Shortly after 6:30pm on a brisk October evening in 1882, the Orient Express pulled out of Paris Gare de Strasbourg station bound for Vienna for the very first time. The train was packed with giddy passengers suited up in smoking jackets and ball gowns for a decadent, pampering ride of their lives across Europe. When the route was expanded a few years later to take in Constantinople, further indulging the colonialist imagination, celebrities, kings, courtesans and spies all joined in the party, cavorting around the cabins and clinking their crystal glasses together to celebrate the promise of a great future. Though the route thrived for a good half a century, war, depression and the advent of the jet airliner brought an end to the gaiety and opulence. By the 1960s, interest in rail travel – to say nothing of luxury trains – had dwindled, and the days of the Orient Express itself were numbered. The train made its final journey in the late 1970s, reduced to a single dilapidated sleeping car and a few shabby saloons.
Now, the Orient Express mythology is back. And how. This year, Eastern & Oriental Express – the Singapore-based sister of the original train company – has launched The Chronicles, four new over-the-top luxury rail journeys through Southeast Asia. In January, I boarded the inaugural trip, Fables of The Hills, for a mesmerising and extremely plush journey from Singapore to Bangkok. With these new routes, the E&O now stands out as one of the world’s most spectacular overland journeys, rivalling the Trans-Siberian in sheer exoticism and trumping the VSOE from Venice to Istanbul for its landscapes (let’s face it: the hinterlands of Southeastern Europe don’t exactly scream Taschen coffee table book visuals).
The 1,249-mile journey can be done in a straight shot of around 42 hours, but why rush things? The E&O offers passengers a leisurely week to take in the paddy fields, lush jungles and handsome temples of the Malaysian peninsula and southern Thailand. For travellers who favour the journey over the destination, your time machine has arrived and is ready for departure
The journey begins
We boarded the train on a balmy afternoon as a kilted battalion of majorettes and bagpipers from the Singapore Police Force Band serenaded us with an eminent rendition of Singapura Oh Singapura. On the train, butlers and attendants scurried about the cabins, making notes of passengers’ preferences for breakfast breads and tea. Guests were led to the observation car and handed flutes of champagne (the train’s non-stop open bar certainly did not hinder social lubrication). And as the locomotive pulled out of Keppel Road Station, crossing the causeway over the Straits of Johor towards the lowlands of Malaysia, we kicked back and gazed out towards a setting sun, drinks in hand. It felt like a theatrical performance – only we were the ones on stage.
Come evening time, we were walked to the dining car, whose tables were bedecked with Speiglau crystal and fine-bone Ginori china. The meals that followed were studies in culinary genius – especially when you consider that the chef and kitchen staff had to prepare everything from a cubicle of a room that regularly moved at speeds of 60mph. The cuisine served was mostly European, with subtle hints of the flavours of Southeast Asia. Wonton of goose liver in truffle bouillon. Fresh crisp fennel salad. Rolled masala chicken on lemongrass risotto. Fragrant Siamese yellow curry. Medallion of beef with fricassee of vegetables. Gnocchi in a fragrant vindaloo sauce. Hardly your standard issue train grub.
Not a single lunch or dinner I ate on that train would have been out of place in a five-star, white-tablecloth restaurant in Paris or London. But the food is just one aspect of the journey that has been honed and fine-tuned over the past twenty-four years.
The E&O dates back to 1987, when Orient-Express Hotels chairman James Sherwood observed that the route between Singapore and Bangkok had all the hallmarks of a luxury rail journey: beautiful countryside, dense jungles, a panorama of ethnic groups and cultures, and heavy colonial mythology. Still, getting an Orient Express set up in Asia was hardly a cakewalk. Until the E&O, a single-journey train connection between Malaysia and Thailand didn’t even exist – there simply was never any privately-owned rolling stock operating on public Asian rails. Setting up the route involved agreements from scores of politicians and bureaucrats – even a special cabinet resolution in Thailand. The two dozen Japanese-built stainless steel railway carriages themselves, which had been in use in New Zealand for nearly two decades, had to be completely taken apart, restored and specially modified to fit the minutely diverging rail gauges of Malaysia (one metre) and Thailand (1.067 metres). Carriages were stripped bare, brakes overhauled, wheels re-gauged, couplers re-machined, plumbing installed, ductwork revamped, carpets re-tufted, windows re-glazed, marquetry chiselled, panels lacquered, teakwood laid, varnish applied and Orfevrerie de Chambly silver tableware ordered.
Sublime settings
Now, the E&O, with its polished cream and green finish and fine rosewood panelling, feels more like a meticulously-restored classic car than a rail transport vehicle. Inside one finds immaculate art deco lamps, walls adorned with decorative lacquer panels carved with inlaid designs and slender wooden corridors that lead to private en-suite cabins with in-ceiling A/C, power showers and Bulgari bath products – veritable bungalows-on-wheels. With trappings like this, it should come as little surprise that romantic and eco-friendly luxury rail travel has become all the rage in recent years: the grandeur of the E&O may just make you forget that you are even on a train.
Still, while the E&O is clearly a destination in and of itself, it is the backdrop of Southeast Asia that makes the journey. We rode elephants and watched monkeys pluck coconuts from trees in Surat Thani. We crossed the bridge over the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi. We painted batik prints on silk at a centre dedicated to preserving Malay handicrafts in Kuala Lumpur. We strolled about Malaysia’s most gorgeous religious building, the Ubudiah Mosque in Kuala Kangsar, the first foothold of the British Empire in Malaysia during the late nineteenth century. It was Agatha Christie who first wrote, “To travel by train is to see nature and human beings, towns, churches and rivers, in fact, to see life.” Effectively, we experienced a week of travel to the Orient of Old Indochina and Siam.
I had forgotten how hot Southeast Asia can be – not Dubai hot or Kazakhstan hot, but balmy, thick-air sweaty, palm-tree-humid Hawai’i hot. So humid, in fact, that at times the air was even too heavy to stand sitting in the open observation car as the train zoomed forth at full speed. North of Kuala Lumpur we arrived to the quiet hills of the Cameron Highlands, an ex-British hill station with amazing vistas and cool temperatures that provided a welcome change from Malaysia’s muggy plains. In 1885, British surveyor William Cameron was sent here to scout out the viability of a hill station settlement. When the connecting road from Tapah was built several decades later, tea planters and vegetable growers – to say nothing of golf courses, boarding schools, inns and the other calling cards of the colonial experience – soon followed. We tasted tea at leafy plantations and hiked along densely wooded paths.
The next day, when the train pulled into the waterside Butterworth station, we hopped on a ferry to explore the Buddhist temples and Chinese clan houses of UNESCO-protected Penang. The spice island has been defined by multiculturalism for centuries, with co-existing ethnic Hokkien and Fujian Chinese, Tamil-speaking Indians and often-trilingual Malays. It’s a fascinating place if you have an interest in the many melting pots of the world.
Taste of the east
The only conundrum during the journey was figuring out how to bask in the luxury of teak woods, open bars and butler service and get to experience Asia in any real, meaningful way. I’ve never been one for fully guided tours or cursory travel – the anthropologist within me has always preferred experiences that are, well, experiential. But I discovered that the E&O does enable you to get to know the lands of the Orient – on its own terms.
The experience of reading a dusty photographic tome about Siamese kings in a velvety reading room as southern Thailand speeds by outside the window. The experience of listening to a crooning jazz pianist tap out As Time Goes By at sunset – as the steam whistle of your locomotive blasts in the distance. The experience of sitting at an outdoor hawker centre on Penang as a Michelin-worthy chef guides you through a scrumptious table of stingray, squid, horseshoe crab and cheese-stuffed king prawns cooked in coconut juice. These are, to be sure, experiences that you would never find anywhere else.
When I asked one passenger why he had joined the train journey, he told me that he had worked hard for twenty years trading gold. When his wife had a near-death experience the year prior, they both decided to take stock of their lives. “I realised that I hadn’t seen anything of the world,” he told me, as Asia raced by us, the air thick with scent of palm oil and jasmine. Our time machine was moving full steam ahead.
You close your eyes and hear the train clattering along the tracks, the soft laughter of your fellow passengers and the clinking of ice cubes in everyone’s glasses. You get to be another person, and live in another era. In the last century, passengers on an Orient Express journey celebrated the promise of a great future. Today it’s the past that one toasts on the E&O, but the experience is no less decadent or wondrous. If there were ever a rainy day to save your pennies for, by George I think you’ve got it.
