Murder on the E&O Express

Was it the champagne-guzzling ex-pat couple from Hong Kong;  loud, and overly-pleased with themselves?  The cute Hawaiian couple, all ex-Californian charm and wide smiles?  Or was it the neat German husband and wife, hiding a writhing hostility behind their smiley chattyness?  At 3am this morning, it would have been me who committed murder, as the train bounced and lurched and groaned on Thai tracks that probably hadn't seen any works since the day we were laid.  I clung to the upper bunk and wished fervently I hadn't drunk so much water with dinner; a scramble down my four-rung ladder to our tiny ensuite was challenging enough when the cabin was lit, let along in the pitch dark with the train likely to leap the tracks at any moment.

Come the morning, all was forgiven.  You can't stay cross in surroundings like this for long.  The E&O train is the glitzed-up offspring of the Orient Express - only twenty years old, all gleaming wood and black ties at dinner, plying its route from Bangkok to Singapore and back again.  Three nights to make it the 1,830 kms through rural Thailand,

 the highlands of Malaysia and the traffic-studded entry to Singapore...without an ounce of wi-fi on the way (thus no blog post until now).

I love train travel, and as someone who's done their time sweating the unpredictable vagaries of Southern Rail - a touch of luxury feels due.  Ironic, really, as it's just like cruising on rails - dressing for dinner, early-morning excursions, the same affluent, post-kids-we're-retired-so-why-not-spend-the-inheritance-ha-ha crowd that you find on the more highfalutin' cruise ships.  And yet while a week on a cruise would probably drive me insane, train travel is...somehow glamorous.  I indulge in my own private fantasy that Cary Grant will swing by and flirt a little, as he did with Eva Marie Saint in the Hitchcock classic, North by Northwest.  On the E&O the brushed velvet sofas and antique table lamps of the bar car hit the spot, particularly with the delightful Peter spinning jazz classics out of the piano, reminding me of my Dad, singing in a voice that was half Satchmo, half Animal from the Muppets.

And all the while, outside, another world is whizzing past.  On the way out of Bangkok the tracks ran past serious squalor; long-limbed kids in bright cotton frocks waving frantically, surrounded by piles of clothes, car parts, rubbish, bins, food containers and house walls of corrugated iron that were slowly falling down.  How do you not feel awkward, gliding past in a train that's redolent of wealth ? I guess all you can do is put some of your money into the local economy and make sure that it doesn't ALL go to international hotel companies and luxury providers. 

What's striking, is how markedly different rural Thailand is from Malaysia.  We went to bed in a third world country and woke up in a first; ramshackle villages replaced by neat housing estates with tarmac roads holding gleaming cars rather than beaten-up scooters with entire families balanced precariously on top.  In a way, I suppose, Malaysia is like the halfway house between Bangkok and Singapore; more moneyed but not entirely sanitised.

The surprise hit was the couple of hours we had in Penang; an island smorgasbord of races and
culture, with the raffish charm that clings to port cities,  where one street held a spectacular Chinese temple,

gleaming mosque and CofE church, and the air was filled with mingling scents; Indian street food, burning incense, bitter coffee. 

 And on every corner, ornate monuments to its colonial past; so different to Thailand, which somehow escaped the likes of Stamford Raffles and Frances Light and their messianic belief in the need to cloak Asian cultures in British bureaucracy.  Back on the train we swept through vertiginous hills blurred bluish in the hazy dusk, neat-roofed villages clustered at their feet.

After another night of clinging onto my upper bunk while the train rattled and rolled, its something of a culture shock to find myself among the towering skyline of Singapore. Looking back, it's the beauty of Thailand and Malaysia that lingers; great swathes of palm trees backlit by hazy blue skies, pea-green paddy fields dotted with scarecrows and latticed with slim, quiet roads, empty save for the odd scooter puttering along.  It was a real adventure.  And now it's time to get some sleep.