless, necessary chore that, because it involves motion, suggests the very freedom it denies. What better place, then, to begin a travel book than a commuter train? The journey becomes a kind of prison break. AddThis sets this geolocation cookie to help understand the location of users who share the information. If you enjoyed The Old Patagonian Express, you might like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. He initially positioned himself as an inquisitive but mildly truculent traveller, but as the journey progressed he seemed to relax into the pace of it and provided, increasingly, glimpses of not only his humour but also his intelligence and his powers of observation. In fact, though he clearly enjoyed the role of solitary traveller, he clearly went out of his way to talk to as many locals as he could along the way. His accounts of some of these conversations were illuminating and very often hilarious. It helped that he speaks Spanish (thus, possibly, his chosen route avoiding Portuguese speaking Brazil) and sometimes he’d listen in to chatting locals who were unaware that he could understand their jibes directed at ‘gringos’ in general and, sometimes, at him in person. But most people he met were friendly and they very often went out of their way to be helpful. This book tells the story of Paul Theroux’s journey from his home in Boston, Massachusetts to the foot of South America, in 1978. He travelled almost exclusively by train – many different trains – and took it him about two months to reach his final destination, at Esquel. From the snow of North America, through the heat of Central and South America and finally the barren desert of Patagonia I found myself held spellbound throughout.In The Old Patagonian Express, Theroux takes us on a Journey; and literally a journey with the starting point and destination just posing as ancilliary for this whole book. I will never get to see the South America Theroux described when he traveled, with poverty and only a mild tinge of modernisation, which in present times might make all the places quite mundane.