Starting out in February 1978 on a
subway train from his home town in
Massachusetts, the author flees the blizzards of North America and travels by rail across the plains to
Laredo, Texas. From there he crosses the bridge over the
Rio Grande and catches the train south to
Veracruz via
Mexico City. In his introduction to the book, Theroux explains how he had learned Spanish especially for the journey so as to include the points of view of his fellow travellers rather than concentrate on his own personal impressions. Other rules he had given himself were never to criticize to others the country through which he was passing and to give as his reason for travel that he is a geography teacher. Each of the succeeding chapter titles are where possible the name of the train on which he is riding, or else a descriptive phrase such as "The Passenger Train to Tapachula", which he catches from Veracruz to the border of
Guatemala. Theroux's journey continues across
Central America, although avoiding the civil war in
Nicaragua. In
El Salvador he goes to a football match which descends into violence whenever the ball is kicked into the crowd, who then fight on the stands for its possession. Travelling in a variety of trains, he finally arrives in
Colón, Panama and, entering the
Canal Zone, travels the length of the waterway by rail at a time of unrest as the US is preparing to hand over control of the canal to the Republic of
Panama. Lack of a rail link through the jungles of the
Darién Gap then obliges him to take a plane to
Barranquilla and from there join the Expresso del Sol over the
Andes to
Bogotá. By now he is coming to the conclusion "that there was a class stigma attached to the trains. Only the semidestitute, the limpers, the barefoot ones, the Indians, and the half-cracked yokels took the trains, or knew anything about them." Air, or even bus, were the preferred modes of transport. Another gap in the route, of which he had no prior warning, forces Theroux to catch a bus to the railhead in the Colombian town of
Armenia. There he comes across a group of three boys between nine and ten years old, none of them from the town itself, sleeping on cardboard in a doorway. One of them has a tubercular cough and none of them has anyone to turn to. Their parents have expelled them because their families are already too large. Later, while passing through
Guayaquil in
Ecuador, Theroux calls in on family of his own, distant cousins of Italian origin from his mother's side. As he continues on his journey through
Peru and
Bolivia, the railway route takes him over the Andes again. There he develops debilitating
altitude sickness, which at the more extreme elevations can only be relieved by oxygen-filled balloons for sale on the train. It is only when the line descends to the level plains of northern
Argentina that he feels himself restored to health. A further restorative is a short stay in
Buenos Aires, "the Paris of South America". While there, he is befriended by the writer
Jorge Luis Borges, who is blind by now and asks Theroux to read to him some of his favourite English-language authors. Eventually, however, Theroux must complete his quest and sets out over the
Welsh-settled plains of
Patagonia. Eventually detraining in the very early morning at the cold and windy station of
Jacobacci junction, he has to wait for the departure of
La Trochita, the
narrow gauge steam train which will take him to
Esquel, the furthest south he can travel by rail on the continent. ==Responses==