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

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Undoubtedly the finest moment in the book comes in Argentina, and has nothing to do with trains, Theroux would meet up with Jorge Luis Borges in his Buenos Aires apartment, browse through his monumental collection of books (supposedly the biggest owned by any South American at the time) At the time of its construction, the Old Patagonian Express line was intended to form part of a planned rail network across Patagonia. Nevertheless, the line was not profitable. Given the communities it served, private investors were not interested in making necessary investment. In 1992, under the liberal economic practices of the central government, it was decided to close the line. [5] However, there was a national and even an international outcry at the decision to close a line which had become emblematic of a bygone age and of that region. The two provincial governments came together to keep the line open. [6] The Trochita today [ edit ] La Trochita running on the sparsely populated Patagonian region, 2010 The wagons are made of wood, Spartan but warm. Inside each one, the air is heated by a cast iron wood-burning stove that was also used for light cooking and is now fed by travelers themselves. A teapot for tea and mate boils continuously on the stove.

Maybe he really is a curmudgeon and a jerk and I'm one, too, for empathizing with him...but I doubt it. La Estrella del Norte (The North Star) conveyed him to Buenos Aires, From there he travelled to Patagonia on the Lagos del Sur (Lakes of the South) Express where everyone he encountered was puzzled that he was ending his journey at Esquel. No-one ends a journey at Esquel, they said. Esquel was a place where journeys began. But what could he do? Theroux had to go Esquel to go home, so at Jacobacci, in the middle of the desert, he boarded the smallest, oldest, and slowest train imaginable.Today, arrive in one of the Lake District’s most popular destinations, the beautiful Bariloche. Greet your guide at the Bariloche airport and transfer to your hotel. Then step out and discover the breathtaking landscape of the region on a half-day tour. Start on the shores of the stunning Nahuel Huapi Lake, meaning “Tigre Island” in the local Mapuche language, and venture westward through the Llao Llao area. Visit the San Eduardo Chapel and explore the Llao Llao Municipal Park, rambling along the myriad of signposted walking paths before stopping by the Tacul Village. Next, ascend to an outlook to appreciate a view that stretches as far as the eye can see, encompassing the Moreno Lake and Llao Llao region below. His book recounts his journey across the United States, through Mexico and Central America and along the Andes Mountain Range until its conclusion in deepest, dustiest Patagonia. Theroux’s Britain is by turns secretive, rose-growing, ­window-washing, dog-loving and quaintly beautiful. With Visit Britain forecasting a bumper year for inbound tourism from the US to the UK in 2023, what does he say, these days, to fellow American tourists bound for our green and dyspeptic land?

Riding on this train is like neglecting the passing of time and losing oneself in a children’s tale of the early twentieth century. The small proportions of this means of transportation make us think we are traveling on board of a toy. 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. A workforce labored on the railroad for over two decades. Workers had to do all the hard work manually, virtually without any mechanical help. In 1941 the first train entered the Railway Station of El Maiten at km 237. Four years later, the railroad reached Esquel, 402 km from Ing. Jacobacchi. Originally a agricultural enclave of pioneers, the town was transformed with the arrival of the train. We go to a soccer match in San Salvador. We talk with a woman who has been duped; she thinks she is in love with a guy who has TB and to whom she has given a large sum of money. She also owns parts of slums! The people, the people the strange people we meet! Oh, Mr.Thornberry, he is seventy-one, from New Hampshire. His one word sentences and his ever observant eye catching the “pipeline” must make everyone laugh.

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Theroux, with the passage of time and the benefits of hindsight, reflects on a journey that he embarked upon ‘because my head was empty of ideas’. Creativity begets creativity. Whilst the train was rattling along through Costa Rica he looked out of the window and asked a fellow traveller where they were. “La costa de Mosquita”, came the reply. Theroux began to make notes. After The Old Patagonian Express was published, he returned to Central America and wrote his novel, The Mosquito Coast, and after that was published, he decided to walk and take trains around the coast of Great Britain for The Kingdom by the Sea. The Old Patagonian Expresstells of Paul Theroux's train journey down the length of North and South America. Beginning on Boston's subway, he depicts a voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts to the arid plateau of Argentina's most southerly tip, via pretty Central American towns and the ancient Incan city of Macchu Pichu. Shivering and sweating by turns as the temperature and altitude rise and plummet, he describes the people he encountered - thrown in with the tedious, and unavoidable, Mr Thornberry in Limón and reading to the legendary blind writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires. Witty, sharply observed and beautifully written, this is a richly evocative account of travelling to 'the end of the line'.

It is fitting that Paul Theroux championed in his book of the same name the importance of the journey itself, not the destination. Nahuel Pan Town Setting off in his hometown, and ending up 'almost at the end of the world', Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express is a travel writing tour de force from one of the masters of the genre contains a new preface by the author in Penguin Modern Classics. 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.”But it wasn’t the only train he took. Theroux’s intention for the journey was not to explore a destination, but to set himself the challenge of travelling from his home in Massachusetts to Esquel in Argentina, and then to return home, but to do so only by using trains as his mode of transport, quoting Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is…to move’ as intention enough. In May 2011, high winds ripped the roof off one car. The roof fell down in between two cars, derailed one which then caused the entire train to derail and roll over. No one was seriously injured and the locomotive and cars were all recovered by June 1, 2011. The audiobook narration by Norman Dietz is very, very good. I settled on four stars but was even considering five. He captures well the irony in the Theroux’s humor. He pauses right when he should. The speed is perfect. He renders different dialects well. For example, when Theroux meets up with a priest from Belfast, you hear that is where he is from. The Spanish speakers do sound a bit all the same; this is why I have given the audio performance four rather than five stars. It is a sad sight to see these formerly imperious engines, brown with rust, lying dormant and slowly being eroded by the Patagonian breeze. But they are fascinating objects to inspect close-up and pose for a photograph with (bonus points for those clutching their copy of Theroux). El Maitén

But The Old Patagonian Express is not just a book about travelling. It is a book about Central and South America. Such an observation may seem flippant — how could the book not be about the countries Theroux passes through? Yet often travel books can be about little apart from their author: an amalgamation of loosely themed anecdotes sewn together with the prefabricated plot of a journey. Patagonian Express is not this. Does this train have a name?” I asked…He laughed. “This train is too insignificant to have a name. The government is talking about getting rid of it.” “Isn’t it called ‘The Esquel Arrow’ or something like that?’ He shook his head. “Or ‘The Patagonian Express’?” “The Old Patagonian Express’”, he said… 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 Readers will say to me, ‘Well, you know, I went there and it wasn’t like that’,” Theroux tells me from his home in Hawaii, where I’ve interrupted the venerable writer feeding his gaggle of pet geese. 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.The train no longer runs between Esquel and El Maitén; instead two special tourist services run (i) between Esquel and the settlement of Nahuel Pan and (ii) between El Maitén and Desvío Thomae.