How We Re-invented the Orient Express
And Found Dracula Along the Way
The authentic Orient Express ran from Paris to Istanbul from the 1880s until the 1930s on a Southern (Serbian) Route or Northern (Romanian) Route, depending on the latest Balkan War. After voracious reading of…
Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express)
Graham Greene (Stamboul Train)
Eric Ambler (A Coffin for Dimitrios)
Ian Fleming (From Russia with Love)
…we were dying to take the Most Romantic Train Trip In The World, but found nothing but imitations and so-called alternate routes, at more than $3,500 a pop.
So one of our all-time-favorite adventures started with the bright idea of booking all of the legs on our own, country by country, with each national railway. It took weeks of research and wrangling, but we ended up with:
Bruxelles-Liege (SNCB Belgium).
Liege-Cologne (Deutsche Bahn).
Cologne-Vienna (ÖBB Austria sleeper).
Vienna-Budapest (Railjet).
Budapest-Bucharest (EuroNight Ister sleeper).
Bucharest-Istanbul (Bosphor Express sleeper and bus).
All for less than $1,000!
The original Orient Express stopped for a luxurious spa night in Budapest, so we did too. We took another three days off in Bucharest to drive up into Transylvania in search of Dracula (Vlad really is dead, although we never saw a body). Which left three overnight sleeper trains on the Vienna, Bucharest, and Istanbul legs.
Neither of us had ever ventured east of Yugoslavia, so we had no real idea what was coming. The Russians were gone and had taken their ideology with them, but we had no way of knowing what kind of hangover they'd left behind.
Which came to mind when we alit in Budapest’s Keleti Station on a cold, moonless night to find a gravel path instead of a platform and no street lights anywhere. It was a black-and-gray scene straight out of Schindler's List, with silent, exhausted crowds trudging into the station and out to the street. One of the few times in our travels that we’ve been genuinely intimidated.
The trains ranged from the Germans and Austrians (ugly, but efficient) to the Romanians and Turks (ornate, friendly, and falling apart). The farther east we travelled, the more the Communist past came to life, in massive, decrepit, concrete stations filled with loiterers who never seemed to climb onto a train. But the cities were clearly making up for lost time, with vibrant art scenes, wonderful hotels and spas, boisterous night lives, and hordes of high-performance German cars.
The food was another matter. After Viennese Schnitzels and Sachertorten, the cuisine steadily deteriorated into an abrupt reversal in Istanbul. The Ottomans have invaded—or been invaded by—nearly every country on the planet, and their former capital is truly the Culinary Crossroads Of The World.
We have an ironclad rule about never eating at a restaurant with an English or tourist menu, and the Turkish script in the docks and alleyways where we ventured proved impenetrable. But the Turks are a friendly lot, and we generally drew a good-natured laugh by discreetly pointing at another diner's meal and signaling for the same. Some of the best, most exotic seafood in the world.
Dame Agatha Christie wrote Murder On the Orient Express in Suite 411 of the Pera Palace Hotel, across the fabled Golden Horn and up a steep funicular from downtown Istanbul. Naturally, we wanted her room, but it was booked months in advance. So was Kemal Ataturk’s suite, so the staff offered us Greta Garbo's former digs on the top floor. We were supposed to stay three nights, but a week raced by before we managed to tear ourselves away.
To the airport, thank goodness!
A note on Railroads:
Never board a train anywhere in the world without consulting The Man In Seat Sixty-One. The Man, Mark Smith, is a rail travel genius.
A note on Times:
Railroads all over the world run on 24-hour clocks (they even used to call it Railroad and Telegraph Time). So if you show up precisely twelve hours late, like we did in Bucharest, expect an embarrassing discussion and an overnight extension in the exotic locale of your non-choice. Ever since, we've set all of our digital clocks and watches to 24-hour time. Just in case.
As for Vlad the Impaler:
Anyone familiar with the George-Washington-Slept-Here trope from Revolutionary America will recognize its parallel in 15th century Romania. The countryside is full of forts and castles that claim Vlad Dracula, the Volvode of Wallachia, as a former occupant. As classy as many of them are, the drab, melancholy Poenari Castle, in the remote Arges Pass of the Transylvanian Mountains, seemed to have best suited the moody, paranoid Count.
As for Vlad the Impaler's nickname:
The key to understanding much of European history lies in the constant, centuries-old threat of Ottoman invasion. So how do you convince a thoroughly brutal and aggressive empire to take its foreign religion and insatiable tax collectors and invade elsewhere? Vlad's solution in 1462 was to line the road from Constantinople with 18,000 impaled Ottoman soldiers. By the time the dumbfounded Sultan Mehmet II and his troops left Targoviste, they'd lost interest in acquiring any more Wallachian subjects.
As for Vlad's adoption by Bram Stoker:
Vlad's reputation never recovered, naturally, and set the stage for Bram Stoker to merge him in 1897 with the beautiful, but authentically hideous Hungarian serial killer Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed into everyone's favorite B-movie ghoul. Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee did the rest.
The book, Dracula, is still surprisingly inventive and readable.
Your adventures are amazing and this one didn't fail to impress. I'm very much looking forward to where you take us next.
Thank you, Robin! And that would be Boston (I promised a friend), which is interesting, considering that is where we're headed tomorrow. Thanks for joining!