Travel
Where are the trains of yesteryear?
by Dean Parker
A TV scriptwriter follows the path of the Orient Express, is detained by Syrians and goes looking for the ghost of Lawrence of Arabia. Sounds like pure soap opera.
Oh, dear. Nobody’s strolling by with trunks full of smoking jackets and silk pyjamas! Ingrid Bergman and Lauren Bacall are nowhere to be seen! Instead there’s a Muslim family trying to get a second-hand stove manhandled onto a wagon.
The Orient Express used to run in splendour from Paris to Baghdad, occasionally tormented by Lawrence of Arabia and his mujahidin. All that’s left now is the Toros Expresi, running between Istanbul and Aleppo in northern Syria.
The grandeur has slipped away, so it’s a snip at $80 a berth for a two-day trip. The once mighty express now consists of a single blue car marked “Chemin de Fer Syrien”, jammed in the middle of 20 or so grubby local carriages and wagons hauled by a proletarian diesel.
My companion and I get co-joined compartments, each with a mirror, lockers, luggage racks, two bunks and a concealed wash basin that serves as a writing desk. The lower bunk is a couchette on which you lounge full-length rather grandly, buttressed by cushions. The bunk above is for proper sleeping. It’s smallish, functional and – unsurprisingly – late 1960s East German.
The journey’s first two hours take us through the sprawl that flows east out of Istanbul; concrete suburbs, brickworks, cement works, petro-chemical works. Then we’re into valleys of pines, scattered houses of mud and timber, and rugged bare hills.
Out in the corridor we stretch our legs and make acquaintances. This doesn’t take long. Two large Syrian blokes and a very dapper older chap make up the bare complement. The latter looks like a professor emeritus of history, but my companion dismisses him as just another travel writer.
There are two attendants, typically hospitable Syrians, who sit round a little gas hot-plate and happily brew up coffee for their charges.
There’s no dining car, which adds a bit of adventure – you have to judge your stops and make dashes for the station buffet.
At one stop the two Syrians appear wearing brownish overcoats and leather beanies. Surprisingly, they’re in men’s fashion and have been to Istanbul checking out the latest in brownish overcoats and leather beanies. They should really check out the donnish chap, who’s in tailored jeans and a linen jacket. He turns out to be a PR man for the Austrian railways.
My companion had earlier reported that the toilet was of the squat variety. My heart – and bowels – had sunk. I held out, but finally succumbed, sadly choosing a period when the train pitched itself round a series of rapid bends. Sometime later I discovered that the unmarked door next to the squat was the Western toilet.
Night falls, the Syrians unfold their prayer mats and I look up at Allah’s starry, starry night and fall asleep.
Waking is a puzzle. The morning sun through the window is brilliant, there’s a mountain range in the distance. Exactly where are we? The train is stationary. The Austrian’s in the corridor, wearing a rakish blue nightgown and leather slippers. Snoring comes from the attendants’ cabin.
Turns out that we’ve been here for hours. An accident on the line ahead. We were to have arrived in Aleppo in the early afternoon. Maybe now we’ll make it by midnight.
It’s a dramatic, empty spot. Pylons cross a pale, stubbled plain to high, snowy-blue mountains daubed with gold in the morning sun.
Nothing is moving. I wander over rail tracks, banks and ditches to a ramshackle tea-hut, where I’ve seen some of the Turkish passengers disappear. Just as I duck my head inside, the whistle blows. Everyone starts moving, fast. Outside, my companion is calling. We’re all stumbling for the train. The two of us head back down the line toward our blue sleeper, now at the rear. It’s a mistake. People are shouting, “Mister! Mister!” and indicating the nearest carriage. The train whistles again. Those aboard are peering out as we change tack and head for the carriage. Hands reach down and I push my companion up and haul myself on just in time.
Breakfast is at the invitation of our attendants – pita bread, olives, hummus, hot tea. Outside, there’s snow, with families out there scraping a living from the soil.
At one stop a grandmother is in her backyard, sternly instructing her grandson on the chopping of kindling. At another, a schoolboy comes up to the window and asks for a smoke.
A tunnel – another – another – and suddenly there are giant peaks above and a quite, quite vertiginous drop down to a distant pale-green river and just as we’re craning our necks, the view to the north turns astonishingly into the painting Colin McCahon never did: “The Resurrection”. It’s the fabled Cilician Gates that gave Alexander access to the wealth of Asia, a great, cleaving gap in a mountain range, like a paling missing in a fence, and through it is a sunlit plain beyond, stretching to the horizon. Magic.
We reach the Turkish border by night, pulling into the small, decrepit station of Islahive eight hours late. There’s mayhem. People swarm across the tracks to the carriages ahead. Men in dark jackets and head-scarves are shouting and arguing and shoving each other aside in the rush to get seats. It’s a nightmare of noise lit by a few high pylon lamps; the Syrian working class returning home.
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