Around the World in 80 Trains Read online

  AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 TRAINS

  For Ariel, without whom this book would have been published a year ago

  Contents

  1The 14:31 to Paris

  2A Small World

  3From Hutongs to Hanoi

  4The Death Railway

  5Bombs and Bullet Trains

  6No Vacancy

  7Hail to the Southwest Chief

  8Keeping Up with the Kims

  9Night Train to Beijing

  10Ghost Cities and the Great Wall

  11Viva Lhasa Vegas!

  12The Old Silk Road

  13Azamat and Marzhan

  14Homeward Bound

  15The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Image section

  1

  The 14:31 to Paris

  Leaning against the window, I looked up at the iron ribcage arched across the roof of St Pancras, blue sky blazing between its bones. It appeared to be rolling back, when I realised it was we who were moving. The 14.31 Eurostar to Paris hummed out of the station, and I sat back, warm spring sunshine flashing into the carriage. As London fell away, I tried to breathe in as much of the city as I could, hoping to hold it in my chest until we met again in seven months’ time. A long journey lay ahead, a journey that would take me around the world. Exactly five years ago to the day, I’d stepped off the Charminar Express in Chennai, marking my eightieth train journey around India. With nothing but a three-month rail pass, an outdated map, and hopeless naivety, I’d travelled 25,000 miles – the circumference of the earth – reaching the four points of the country’s geographical diamond. In between hanging from doorways, squatting on steps and snoozing on piles of laundry, I’d come to understand why Indian Railways is known as the ‘Lifeline of the Nation’.

  Having narrowly avoided a number of scrapes, I’d sworn never to take on anything so ambitious again. Little did I know that the railways had followed me home – their dust in my hair, their rhythm in my bones, their charm infused in my blood. Slowly, the symptoms began to manifest: I’d linger on bridges watching freight thundering below. On warm afternoons, I’d buy round-trip tickets just to sit in the window and read, and at night, I’d lie awake listening to distant horns sound through the darkness. It became a sickness, one that had no cure. At least, no cure that I’d find in London. I had to get back on the rails – but I couldn’t just pack up and leave. After returning from India I’d eased back into the swing of London life, working as the subeditor at The Week magazine, and, by all accounts, the job was the stuff of dreams: I swanned in at ten o’clock, and spent the day reading newspapers and drinking tea, with Coco the office dachshund asleep in my lap. In essence, I was being paid to do what most people did on a lazy Sunday. And now there was someone else to consider, my fiancé Jeremy, who had proposed a few months earlier, next to a bin outside St John’s Wood tube station. Knocked out of the way mid-proposal by a group of Japanese tourists wearing waterproofs and wellies, he had asked me to marry him, in the rain, on the very spot where we had met for our first date.

  Dismissing the idea of leaving, I carried on with the humdrum of daily life, suppressing the urge whenever it rose, until I finally gave up the fight: there was too much to discover on the rails, and the trains were waiting – but not for long. Train travel is evolving at high speed: bullet trains are multiplying, long-distance services running out of steam. Sleeper services are being phased out, and classic routes fading away. According to economists and pessimists, the romance of the railways is dying a swift death, but I refused to believe it was true. Nowhere in the world could rival India’s railways, but I knew that every country’s network would possess a spirit of its own, it just needed a prod and a poke to unearth. Trains are rolling libraries of information, and all it takes is to reach out to passengers to bind together their tales.

  After a final cup of tea, I patted Coco goodbye, and bade farewell to The Week. Jeremy – better known as Jem – agreed to join me for a month along the way, and I set about organising the trip. Hanging a world map on the living-room wall, I punctured it with pins, and tied coloured string from one to another, watching the next seven months of my life unwind around the globe. Surrounded by stacks of guides and maps, I sat cross-legged on the floor of our flat, poring over routes, flagging up significant events, and planning with as much precision as such a journey would allow for. One of the greatest mistakes a traveller can make, is to believe a journey can be controlled – least of all one of this magnitude. Nothing but disappointment can result in such a fallacy, and I’d made allowances for delays, cancellations, and general tardiness on my part. When I’d travelled around India, the plan was to have no plan, which had served me well within the confines of a single country; but this adventure had too many cities, countries and crossings for me to ride by the seat of my pants. As the day of departure approached, Jem grew ever more quiet, until one morning he sat down next to me.

  ‘Are you going to be okay for seven months on your own?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, in a small voice that surprised me.

  ‘Are you sure?’ He stared at the map. ‘There are some pretty hairy places under those pins. Iran? Uzbekistan?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  The truth was that I wasn’t sure I’d be fine. In India, I’d been groped on a night train, cornered in a station, chased down a platform, stared at, leered at, spat at, shouted at, sworn at, and spent numerous nights crouched in hotels after dark with my bags piled up against the door. Above all, I didn’t want to leave Jem behind. What a waste it would be, to travel around Europe, Russia, Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Canada, and America, with no one to build and share memories.

  Now, as I looked at the passenger in the seat next to me, I knew we’d made the right decision. Jem had quit his job, bought his first rucksack, and was accompanying me for the entire journey. Alarmed by his suggestion that all he needed for the next seven months was a new pair of boat shoes and a couple of jumpers, I’d taken off his Tag Heuer, handed him a Swatch, and marched him to Blacks for waterproofs and socks. Having grown up in the backwaters of Cobham, Surrey, Jem wasn’t used to bags that weren’t on wheels, and I suspected we were in for an interesting time. That morning, I’d made a last-minute dash to Stanfords in Covent Garden to pick up a notebook for the trip. Turning it over, I stroked the newness of the leather, and opened it up to document the first of eighty trains, sliding the ribbon into place. Looking out of the window, I saw that the train was approaching the Channel Tunnel; I took a deep breath as we went underground and England faded from sight.

  Contrary to what they implied, Eurail passes were perfect for people who planned, people who lacked spontaneity, people who knew exactly where they would be having dinner and at what time, ninety days in advance. I am not one of those people, and was rapidly finding the one-month rail pass a hindrance to our travels. For fixed itineraries it was fine, paying itself off within five or six long-distance journeys. But for people like us who woke in Paris wanting lunch in Barcelona, it didn’t work to our advantage. Each booking incurred a supplement fee, a cancellation fee or an administrative fee, and I spent the first week in Europe indoors, standing in stationary queues, waiting for refunds.

  While I’d been filling in forms and moving from one counter to another, Jem had come up with a list of sights and cities that he wanted to visit, handing it to me over lunch in a cafe in the Marais.

  ‘Gaudí’s House … Valencia … Lourdes? Really?’ I asked, as the waiter placed a basket of freshly sliced baguette on our table along with two paper placemats and a carafe of water.

  ‘Yes,’ said Je
m, trying to spread hard white butter across the bread, and tugging it apart.

  ‘But you’re not religious.’

  ‘I know, but I’m curious. You know how you hear about places when you’re a kid and you imagine them to be a certain way, I’ve always wondered what Lourdes is like.’

  Amid the din of conversation and scraping chairs, I looked around the cafe with a growing admiration for the way in which the French cared for nothing else when it came to meal times. Over a pichet of wine, they tore bread, wiped it in cream, cracked crème brûlée, sipped dark, perfect coffee, and drew out the afternoon as though it were a Saturday instead of the middle of a working week. No one seemed to have a job to go to, turning up with coiffed canines, manicures and perfect tans – the women were well turned out, too. Lifting a crisp, sticky chunk of confit de canard, I thought about going to Lourdes, and decided that it wouldn’t hurt to find salvation along the way.

  After lunch, we boarded the train to Limoges from where we were continuing the journey to Clermont-Ferrand, then Béziers – one of the longest single lines of track through France, known for the views over the Massif Central. While waiting around for the connection in Limoges, we shared a Coke and paced the cool, empty station, listening to the squeak of our footsteps and admiring the domed roof, the interior of which was engraved with four partly clothed women: Le Limousin, La Bretagne, La Gascogne and La Touraine. Circled in wreaths, carrying chestnuts and overlapped with acorns, oak leaves and vines, the allegories represented the four regions served by the train. Ropes of oak leaves snaked towards the dome, culminating in a circle of stained glass. For such a provincial town, the station was unusually ornate. Curious about its exterior, we wandered out into the forecourt, unable to see the roof from where we stood. Over the road, we found a seat on the wall of a fountain from where we could take in the full splendour of the art deco building and its clock tower. Of the stations we were to pass through in Europe, Limoges-Bénédictins turned out to be one of the loveliest, a haphazard and serendipitous discovery – thanks in no part to our rail pass.

  France’s TGVs – Trains à Grande Vitesse – have revolutionised train travel across Europe for commuters, but for idlers like us whose sole intention was to spend the afternoon gazing out of windows, the high-speed trains served little purpose, reducing the views to a blur. There were few passengers on the slow trains from Limoges to Clermont-Ferrand, and Clermont-Ferrand to Béziers, most of whom moaned about the heat, fell asleep in the heat, then jumped off within a couple of hours, leaving us to wind down the country alone.

  ‘Look what they’ve missed out on,’ said Jem, edging to the window as the train rumbled across a canyon, at the bottom of which were children playing in dinghies and leaping off limestone rocks into the water. Stopping their games, they looked up and waved paddles as we crossed the bridge. Over the next three hours, we crept through the depths of dark forests, silver trails of water whispering by. With the windows open, the clean smell of pine filled the carriage, as we rocked our way south to Béziers. An alert sounded on Jem’s phone and he glanced down.

  ‘I should have been going into a weekly meeting right now,’ he said, leaning back with his eyes shut, a small smile on his lips.

  From Béziers a connection via Toulouse brought us to Lourdes just in time for the evening procession. We ambled down the hill with the tributaries pouring into the sea of pilgrims making their way towards the Grotto. Expecting a quiet town with a few nuns scattered around a trickle of water, I felt like I was caught up in the aftermath of a football match. Rammed with pizzerias, kebab houses, and bars outlined in neon, Lourdes looked like the Magaluf of Christendom. Souvenir shops with names like ‘A La Grâce de Dieu’ and ‘Mystères de Marie’ lined the pavements, each one trying to out-flash the other with commemorative teacups, fans, doorstoppers, and cigarette lighters shaped like Jesus. Wandering around in bemusement, Jem pointed at a foot-high fluorescent statue of the Virgin Mary rising over us.

  ‘Imagine waking in the middle of the night and seeing that staring at you.’

  ‘Would you like your car to smell like the pope?’ I asked, finding a collection of car fresheners that purported to smell like different saints.

  ‘What does Joan of Arc smell like? Charcoal?’

  Each one of these supermarkets of religion was stacked with postcards, rosaries, snow globes, paintings, incense, and bottles of holy water – their prices rising by a few euros at a time the nearer we got to the Grotto.

  Among the crowds heading towards the procession were children in wheelchairs, haggard parents pushing them along. The sight filled me with frustration. I’d once considered myself a Hindu, accepting the religion into which I’d been born with very little thought – largely because it didn’t require me to do much but treat others as I’d hope to be treated, and eat barfi and biryani during festivals. Happy to go along with the idea that there was an unknown entity above, I’d mutter the odd prayer from time to time: in the moments before sleep, at a temple, or while perched on a back-row pew in Hampstead Parish Church in the quiet midweek. However, after my travels around India in the company of a self-confessed ‘devout’ atheist, I began to question the existence of a higher power and my need for religion as a whole. Time and again I encountered so-called ‘godmen’ exploiting the poor and vulnerable, priests extracting money for nothing, and blind faith leading to disappointment. By the end of my journey I concluded that the existence of a god went against all logic and reasoning and that I had no need for any kind of religion. Feeling freer and more awake than ever before, I found myself unable to ever pray or consider god again. Now, as I watched sick pilgrims streaming towards the grounds, carrying expensive candles and cans to collect water, I felt a renewed sense of my own conviction. Even if the experience brought peace to the needy, knowing others were profiting from their desperation wasn’t something I could accept. However, at the last minute I bought a tiny bottle, with a gold lid shaped like a flower, to fill with water and keep as a souvenir, if nothing else.

  Arriving at the sanctuary gates, Jem and I moved to the side as patients were wheeled in from a nearby hospice, their beds layered with blankets to stave off the evening chill. The sky had darkened and a deep purple bruise glowered over the Byzantine Rosary Basilica, as it loomed above the thousands holding candles and murmuring prayers. Taking our chance to slip away to the Grotto, we joined the queue, passing a man with a suitcase filling up plastic tubs of holy water. In silence, we edged through the tunnel, the trickle and drip echoing around. Beneath the statue of Our Lady, the rock wall glistened with water running down from her feet. From behind, impatient pilgrims stretched their arms over my head to touch the cold surface, bringing their fingers to their necks, lips moving in quiet prayer. As resistant as my feelings were, I was surprised by the calm that overcame me as we left the passage. On the way out, I had stopped to fill my water bottle, screwing the lid tightly shut and placing it in my pocket, when I noticed Jem lingering around the Grotto.

  ‘If it’s okay, I’d like to light a candle for Dad,’ he said. We chose a tall, slim gold candle and placed it in the holder together, watching the flame dart sideways in the wind, before walking back towards the thoroughfare, where the procession was well under way.

  One Sunday, aged fifteen, Jem was polishing his father’s Church’s brogues – a weekly ritual – when he saw him break out into a sweat. It was a cold January day and Jem eyed him with unease, knowing that something was wrong. Within a few minutes his father was leaning over the arm of the sofa, clutching his chest, before collapsing on the floor with a heart attack. Jem watched on helplessly as his father died before his eyes, aged just forty-four. Losing a parent at such a young and formative age jilted his entire outlook on life. The suggestion that his father’s death was god’s will insulted him, and he rejected others’ attempts to use religion to find reasoning in such an unjust event. Instead, he made a pledge to himself that every day from then on would be lived to the fullest, with career
and money taking a backseat in favour of making the most of his time with friends and loved ones.

  The next two weeks passed by in a blur of high-speed trains. Leaving Lourdes, we travelled to Toulouse, then Barcelona, shooting across to Madrid, looping down to Valencia, and curving back up the coast to Barcelona. From there we’d crossed the south of France and Monaco, coming to rest in Italy. There were twenty-eight countries available with the rail pass – almost one for every day we had in Europe – but it was impossible to devote a significant amount of time to any one place. Narrowing it down to a few old favourites, we chose to travel through cities that were havens of glorious food, better wine and even better beaches – but the trains were proving a disappointment. No one spoke, everyone slept, and there was little to differentiate one journey from the next. Efficient, punctual and easy to use, Europe’s trains served no greater purpose than to take passengers from one stop to the next, with a few pretty pastures in between. In the absence of sleeper services, these short hops didn’t lend themselves to the high-octane adventure we’d been hoping for.

  Sitting in a cafe in Milan, I scanned the list of trains we’d already taken. Every time I bent down to write, the sound of mopeds distracted me, as young women with legs like Bambi put-putted past in sandals and summer dresses, revving over the cobbles like something out of a Dior advert.

  ‘I’m the one who’s supposed to be leering, not you,’ said Jem, pressing his beer against his cheek.

  ‘I can’t help it. Italian cafes are designed for leering. Everyone’s drinking and you’re sitting on the pavement with your back to the restaurant with no one to look at but pretty girls in pretty dresses. Anyway, it’s not like those transition lenses are fooling anyone. I can see you perving behind them.’