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Globe and Mail
12-06-2025
- Globe and Mail
Travel in the charm of another era on board Malaysia's Eastern & Oriental Express
I take the train for the romance of it – for a taste of an older world. Visiting Malaysia, I had been dazzled by the futurisms of Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, scion-cities of late-stage capitalism, filled with glitzy shopping malls, spacey light shows, skyscrapers so avant-garde they might be half-built or simply newfangled, and assurances that Asia was the future of the world. It was also pitilessly hot and humid. 'You don't know how to walk in Singapore,' a girl said to me, hiding her giggles at my sweaty shirt behind her hand. 'You have to slip from mall to mall, spending as little time outside as possible.' But passing from one air-conditioned arcade to another struck me more like hell, and one can only drink so many $16 beers, hear so much unending traffic and read so many signs like 'Failing to flush toilet is illegal' (who needs such a sign?) before thinking the future isn't all it's cracked up to be. I felt like taking a step backward, away from that shining Tomorrowland, into something a little cozier. Standing on the open-air caboose of the Eastern & Oriental Express, watching the Lion City and its stippled skyline fade into the horizon, I felt entirely at peace. How luxury train travel is turning the journey into the ultimate destination The E & O Express was resuscitated by Belmond in 2024 after a COVID-19 pandemic hiatus and is now the only sleeper train still operating in Malaysia (the Intercontinental Express still runs overnight from the Thai-Malay border north to Bangkok). And a comfortable sleep it is. My cabin was stately, wood-panelled, snug, lush without being garish and filled with flowers and light, not to mention vintage marquetry and upholstery. The sofa bed and lounge chair converted to cushy single beds in the evening, and the ensuite included a full shower and marble sinks (no haughty signs needed). In the dining cars, one could chat with the sweet and smiling staff over fine dining that mixed the local with Provençal cuisine; our first spread was sakura ebi fricassee with black bone chicken soup and goose oil pilaf, with tropical panache for dessert. From Singapore, we had 1,800 kilometres of Y-shaped travel to go, first to the Malaysian junction at Gemas, then right to the protected rain forest of the Taman Negara, then left along the west coast to Butterworth, and finally back down again to Singapore, all in all, a journey of four days and three nights. Along the way, I'd be experiencing, so the brochure assured me, 'some of the most intoxicating places on Earth.' I took that as a sign to start things off in the bar car. While the barman fixed my gin and tonic, I eyed an ancient-looking map on the wall. It gave a slightly cockeyed view of Southeast Asia ('The East Peninsula of India,' it read). Malaysia, outlined in green, hung from Thailand (here, still the Kingdom of Siam) like an unopened lily bud. I put my finger where I estimated the train to be, somewhere within the white, unmapped centre of the country, an anachronism down to the map's date, 1755. 'That,' the barman said, leaning over the bar counter conspiratorially. 'Is the most expensive thing on the train. One million dollars.' 'This map? A million?' More from Southeast Asia: Singapore is a theme park for foodies He nodded knowingly while I sipped my gin and tried to look unquestioning. Banana leaves were slapping at the windows, filtering the setting sun. I remained in the bar car, listening to the chatter of the passengers. 'Awful lot of palms,' and 'You don't mind if I have another gin, do you dearie?' And 'Look at them cattle!' when we passed a small herd of skinny, humpbacked zebus. For all its advancements and agriculture – from the train, the country seemed at times entirely covered by oil palms – Malaysia lies close to the gnarled roots of nature. We alighted the first morning of our journey near the national park of Taman Negara, and were taken on a guided walk under the green canopy, the fronds above us meeting like eyelashes over the road, the path lined with palms like green fountains. We were primed for movement in the bush – it is one of the oldest rain forests in the world (more than 130 million years), with a menagerie of animals whose twisted familiarity enhance its primeval aura: the pig-like tapir, the bullish gaur, the catty civet and the minuscule mouse-deer. There is also black leopard, Malayan tiger, Asian elephant and a small population of Indigenous Betaq peoples. We didn't encounter the latter – they are shy, our guide told us, but there were sightings of civets, hornbills, grey macaques, even a long-armed gibbon swinging in the trees. Over that afternoon and into the night, we travelled from Taman Negara to Butterworth. From there we disembarked and ferried onto the island of Penang for a morning of free time before our return to Singapore. The British influences on Malaysia are fast fading – China and Australia are the great systems in its orbit now – but the last shreds of the Empire still cling to Georgetown, a former colonial post on Penang that is a marvel of preservation, if a little rough in upkeep. 'There are three untouchable things in Malaysia,' a taxi driver in Georgetown told me. 'Royals, race and religion.' The country is ethnopolitically complex, with a history of racial tension, but today the dominant races (Malay, Chinese and Indian) and religions (Islam, Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism) live in relative harmony, and the country is peaceful and quite safe for a foreign visitor. We happened to be driving down Harmony Street, when the driver asked me 'Are you knowing, sir, that today is New Year's Eve?' I had one of those brief moments of panic – Good Lord, isn't it April? Just how intoxicating has the trip been? I caught his smiling eyes in the rear-view mirror. 'We celebrate five new years in Malaysia,' he said. 'And 387 festivals.' Hearing that, I felt it wasn't peace that was improbable, but rather the fact they got anything done – and Penang is a hub of electronics manufacturing. 'Today is Vaisakhi, isn't it? Sikh new year. I will take you.' And we were off, to the local Gurdwara, the Sikh temple, where Jasdev abandoned his taxi to sit and chat among the revellers as we ate the freely given dahl, paratha and chai. Jasdev returned me to the ferry, to await passage back to the train station. When we parted, he placed his hand on his heart, and I mine. It is the graceful action for all Malaysian interactions. 'I wish you a peaceful and prosperous voyage,' he said. Later, in my cabin, watching the sea recede and the Cameron Highlands loom ahead, it wasn't gloom I felt at the prospect of returning to Singapore. Just the sense that all good journeys are over too soon.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A Woman Was on a 6-Hour Train Ride with Her Boyfriend. When He Fell Asleep, She Met Her Husband
Maire Clifford met her future husband, Andy Bain, on a train to Edinburgh while her then-boyfriend slept beside her. The two instantly clicked, stayed in touch, and reconnected months later — eventually falling in love without even sharing a first kiss. Bain proposed at a train station with his grandmother's ring, and Clifford said yes, calling their meeting a moment of fate.A traveler took the 'never let your boyfriend stop you from meeting your husband' meme to heart on one fateful train ride. Maire Clifford shares the unlikely story of how she met her husband in 2000 while making the six-hour train trip from London to Edinburgh, Scotland with her then-boyfriend in an exclusive interview with CNN, Shortly after departing, she recalls, her beau fell asleep beside her and the events that followed changed her life. 'I was like, 'Okay, this is going to be really boring,'' Clifford remembers. 'So I went through to the smoking carriage.' It was empty except for one man, Andy Bain, sitting beside his large backpack. She asked him for a light, which he happily provided, and the conversation flowed from there. 'I just remember being struck by how easy…like there was a real sense of familiarity,' she said. Bain was traveling back from a journey through Zanzibar and Tanzania, where he'd been contemplating his life and relationships. 'I'd kind of not had a great relationship prior to Maire, and not really any great relationships, I guess,' Bain explained. 'I'm not putting any blame or anything. People just are wrong for each other, but I made this conscious decision that I wasn't going to be seeking a relationship.' After flying back to London, he missed his original train, which landed him on the same one as Clifford. Their meeting, he says, made him 'believe in fate.' 'Not only was it immediately after I'd kind of said, 'I'm going to open myself up to the world,' but I'd missed the train that I was supposed to be on,' he said. 'And then the first person that I really met after that decision, through that kind of happy accident, was Maire.' In return, Clifford praised Bain for being 'a certain type of person to be able to notice those special moments when they happen.' As for Clifford's sleeping boyfriend, he remained in his slumber for the duration of the train journey, giving her and Bain six hours to get to know one another, platonically at the time. 'I don't remember thinking, 'She's really hot,' you know, or anything like that," he says, "It was just, 'She's really cool.' And it was really, really nice just to have just such an easy conversation with someone.' At the end of the trip, the two swapped emails before Clifford returned to her original car and her snoozing beau. About a week later, she sent Bain an email and they kept in contact for months, speaking more frequently and eventually advancing to phone calls. By that point, she says, the boyfriend from the train ride was out of the picture. The two eventually met up in London, still as friends, and then she planned a trip up to Edinburgh for Hogmanay (Scottish New Year's Eve). During a late night talk on that visit, he asked her, 'Do you believe in soulmates, because I think that you're mine,'' she recalled. And days later, the two professed their love to one another. Though the two hadn't even shared a kiss up to this point, Bain explained that it was their shared values and experiences that made him realize his feelings for her were more than friendly. From there, the two dated long-distance, but after a few months, he moved to London and shortly thereafter. He proposed with his late grandmother's ring, which he wore on a necklace. 'We were in Paddington Station, amongst all the Burger King wrappers or whatever… And so I got my ring off my neck, I got down on one knee, and I said, 'Will you marry me?'' Clifford said 'yes' and recalled dreaming about Bain's grandparents that night, welcoming her into their family. Read the original article on People
