“So this is the great Orient Express,” says a character in Graham Greene’s 1969 novel Travels with My Aunt. “Maybe it’s real luxury travel…for people not in a hurry.”
That novelised version of the famed Paris to Istanbul train was a little run-down, and calamitously, had no restaurant car to sate passengers on its three-day journey. Ttitular Aunt Augusta bemoans the lack of caviar and champagne in which she’d indulged on a previous voyage.
“We practically lived in the dining car. One meal ran into another and night into day.”
Just as Aunt Augusta harkened back to the glory days of train travel, so too does Golden Eagle Luxury Trains. Passengers on its new French-Turkish connection will hardly find themselves going hungry, but they certainly won’t be in a rush.
A champagne reception at Gare de Lyon set the inaugural journey off on a footing of opulence and pleasure. While Paris slipped away behind a drizzle of rain, we first travellers were treated to a boozy on-board lunch that portended the extravagance of our seven-day voyage to the Bosphorus.
Coupled to the royal-blue wagon-lits of its Danube Express were two restaurant cars and a bar car, all in full swing, with enough caviar and champagne to last well beyond Istanbul.
The Golden Eagle winds a sinuous route across the continent
Golden Eagle’s itinerary touches on many of the locations taken by previous iterations of the multifarious “Orient Express” trains — Austria, Serbia, Bulgaria — although it traces an original, more languid, sinuous route across the continent.
The train makes additional stops in France’s Reims to visit a champagne house, an afternoon at Slovenia’s Postojna Cave, spirit-tasting in Belgrade, and a city tour of Sofia.
This was late May (the route is offered in spring and autumn), the perfect time to make a cross-continental crop inspection of Europe. The budding grapevines of France trailed into the soggy barley fields of Austria, to Serbia’s parched beans and corn, and Bulgaria’s squat, as-yet-faceless sunflowers. Fat Brown Swiss cattle in Alpine pastures begat Croatia’s sheep, which gave way to the skinny Dardanelle goats of Turkey.
And every day of the journey, sprouting between the railway ties as though they had been seeded by passing trains, was a festive tri-colour of poppies, butterwort, and early-purple orchids.
Europe’s best restaurant on rails
Greene’s Aunt Augusta was right to say that “in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in wine, in love, in food.”
Food was on my mind from the get-go of this trip, and did funny things to my senses. At our stop in Reims, I was happy to hear our guide say, “We will be visiting the Café Drole.” I was honestly surprised to find us then at the city’s cathedral rather than a brasserie.
The statues carved into the church’s façade, chewed by acid rain, looked leprotic without various fingers, hands, noses, and toes, and put me in mind of gorgonzola.
The next day, as I passed through Austrian Tyrol, the waiter bent with a basket of bread and asked if I wanted “The normal, or the terrible kind?” Too curious to refuse, I asked for the terrible, only to find it was, in fact, made with tarragon.
The bread, the butter, the finicky meals, and delicate desserts are judiciously constructed in the cramped swelter of a railcar kitchen. It feels certain that, were it not moving on rails for weeks at a time, the Danube Express restaurant would have a Michelin star or two — that system being predicated on the anonymity of reviewers, who are unlikely to spend a week or more eating at the same establishment.
Yet I could think of nothing better than having my regular breakfast of poached eggs and bacon while passing through Slovenia’s Julian Alps, or eating octopus carpaccio, grilled sea bass, and baked mango cheesecake as we traveled south through Croatia, to my left was a wolfish Balkan wood, to my left, fishing boats and Adriatic beach sand.
Each evening, Gábor Viczián, the train’s resident musician, would fill the bar car with music — tunes from his native Hungary, the Great American Songbook, and Elton John. One night, the carriage slowly emptied, until it was just the two of us, him at the piano, and me drinking my champagne.
I tried to listen with sincerity while Gábor explained to me how Chopin’s modulated romantic chords led to the swing and jazz of Gershwin and Joplin, but between the rocking of the train, the drink, and Gábor’s unique spin on the English language, his explanations soon became a little blurry.
A historical voyage made new again
In my clear moments, I knew this was a special voyage. As the trip wore on and Istanbul loomed, it became a topic of conversation — the historical connotations of the journey, in literature, film, and the imagination, were inescapable.
The last supper on board, a semi-formal “black-tie gala,” was held as we rattled between Sofia and Istanbul. I sat with an Australian gentleman, who expressed amazement that everything had gone so well.
“This trip just flowed like wine,” the Australian said. “Smooth from start to finish.”
Yes, I thought, and the train is the terroir, providing us with everything needed for an excellent trip.
“We can only do so much,” said Tim Littler, Golden Eagle’s founder, who travelled with us on the journey. They have refined their mission after years of operations in Europe, Central Asia, and India (new itineraries will soon begin in China, Tibet, and Vietnam).
What is under Golden Eagle’s purview — the delicious food, the drinks, the comfortable cabins, the friendly and smiling staff — was better than anyone could ask for.
As in any kind of travel, the rest was up to us passengers. How could the torrential rain we encountered in Vienna be a problem when we had a private orchestral concert waiting for us at the Burgtheater? Why bother over the occasionally spotty Wi-Fi when we had the breadth of Balkan Europe to look out upon?
How could anyone complain about the wait times at the Bulgarian border when the formalities were entirely taken care of by Golden Eagle staff, leaving us free to continue sipping champagne and reading our novels?
The time allotted to us was the true luxury. To paraphrase Greene, this is the great Golden Eagle; it is real luxury travel for people not in a hurry.
The writer was a guest of Golden Eagle Luxury Trains.
