Morocco tourists make tracks on James Bond’s ‘desert express’
bouarfa (Morocco) — Edouard Kunz knows timekeeping is important but the former Swiss watch precision mechanic admits that James Bond’s Oriental Desert Express in remote eastern Morocco never runs on schedule.
The train, made famous in the 2015 Bond movie Spectre, trundles tourists between the town of Oujda and the former mining city of Bouarfa along a 350km stretch of desert.
“It takes between eight and 12 hours to make the trip, sometimes even more,” says Kunz, 70, who is known as Edi, blaming sandstorms for frequent delays.
His passion for trains put him in the driver’s seat more than 10 years ago when he persuaded Morocco’s National Office of Railways to let him run a tourist train on a disused railway line. The track that runs near the border with Algeria was originally built nearly 100 years ago when Morocco was a French protectorate.
It was part of an ambitious project, the Mediterranean-Niger railway, to link the sea to inland Africa.
However, the project was shortlived and, in time, the mines and factories in Bouarfa shut down, until the desert region with its lunar landscapes was rediscovered by Kunz and the location scouts for Spectre.
Exterior shots of the train making its way through the desert darkness were used in the Bond movie, a star-studded spy thriller with Daniel Craig reprising the role of 007.
One of the most striking sequences in the film depicts a romantic dinner between Bond and a character played by French actress Lea Seydoux that is interrupted by the villain Mr Hinx, played by wrestler Dave Bautista.
The train moves at a top speed of 50km per hour, but this can often drop to 10 kph and sometimes the train has to come to a complete halt because of sand on the tracks. When that happens, workers resort to shovels to get rid of the sand before the train can proceed.
“Some people buy BMWs but I bought myself a train,” Kunz says, with a chuckle, recalling how he struggled to make a profit with his desert train project. —