Chapter 1
It’s better on inspection inside – basic but clean – but it is blisteringly hot now the rains have stopped and the temperature is starting to rise again. I make enquiries and the air-conditioned buffet car that I had been planning to spend the evening in, chatting to mysterious widows over caviar and champagne, turns out to be a figment of my over-heated imagination. The catering facilities consist of a lady with a tray of packaged croissants and instant coffee that can only be accessed at 7am the following morning. The good news is I have a greasy cheese pie bought from the station kiosk, so at least that’s dinner sorted. As we pull out on time, I’m looking forward to the first leg of the journey in particular, because it’s back along the river to Ljubljana – the beautiful route I was denied a view of yesterday in the whole Window Blind Incident. I make my way to my reserved compartment where it’s disappointingly clear that gazing out at the rolling Balkan countryside is not an option this time either, since the cabins are already made up into beds. There’s nowhere to sit and the windows are obscured by the foot-ends of the upper bunks. That puts paid to slouching in a seat for an hour or two, idly watching the world go by as the setting sun casts shadows on reflective rivers and picturesque valleys. Which leaves standing in the corridor, getting in the way of the conductor and attempting to translate the various warning signs – leaning out of the window, apparently not recommended; ditto opening the window and throwing things out of the window. Basically, don’t touch the window. Which rather reduces the entertainment and intrigue possibilities on the Zürich express to zero. Poirot would probably be the one committing murder on this train, just to jolly things up a bit. To bed then. Here, I need to backtrack a bit for the benefit of those familiar only with the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express or the fancier carriages of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Perhaps you’re lucky enough to have experienced them at first-hand, or at least seen them on TV travel programmes, and marvelled at the hand-stitched bed-linen, the crushed velvet drapes, the complimentary slippers, and the attentive service by butlers, at whom you only need raise an eyebrow when you’d like another nightcap. In travel, as in life, you get what you pay for, and those famous and very agreeable overnight journeys – on trains pulled by unicorns, passengers soothed by whale song and tucked in at night by elves – cost thousands. At the other end of the scale, the budget version is sitting up all night in a high-backed train seat with the lights on and the conductor poking you every now and again to have another look at your ticket. At 3am the train sits in a siding for an hour or so and you finally manage to fall into a fitful sleep only to be poked awake by a different kind of guard who wants to see your passport. At 5am the passenger next to you starts chugging beers and clambering over your knees to go to the toilet. Don’t go to the toilet yourself by the way – it’s a distressing sight that will stay with you until the day you die. Use a plastic water bottle, like the guy on the other side of you. You only travel overnight by train this way when you’re young or broke. You do it because you have no choice, and you don’t do it very often because what the InterRail website makes sound like a complete hoot – “Get ready to sleep your way to Berlin!” – is in fact truly and deeply uncomfortable. If you examine any of the medieval illustrations of Dante’s Inferno, right there in the Circles of Hell, somewhere between Wrath and Violence, you’ll be able to pick out the tiny, tortured figures of contorted backpackers trying to get some shut-eye on the Paris-to-Venice sleeper. When you get a bit older and little more affluent, it’s revealed to you in a hand-delivered letter on embossed parchment on your thirtieth birthday that some of the train carriages magically convert into couchettes – little bunk-beds with sheets and pillows. Your world is rocked. You mean if I just give you more of this money stuff, I can lie down and stretch out overnight? Sleep might be technically possible after all? Even on the Zagreb-Zürich service – sans confort it might be – there are different classes of accommodation available, with the top-of-the-range choice being a single-person sleeping cabin with its own little sink and a turn-down service. I consider its attractions and also its hefty price. I weigh the merits of the relatively cheaper two- and four-bunk options. All seem to offer a restful night’s sleep as we trundle across central Europe. However, I feel that any type of couchette is better than sitting up all night and thus opt for economy on the basis on which I make many of my travelling decisions – namely, how bad can it be? Funny you should ask. My cabin is one of those six-seater compartments of the sort I’ve been travelling in for the last couple of days. The two facing rows of three seats have been made up into the bottom two bunk beds. Above them, on each side, two more beds fold down from the compartment wall, so that the six-seater cabin becomes a two-sided triple-decker bunk house. I have one of the two top bunks, access to which is up a little ladder. There’s a sheet, thin blanket and pillow provided, space at the foot of the bunk for your bag, and a reading light and small storage net at the other end. This is all very nice and just as it should be. What there isn’t is any headroom whatsoever. If you can picture lying on your back in a closed coffin or getting stuck underground while crawling through a cave, I’d say you have a pretty good idea of the available space for moving around in the top bunk of a six-berth cabin. Raising my head more than a few inches proves impossible – so doubling up to take off my socks, say, not a chance. I entertain myself for a while by wrestling with the sheet, eventually managing to spread it out beneath me, and lie there breathing heavily. Similar groans and sharp intakes of breath reveal that the rest of the occupants have all arrived by now too. I have three other gulag inmates at my level in the top tiers, and we form an immediate yet unspoken bond as we peer over the edge at the two people in the spacious ground-level bunks, who are gaily swinging themselves in and out of bed, taking off their shoes and socks, sitting up, checking the contents of their bags, and generally behaving in a manner likely to cause murder most foul. One of them disappears into the corridor, heads down to the train toilet and comes back shortly dressed in sleepwear, teeth presumably brushed, throat gargled and teddy bear primed for cuddling. I toy with the idea of sliding myself out horizontally, latching on to the ladder backwards, climbing down, locating the toilet, changing a T-shirt at least, returning up the ladder backwards, finding somewhere to put my discarded clothes and sliding myself back in horizontally, but it’s exhausting just thinking about it. I do manage to kick my shoes off. There. Bed-time. I lie there, firstly on my back but it’s just too weird with the ceiling so close to my eyes. I wriggle and shift, and eventually end up in a sort of lateral splay as the train rocks gently from side to side. The compartment door is slightly open and there’s a shaft of natural light from the corridor which waxes and wanes as the train rattles on into the night. Slow corners tilt me one way and another, while clanks and squeals – and almost imperceptible speed changes – signal arrival at and departure from unknown stations in Slovenia and then Austria. Voices rise and fall as people walk past our cabin; below me are coughs, snuffles and snores. In this cramped coffin-cave, sweating on a bare sheet on a humid night in central Europe, something miraculous happens. The train picks me up and carries me off, and I drift into a sleep that has a womb-like rhythm at its heart – a pulsing, rocking, breathing state that takes eight hundred kilometres and fifteen hours and condenses them into an instant or an eternity, it’s hard to tell which. Train-sleep is unlike any other. I’ve succumbed to it before, in France, Italy, Malaysia and China – the same narrow bunks, the same sounds, the same motions leading to an ocean-like wave of acceptance as you give yourself to the rolling rails. Minutes go by in hours, and then hours in minutes, as I’m rocked in and out of consciousness by a giant metal cradle on wheels. It’s hard to believe but I have to be woken up – a touch of my shoulder by the guard who inspected my ticket the night before. It’s around 7am and my stop is coming up in around an hour. I’m treated – why Ambassador, you spoil me – to a cup of instant black coffee and a cellophane-wrapped croissant, which is by no means the worst thing I have had for breakfast on a train. That would be the meal served
