Getting Away with Murder (on the Orient Express)
I know what you’re thinking, two posts in as many days, you can’t handle it. You’re made of sterner stuff than that, stiff upper lip young fella-me-lad, we didn’t build the Empire without going through a few hardships – here have a gin and tonic. It was with such British verve that a couple of weeks ago we boarded the Orient Express.
Jane had heard that the infamous vehicle occasionally takes trips up into Malaysia for just the evening, rather than heading all the way to Bangkok over a period of days. So it was that months down the line (insert drum crash here), we ‘poshed’ ourselves up and headed to the train station.
The train itself is beautiful, with the classic colonial carriages and narrow hallways and cabins. I nearly couldn’t stifle my urge to fight a Russian spy inside one of the cramped carriages, but the offer of drinking on the open back of the train was enough to prevent a fruitless search of the carriages for agents of SPECTRE.
We were to be seated for the 9:00 dinner session meaning we had plenty of time to drink champagne in the open, ‘smoking’, carriage at the rear of the train (which explains some of the less handsome photos). We stood and admired the railway snaking back into the jungle, whilst listening to gym-toned ex-pat wives complain that their ‘chi’ was misaligned. Seems money can’t buy you everything, particularly nice, straight chi and an attractive, non-boorish husband.
On our way to dinner, slightly blurry but able to blame wobbliness on the motion of the train, we spied an open and unoccupied carriage. The three Brits poked their heads round the door and prepared to move on ‘in case somebody has booked it’ but our antipodean companion marched in, in typical Aussie style, and we followed in his wake and set up like we owned the place. Very civilised we looked, and were the subject of many jealous stares. Excellent.
Dinner was fabulous but before long we’d stopped, been stared at by a bunch of puzzled Malay’s at a remote train station and started back toward Singapore. The bubbly giddiness gave way to almost somnabulatory behavoiur as we disembarked at, the decidedly non-glam, Woodlands train station to immigrate and recollect our confiscated passports – none of us having scampered into the Malaysian undergrowth in our dinner jacketed finery.
There are some photos of the trip on Flickr, as usual.
In other ‘doing colonial things’ news you’ll be pleased to hear that Jo and I completed our week by going to Raffles Hotel where I had a Singapore Sling (described accurately by Jo as ‘heinous’) and we had the nicest Chinese ever – which wasn’t even too expensive. Life here remains hard.
Andy 19 April 2007
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