The Last Train to Zona Verde Read Online Free

been attacked, beaten senseless, and robbed. How it was possible to close such a mountain was anyone’s guess. This enormous, dominant upswelling of rock, two miles wide on its plateau, constituted a ridge that extended forty miles to Cape Point.
    But this was Africa, so subject to sudden change. Less than a month later, Table Mountain was named (along with Halong Bay in Vietnam, the Amazon rain forest, Iguaçu Falls, and three others) one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. Recognized across the globe as a marvel, Table Mountain was proudly reopened to the public.
    That same day of my waking at the luxury hotel, I went for a walk. At Texies Fish and Chips on Adderley Street, in the Grand Parade near the train station, while I was eating my lunch of broiled kingklip and admiring the view, the apparent prosperity, the busy to-and-fro of shoppers, the scavenging pigeons pecking at crumbs tossed by passersby, I noticed some young men in the shadows of the arcade near where I sat at an outdoor table, returning my gaze. Seeing that I had had enough of my meal, one of them, a skinny teenage boy, came over and hesitatingly asked, “Can I finish?” I simply nodded, because he had taken me by surprise. He carried the remains of my food — the plate of greasy chips — a short distance away, scattering the pigeons, and wolfed them down.
    Travel writing is sometimes no more than literary decor for a sort of mocking misanthropy or mythomania or concocted romance, but at that moment I felt only helpless pity. And I was to see this same desperate reflex a number of times during these African travels, the hungry lurking man or boy, waiting to take my leftovers, or someone else’s, and eat them with his dirty fingers.
    If I wondered why I had come back to Africa, I suppose I had to answer: to happen upon that, among other chance encounters. It was wrong for me to say that I was seeking something. I was notseeking anything. 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. Disgust is like fuel. It took the curse off the zigzagging flight from New York to Dubai, and the next leg to Cape Town, twenty-two hours of flying, thirty hours of travel. But I was glad to get away. It was travel as rejection, as though in leaving I was saying to those fatuous people,
Take that
. And perhaps hoping they’d say afterward,
What happened? Where is he? Was it something I said?
    Most of all, I wanted to go back to Africa and pick up where I’d left off.
    Ten years before, I was here and wandered through the slum of a squatter camp, called New Rest, on the desolate sand flats on the outskirts of Cape Town. On my return, the first place I wanted to go was this camp, to see what had become of its shacks, its outhouses, its bedraggled people who had settled in the wasteland beside the highway.
    Was it still vexed, a slum made entirely of scrap lumber and ragged plastic, still shonky amid the windblown grit?
    The majority of black South Africans live in the lower depths, not in picturesque hamlets or thatched huts on verdant hillsides. Three quarters of city-dwelling Africans live in the nastiest slums and squatter camps. But what happens to these places after a decade or so?
    “Don’t go to a squatter camp. Don’t go to a black township. You’ll get robbed or worse,” a mixed-race clerk at Cape Town’s central railway station had said to me one Sunday morning ten years ago, refusing to sell me a ticket to Khayelitsha.
    I asked why. His adamant certainty captured my attention. He was not making a racial generalization. He would not sell me what he regarded as a ticket to violence. He explained that the train to Khayelitsha was routinely stoned, the windows broken, the passengersassaulted, by unemployed youths in the township and the nearby squatter camp.
    The next day, provoked by his warning, I went to the New Rest squatter camp,