The Old Patagonian Express

From blizzard-stricken Boston to arid Patagonia, travelling by luxury express and squalid local trucks, sweating and shivering by turns as the temperature and altitude shot up and down, thrown in with the appalling Mr Thornberry in Limón and reading nightly to the blind writer, Borges, in Buenos Aires, Paul Theroux’s vivid pen clearly evokes the contrasts of a journey to the end of the line’