More than anything, I wanted to read a book.

"But my chief reasons for taking the Puntarenas train had nothing to do with travel. More than anything, I wanted to read a book. And I had a good book. Twice in San Salvador and once in Limon I had opened Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; each time it had been night and, while I had read the novel with fascination, on turning off the light the horrors of the story returned to me and made me wakeful. It was, without any doubt, the most terrifying story I had ever read: claustrophobia, shipwreck, thirst, mutiny, cannibalism, vertigo, murder, storm--it was a nightmare journey, and it produced nightmares in me. At home it might not have seemed so bad, but in three Central American hotel rooms--hot, stifling, narrow; the bulb-blistered lamp shade, the strange bed, the rat gnawing the ceiling--the book was an experience of pure terror. I put it away, and I vowed that I would not open it again until I was in a sunny railway compartment. It did not matter where the train was going; what mattered to me was that I should read the book under ideal conditions, on a train, with my feet up, my pipe drawing nicely. This was my reason for going to Puntarenas on that train."

~~ from The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux