This article is part of Traveller’s Holiday Guide to Luxury Bucket List. See all stories . On a 15-carriage train, where my car F is 12 carriages from the piano bar, a certain knack is required for walking while the train is trundling along at 90km/h.
I master a technique that necessitates a hand on each wall and a step-stop-step balancing act with my shoulders taking the weight when the slim, narrow-gauge track curves and the carriage leans. On one occasion, a fellow passenger pops out of a cabin up ahead, nods his hello and takes the lead, heaving open the twin set of heavy wooden sliding doors between each carriage so that we can both slip through before the doors roll themselves shut with a weighty bang. The sumptous piano bar on board the Eastern & Oriental Express.
Credit: Ludovic Balay Such is the length of the train and the shared purpose of getting to the piano bar, the interaction results in a pleasant tete-a-tete as we continue single file. In fact, it is as good as any confessional, with life’s big questions culminating in the final reveal: we could both murder a drink. Murdering anything is entirely on theme aboard Belmond’s Eastern & Oriental Express.
This is the sister train of the famed Orient Express, on which Agatha Christie’s novel Murder on the Orient Express and the acclaimed film of the same name was set. I can well imagine detective Hercule Poirot engaging his suspects in similarly probing conversation as they pass through the carpeted carriages.