Meandering up to Mandalay...
Ivo Dawnay and his wife Rachel Johnson revel in the retro refinement of a leisurely 18-day journey from Singapore to Burma
YOU have decided to pass on the Lamborghini. So how are you going to reward yourself for a lifetime of hard work as George Osborne’s pension reforms drop a tidy tax-free sum into your bank account? Young men, no doubt, still ‘go west’. But the more romantically inclined older generation seem to be flocking in their thousands to the exotic delights of South East Asia. It is easy to see why. The meeting place of the two great cultural tectonic plates – India and China – combines the best of both of them on an intimate scale, dumping on the way the hassling, maddening crowds that can make them hellish.
Our 18-day meander from Singapore, on the tip of Malaysia, to Mandalay, only a few hundred miles from both the Chinese and Indian borders, was a six-star experience: the pool’s winner’s journey, but without the vulgarity.
Singapore’s a Marmite place. Some love the OCD, disciplinarian impeccability of it all: not a speck of litter, chewing gum illegal, and a constant fear that one may be executed or, at the very least, caned for leaving a lavatory seat up (or is it down?). It was not for me, though my naturally disciplinarian wife Rachel loved it.
On the other hand, our sojourn in the wedding-cake-white palace of Raffles hotel was a taste of things to come – a nostalgic memory of what the golden days of empire must have been like before we had to start apologising. Chota pegs, punkah wallahs and faultless service. One almost expected to meet Rudyard Kipling in the bar. Heavenly.
A few hundred yards over the causeway bridge from the smug affluence of Singapore, Malaysia and Asia proper begins. Grubbier perhaps, but much more exciting. From
the open-air observation carriage on the end of the Eastern & Oriental Express, the manicured lawns and squeaky-clean high rises of the island city-state give way to a modest 3ft-gauge track, swathed by banana palms. Between the foliage, the smells of sandalwood fires from family compounds drift to the rattling carriages. This is the way to travel: a route taken by 1,000 pith-helmeted assistant district commissioners and their doughty wives, revived for a few dozen well-heeled nostalgists in love with the romance of rail.
Belmond’s Eastern & Oriental takes the more famous Venice-Simplon Orient Express idea and transposes it to the flamingo neck of the Malay peninsula, turning a two-hour flight into a three-day, two-night odyssey.
Alas, there is no steam engine to pull us and the carriages from the outside might be from anywhere in the first world. But the clickety-clack of the tracks, the rosewood marquetry of the interior fittings, the two restaurants, library car and bar, the butlers and waiters and candlestick-makers are throwbacks to the age of quality and elitism, and a deliciously politically incorrect epoch away from the democratic horrors of Heathrow.
It is hard not to keep from smiling at the strangeness and familiarity of it all. It is a Downton Abbey on rails withh the soundtrack the creaking g and swaying of our 18 carriages, accompanied by a distant asthmatic puffing from our diesel engine.
THE journeyy unwinds at a snail’s pace. Idle e hours are spent in n the open-air obserrvation coach withh the smokers, plied with cockktails by smiling staff. Then, n, after a four-course dinner, we tucked up in our cosy bunks ks and listened to the creaks andnd moans of the old wood pannelelling, and every now and again, n, E&O’s unique backwards jerk. k. ‘Slack couplings,’ an engineerer among the passengers later er suggested, eliciting a streamm of double entendres from the he jovial company.
At 2am, hours late, we passed ed through sleeping Kuala Lummpur, eyes straining for a sight of the famous Petronas twin towers.
On the second day, we stopped for a bus tour of a hill-station town, more interesting for its pukka public school than its long dead sultan and his museum of equally deceased, antique Rolls-Royces.
And on the final day, we visited the Bridge on the River Kwai, where the touching Commonwealth graveyard full of the doomed youth who gave their lives to the Death Railway brought lumps to throats.
At last we swung and rattled into the hubbub of Bangkok station, disappointed only that no murder on the E&O had taken place, as so many of us had hoped. There lined up for us in front of the engine were our prime suspects: the silky-smooth Belmond director with his Poirotesque moustache; Yannis, the chef; the tech salesman; and the charming, elderly couple from Virginia who looked as if arsenic wouldn’t melt in their mouths.
After a couple of nights in the thousand-thread warm bath of luxury that is the historic and literary Oriental Hotel, we were on the road again, or rather on the river.
A short aerial hop to Yangon – Rangoon to you and me – and we were in an older world. Close it may be, but Myanmar (all right, Burma) is a different world from the neonknowingness of sex-mad Bangkok.
Only now awaking from the deep sleep that military rule imposed, this is the land that KFC and McDonald’s forgot, its crumbling colonial buildings charmless alongside the garish exuberance of the thousand-year-old Shwedagon Pagoda and its myriad buddhas. Give it a day or two if you must, but the soul of Burma is not here – it is up-country in the hills and jungles.
Our destination was Bagan, the great plain of temples and pagodas built in the heyday of an early Burmese empire between the 11th and 14th Centuries. A wonder of the world, Bagan’s end came rapidly when the Burmese king made the mistake of executing emissaries from the Mongol court of Kublai Khan, grandson of the even less forgiving Genghis. The king’s just desserts followed swiftly, as did the end of Bagan, a capital of Theravada Buddhism, then home to a civilisation of almost 200,000 people.
Today, Bagan is Myanmar’s biggest tourist draw, rivalling even the jungle delights of Angkor Wat, no more than
a few hundred miles away in Cambodia. The area has been spared, so far, by the coach-tour trade but one fears not for long. As it is, today it is standing-room only on the Shwesandaw pagoda to watch the sunset, and at dawn there must be the world’s only hot-air-balloon rushhour as dozens of Nikon-wielding gawpers ooh and aah at the dawn mists and the spooky mystery of the gold-clad stupas that rise above it.
From Bagan – if you want to hurry this trip up – you can fly to Mandalay (for £235) but my wife and I were ready, indeed, aching for the next watery steps on our journey – a voyage on Belmond’s Road to Mandalay, a luxury cruiser transported from the Rhineland almost ten years ago that took us along the legendary Irrawaddy from the pagodas of Bagan to those of mystic Mandalay.
It combined the romance of E&O’s train journey with the one quality no train could provide – space. Our stateroom was perfectly configured, its two windows gazing out at the tamarind, banyan and red cotton trees along the shore. In the dining room, our tiny Thai lady chef laid out daily food – both Western and Asian of outrageous delight – and didn’t baulk at our demands for seconds.
Low water meant we were unable to cruise into the fabled city itself, but we moored and decamped to a fleet of buses. My wife declined to move Mandalay from fable to fact, preferring the romantic image to the Chinese version of the town that succeeded its flattening by the RAF in the Second World War. And it was, I confess, a disappointment, though the stupa-encrusted Sagaing Hills had their charm, as did U Bein bridge, built from the teak pillars of the old royal palace, and now a place for lovers at sunset.
MANDALAY was better in books where the last king, Thibaw, and his lady Macbeth-like queen, Supayalit, took office with a ritual slaughter of possible pretenders, sewn elegantly into velvet bags and ‘gently’ battered to death with clubs to ensure that no blood was spilled on royal ground.
There were compensations for the remoteness of our mooring place from the capital, however. On our final day, by trishaw and taxi we visited tiny local towns and villages. There the real life of Myanmar unveiled itself in biblical scenes – the threshing of chickpeas with oxen in farmyards, the hewing of bamboo and the preparation of a thousand exotic foods in a world still largely free of digital wonders and replete with real ones.
And always alongside us the earthly, culinary, sensual pleasures of the top deck of the Road to Mandalay – so much better, one concluded, being on the road than the getting there.