![]() ![]() No Latin American who has a choice, Theroux discovers, travels by train his companions are the noisy, uncommunicative poor-and, memorably, a garrulous, forlorn American out for a good time. Crossing from Laredo to Nueva Laredo is merely to swap banal order for tatty squalor-and board the first of the world's most run-down, slow-moving, altogether hopeless trains. The opening sings: Theroux wakes up in the Medford, Mass., bedroom of his childhood and catches the train-the workaday commuter train-for Patagonia! But on the Lake Shore Limited he encounters only a raw-food freak and a fiftyish ingenue worth mentioning and heading South, only the ""suffocating"" towns of Oklahoma and Texas. ![]() ![]() But, unforeseeably, the point is otherwise. It's even doubtful if Amtrak-under whose aegis Theroux begins this new, mostly dispiriting journey-will pick up an extra fare. Rail travel is not about to boom South of the Border. ![]()
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