Der alte Patagonien-Express

For two months Paul Theroux travels south from his hometown Medford, Massachusetts. Luxury trains and dingy local trains take him away from snowy Boston to the terminus in Esquel in the highlands of Argentina. On his journey, he meets football hooligans in El Salvador and American dropouts in Costa Rica, he sets out across the Panama Canal, talks to street children in Colombia, shares a hotel room with rats in Ecuador, gets altitude sickness in Peru and at night in Buenos Aires reads poems to the aged, blind Jorge Luis Borges - a legendary encounter about which the New York Times wrote: "This scene alone justifies the price of the book. ".