This luxury train captivates with Agatha Christie glamour
In setting her thrillers everywhere from the Côte d’Azur to the Middle East, gimlet-eyed Agatha Christie captured the glamour of golden age travel like few others, and her stories continue to resonate to this day.
Be careful which fantasies you fall for, is all I’m saying. If, like me, you get a little too swept away in Hercule Poirot’s travel mysteries, you too may just find yourself wearing a white linen suit on a vintage train rollicking through southern Africa. But then, if you were me, that would be a dream come true. And the train, too, from Rovos Rail, which celebrated its 35th anniversary on the day I disembarked at Victoria Falls and always ranks highly in compilations of the world’s most storied rail journeys, is itself a kind of fantasy.
Created by Rohan Vos, the luxury train company was initially conceived as a private caravan to ferry Vos and his family around the African continent. Those first few carriages, with an office and a gym for the founder and cabins for each of his children, have grown now to some six separate trains that each can accommodate up to 72 passengers and operate across 10 countries over nearly a dozen routes. The carriages that now make up each of the trains were mostly built between 1968 and 1980, and, though they have been meticulously revamped (including with USB ports), the vintage-y romance of train travel remains at the heart of the company’s mission.
The mood aboard is inflected with a bit of nostalgia for those days of golden age travel when Poirot was in his prime. As Rohan’s daughter Tiffany Vos, who is now in charge of the company, told us while we were boarding in Pretoria, South Africa, on a five-night trip to the falls in Zimbabwe, mobile phones would not be permitted in public areas, and the dress code – smart cocktail attire for meals – was meant in earnest, the better to create an escapist world. Which was, of course, music to our ears. Indeed, I may have been the only one flouting the photography rules, but only in the service of journalism.
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The popularity of these wistful expeditions – be they slow travel up the Nile on a steamship, in high-camp kimonos for the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express or, indeed, on safari in Africa – has to do, I believe, with our love of an evocative getaway, of wanting to insinuate ourselves into a glamorous and exotic cultural narrative for a time, the better to try on a version of ourselves (the one who wears kimonos, obviously). Travel of this sort is an opportunity to leap into another life, another character, or a portal into a new way to be.
Maybe I’ve watched too many movies – definitely – but it is precisely the sort of quixotic fare on our screens that I think makes the best inspiration for our next holiday adventures. And Agatha Christie’s Poirot stories are the ne plus ultra of the form, the source material that launched a thousand White Lotuses – the wanderlust that set us in motion, the fantasies we want to place ourselves into, of stylish, rich and venal people on enviable trips, with plenty of intrigue and subterfuge to keep them entertained on their steamship or Victorian train car.
From the movie to the mood board, we begin our preparations, plotting our adventures with images and stories of a specific type – Alain Delon and Romy Schneider by the pool in La Piscine if that’s our thing; Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow on the Amalfi Coast; Emily in bloody Paris. Once prepped visually, we costume ourselves for our trips, dreaming of slouchy suits for safari, say, even if our safari is just leaving the city limits; slipping into something sleek and slinky for a tango in Buenos Aires, maybe; or just the best pair of blue jeans for a road trip. And to judge by the number of articles online that detail the locations of this or that movie, I may not be the only one who plans their travel this way.
But this idea, of steeping ourselves in the subject of our pilgrimage, can also affect the mood (or genre, if you prefer) of the journey. Is your trip to Maigret’s Paris, for example, madcap and gleefully boozy like Michael Gambon’s adaptation, or sober and deliberate like Rowan Atkinson’s? Is your Berlin the sexy pop-art backdrop for Atomic Blonde, or chilly and grim like Richard Burton’s from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold? The further you go into the mood-boarding of it all, I guess, the more that mood can in fact inform your own experience, I find. Because of how it shapes your decisions. Are you swizzling a Martini or two because, in your mind, you are James Bond on the road, or are you living off protein bars because you are reading the Gray Man series?
Beyond helping to flesh out an itinerary, travelling in character, if you will, really creates the atmosphere and pace of your trip. It influences both what you see (even when you look at the same thing as would another character), and, crucially, how you are seeing yourself as you go through the journey. Travelling this way, in other words, you are the protagonist in a narrative of your own creation; call it “main character travel”.
After a Champagne toast on the platform in Pretoria, and buoyed by a brass band in full swing, we main characters were escorted aboard and led to our cabins where porters had already laid our bags. And the cabins themselves are mini marvels of efficiency and subtle opulence – everything tucked and sorted just so behind shimmering wooden-panelled walls, or cradled in a rack above a spacious bed, and frequently turned up or turned down by a butler assigned to each carriage. But even in my cabin, I was far too excited to sit. So I set out first in one direction and then another, counting cars, diagramming the layout of the train, to understand how our time and our days here would unfold.
Soon it was cocktail hour and the honeymooners, the families on holiday and the retirees gathered in the observation bar car at the rear of the train. A young lady in livery emerged with a metal dinner chime, which she played in singsong scales as she passed from car to car, summoning us to a three-course feast with wine pairings. The decor in these public spaces was gentleman-clubby, chintzy, with panelled walls and tartan upholstery – an ambulating remake of Out of Africa. The dining tables set with pressed linen, cut crystal, antique silver. Lunch and dinner were served at a calm cadence with all the formality a rocking carriage can accommodate. Which you well might expect on a luxury train through continental Europe, the Americas, or Southeast Asia – though, maybe less so, while on safari.
As in any good Agatha Christie story, we first noticed our fellow travellers in advance, at the Four Seasons Westcliff in Johannesburg before we boarded the train, marking one another as likely suspects to be making just such a journey. Sitting on the terrace there overlooking the forested city turn an autumnal orange and gold, we may have entertained that game, speculating on eventual carriage mates, like players in a mystery sussing out suspects. By the end of the trip, we parted with great ceremony, each of us entering into a new story, but on the train our stories were linked – resulting in a bond I’ve only experienced on these Poirot-style sagas.
There’s naturally built narrative on an outing like this, cruising up the Nile with fellows who began the journey as strangers but became bosom buddies by the time you reach Aswan, or plotting all manner of intrigue over a parade of Pisco Sours aboard Belmond’s Andean Explorer in Peru. There’s a locked-room intensity to these expeditions, a deepening, serial enrichment, as if you are travelling further into your favourite crime thriller – as well as an overwhelming commitment to party like it’s the end times – so that, after four or five days on board your train or dahabiya, you have experienced several seasons of the best Netflix show ever.
Maybe Christie was satirising her social set and countrymen in their travels throughout the English colonies, but this casual, accidental form of interaction that she made the meat of her mysteries makes her stories so relatable today. And it so happens the accommodations of her time were exactly the sort of opulent slow-travel extravaganzas we so fetishise today. Christie was married to an archaeologist, and so found herself in all manner of far-flung spots around the globe, from Baghdad to Baalbek, where she had frequent occasion to marvel on the absurdities and profundities of travel, as well as that of her fellow travellers.
In fact, her stories can be read as arch, if devastating, commentaries on the tourism industry itself – even as they are likely the greatest engines driving our present wanderlust. Maybe her stories, particularly the Poirot series, can and perhaps should be written off as casual diversions of the day. But there’s just something about the nostalgia, the glamour, and the narrative unravelling that make them the ultimate prompts for the grandest adventures now.
Chris Wallace is the author of Twentieth-Century Man: The Wild Life of Peter Beard (Harper Collins).
