All aboard

One of the things that I had wanted to do since starting to read about Singapore was to take the Orient Express from Singapore to Bangkok. I'd kind of filed it at the back of my mind so it was pretty surprising when some people we had met here invited us to go with them on the trip just after Chinese New Year. Given that the E&O company offers a 25% discount it seemed rude not to, so one day after arriving back from Bali we were packing our bags again.

As you can see our timing couldn't have been better. We had armed guards on the train at all times, just in case.

As the others waited to board, I took a walk up the platform to see the train. I'd obviously been expecting the train to look like the Hogwarts Express, but sadly it was a lot more practical than that, though given the size of the train I had to admit that it made sense. Each carriage has been beautifully built to the most opulent standards using the finest materials (I sound a bit like the brochure here). On our journey there were 11 sleeping cars, plus the bar car, the 2 dining cars, the lounge car, the observation car, the library car and the merchandising opportunity aka the boutique. It takes about 10 minutes to walk from one end of the train to the other. One of my favourite in train devices was a little hook for keeping the toilet seat raised. I guess the only thing that this proves is that train designers were men, but to me it speaks volumes.

Personally speaking I love train journeys (as long as I get a seat, the Tube doesn't count) and there was something extremely satisfying about doing a journey that you can make in a couple of hours by plane and stretching it out to be 48 hours long. It felt more like exploration harkened back to the days of Singapore just becoming established and a bit more like I thought that being in Asia might be like. It also makes the journey become the trip and less like a mode of just getting there. It seems so easy to jump onto a plane and be almost anywhere in the world in at most a couple of days. Although this doesn't explain how packages from America are taking a month to get here airmail.

Life on board is pretty easy and in some ways I felt a bit uneasy because the service was so good and omnipresent. Each sleeper car had a steward who looked after your every needs, brought you breakfast in bed, transformed your carriage from day to night (beds fold down out of the walls etc). Everywhere were staff who brought you drinks and snacks and each dining car had many waiting staff. Basically, what it all boiled down to is that this is the way that the colonists used to travel and it felt a bit wrong that Britain would march into any country that their mineral wealth took our fancy and then create a 5 star hotel atmosphere for themselves to boot. The other factor is that, as any fan of John Hughes movies knows, you come from the wrong side of the tracks and we're not talking about mountain tracks here. Perhaps naively I had a vision of the train passing through lush verdant jungle with monkeys swinging from tree to tree alongside the train and the odd parrot here and there. The reality is you also get to travel through some of the poorest areas of Malaysia and Thailand (Bangkok especially) and it feels a bit wrong to be sitting there with a gin and tonic while people are living in shacks by the train lines. Although it should be noted that our steward was called Weenus, which did make me laugh.

I mentioned the library car, and one of the things that I found there was this picture from an old newspaper. OK, ok, you caught me out. I persuaded everyone to dress up to the nines for dinner and managed to get quite a nice vintage look going. It's not exactly the Bethnal Green Working Mans club but it was nice to be dressing up again. The staff all thought that we looked fantastic and some of the other guests were impressed as well. The train had requested a jacket and tie and evening dress for ladies, so it was great to see this German couple who wore the same casual clothes for the entire weekend. We nicknamed them the 'Commando couple' and you can see Mr Commando looking a lot like Mussolini here at Butterworth, our first excursion stop.

Unfortunately, and probably through lessons learnt, the train company isn't so keen on allowing the passengers a free rein to explore. I suspect more than a few of them have missed trains that way, so the format of our trip from Butterworth to Penang Island was leave train, get on coach, get off coach, walk 20 metres down a street with no side turns, get into a rickshaw and get pedalled past the sites and then get dropped back at the coach again for the return journey. I would have preferred to have been given a map and gone to one or two of the sites on my own but I guess people are stupid and can't be trusted. The line up of rickshaws was funny (in a very sad tourist way) with some of our train brethren couples being, how to put this, too large to sit in one side by side and having to have the ignominy of one to themselves... Rickshaw riders are also known as the king of the roads, mostly due to their lack of respect for the traffic laws including as we found out, red lights. This doesn't mean that the other cars stop, it just means that you get to have cars heading straight at you. Thankfully it's all part of a system and no-one seems to get hurt.

Butterworth pretty much marks the end of Malaysia and to be honest I was looking forward to Thailand more. Malaysia is somewhat over exploited from a natural resources perspective and although we did get to pass through some of that dense jungle as the pictures show, for the most part the rainforest has been torn down and replaced with palm oil plantations. Biofuel car users take note. Where do you think bio diesel comes from..? Yes, your eco cars are helping the demise of the rainforest. Thailand on the other hand has replaced their forests with rice plains, which are much more picturesque, so that's ok then.

It's probably worth mentioning how nice the food was that we had on the train and considering it comes out of the same sized kitchen as a train in the UK, makes me wonder exactly how the food there can continue to be so sub-standard. From time to time we got a peek into the myriad of cupboards and what have you that contained a jigsaw of tools, food storage and wine cellars that keep the train moving in the manner to which it is accustomed.

The second excursion was to the 'Bridge over the River Kwai', providing the other tourists with an unexpected photo opportunity to get some pictures of the Orient Express crossing the bridge. Sadly due to a few delays en route although we were given the benefit of a free run of the museum and the war cemetery we didn't have a great deal of time to look around both, although both were very interesting. Ayako, a Japanese member of our party said she found the history side of the story very interesting and something that she hadn't really been aware of.

The really big difference that we observed between Thailand and Malaysia is that the people you pass all wave and smile at the train (particularly if you are on the open sided observation car) even in the Bangkok suburban slums. If you look at any of the pictures from the end of the trip you'll see the genuine smiles of welcome that we were flashed as we rolled past.

I uploaded a lot of photos here for this trip, as it was a bit special to me. However if you want to see an edited highlights video then click here.

You can also see the 'official' E&O video here, it gives you a good idea of what the trip is like. Obviously they spent a bit more on thier video budget than me...