Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
All aboard the Love Train
Romantic weekend break
This week: the ultimate in luxury for lovers – a trip on the Venice Simplon- Orient-Express
It has to be the most romantic hotel for a weekend break – the view is always spectacular but never stays the same. The food, served on crisp white linen tablecloths in Art Deco dining cars, is simply sublime. You can drink a different wine for every region you travel through – and really, can there be anything quite so exhilarating as the knowledge that you are about to embark on a huge adventure?
One moment you’re climbing aboard the glistening dark blue and gold Wagons-Lits in northern France with just enough time to drink a glass of champagne in a crystal flute and watch the canals and mills gliding past the picture window. The next you’re waking up to your white-gloved steward serving fruit and buttered croissants as cows with bells round their necks come down from snowclad mountains and children on the balconies of gingerbread-style chalets wave you by.
The Venice Simplon-OrientExpress is certainly the most luxurious of mobile hotels and a favourite for honeymooners and special anniversaries – and it’s the highlight for many celebrities when answering Weekend’s The Definite Article question about their fantasy 24 hours. It’s known by the stewards as ‘the Love Train’ because so many honeymooners are on board. In fact, the alarms in each cabin had to be changed from a flick switch to a flat button because with so much moving around they were often set off accidentally...
Each stop on the way seems to be more of a hotspot for passion than the last. Setting off from London’s Victoria Station in the elegant British Pullman, you board the even more opulent Wagons-Lits at Calais, bound for Paris, Venice, Prague and Vienna, depending on your route. Finally, if you’re on the full six-day trip there’s Istanbul, where Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot boarded in Murder On The Orient Express. David Suchet, who’s played Poirot on TV since 1989, was travelling alone when he took the trip three years ago for a documentary, but he still had a fairytale ending – he got to drive the train.
You can walk the length of the 17 coaches to compare notes on the vintage carriages with their different marquetry and mosaics, and find Poirot’s perfectly preserved wood-panelled cabin in coach A. You can even stay in it – but you won’t get to take the driver’s seat. At each border not just the driver but the engine must change to meet each country’s laws – astonishingly an obliging Austrian let Mr Suchet have a turn.
Not that anyone notices any stops along the way; the steward takes your passport and handles any red tape, so all blends seamlessly into the soothing clickety-clack of the wheels. Once you’ve dined amid the pearly Lalique panels of the dining car you head for the bar car where cocktails await and a pianist tinkles the baby grand. And when you return to find your cabin transformed into the cosiest of bedrooms, it isn’t surprising that sleep, when it comes, is all-enveloping. The suspension was overhauled in 2000 to help you have only happy dreams, and train manager Bruno Janssens points out with relief: ‘A reallife murder on the Orient Express? Never, thank God!’