Letter from the 'Francisco De Goya' Overnight Express by Benjamin Curtis
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It's nearly four years since a perfectly ordinary flight from Venice to Heathrow ended any chance of me stepping onto an aeroplane again. I'd been increasingly unhappy about the whole thing on previous flights to various long-haul destinations. Suddenly, as Venice Lagoon evaporated seamlessly into banks of cloud, something snapped. I would never take a plane again unless absolutely necessary. My frequent sojourns between Madrid and England, saved from this category of necessity by 'Eurostar' and the overnight 'Train-Hotel Francisco de Goya', have become something of a delightful inefficiency.
For some reason, the Paris-Madrid leg remains my favourite. While you jetsetters pace up and down in some soulless departure lounge, I sit on the terrace of Paris's Gare de Austerlitz station bistro, sipping vin rouge, contemplating the impending 'four-berth lottery'. Being economically confined to sharing a compartment with four strangers adds the first element of interest to the journey.
Upon boarding the train, one is squeezed down a chaotic corridor, a pantomime of French and Spaniards all waving tickets at each other, lovers attempting last private embraces before one half leaves the train, conductors trying in vain to gather passports. Then everyone enters their shared sleeping space smiling, offering cautious greetings - you will after all be sleeping not three yards from these people, complete unknowns who, unpleasant nocturnal habits aside, could well be opportunist kleptomaniacs or worse.
So far I have to count myself lucky, although a young man did once unnerve the rest of us slightly. He seemed to be of North African origin, though as he was unable to produce a passport or speak any European language once the train was moving, there was no way of knowing. After a protracted, and in his case silent, argument with two guards, they informed him that he would be taken off the train at the Spanish border - in the middle of the night. Knowing that at any time a group of armed customs officials were due to burst in and attempt to remove an uncooperative stow-away hardly helped me to sleep. Nothing happened though, and the next day he stepped boldly off the train in Madrid and disappeared. Good for him.
A little after the train leaves a man darts along the carriages waving a bunch of coloured tickets. Blink and you'll miss him, and if you don't speak Spanish you'll simply wonder what on earth he wanted. In either case you'll loose out on one of the greatest pleasures of modern day travel - supper in the dining car - perhaps the closest many of us will ever get to the ambience of the Orient Express. My latest trip was no exception, and has doubtless spoiled me forever.
I'd made a once-in-a-lifetime request to be upgraded to a single compartment. This fulfilled, I found myself enclosed in complete privacy. I felt like Royalty, though the carriage guard tried his best to bring me back down to earth: "You must have too much money, eh?" he teased, deaf to my protestations that it really was a one-off, a special treat.
Seated in the dining car, at last feeling that I deserved a place there, I wasn't expecting too much from the elderly French lady across the table - she was buried in a crossword. Then two African gentlemen appeared like a vision at one end of the carriage, dressed in kingly, gold-embroidered robes, red cotton bobble hats and chunky Rolexs. To my surprise they were directed to our table, a father and son I thought, communicating in some mysterious Patois, broken only when the younger turned to me and asked if I spoke English.
They were in fact Nigerians, travelling European capitals in search of shares in convenience-food companies. The son, perhaps no more than twenty, already owned one factory at home, but was evidently hoping to extend his empire. They asked how they might find appropriate enterprises in Madrid: I meekly came up with "the yellow pages?". To my relief the father replied "Yes, that's what they suggested in Paris". A hundred kilometres down the line we asked for our bills (about twenty pounds pays for a very Spanish three course meal with wine) - mine came but theirs, whoever they were, was covered - courtesy of the train manager.
The pleasure of sleeping in a private compartment is immeasurable. You wake in the middle of the night just to throw open the curtains and attempt to penetrate the darkness for signs of life, to see if you can work out where you might be, even what country you are in. Stations come and go, Hendaye, Burgos, Valladolid, sliding away into the night. The train seems yours, the journey devised entirely for your convenience, to indulge your imagination.
At breakfast, while the train cut through the ragged mountains of Castilla y Leon, my Nigerian friends appeared again. I asked if they had slept well: "My son has not slept at all, he has spent the whole night staring out of the window!" beamed the father proudly. At once a forgotten maxim came to mind, the one about the journey being worth as much as the destination. Despite the fifteen extra hours it takes me to cross our continent, persuasive aviation statistics and the constant cajoling of comfortable-flying friends, I, like the classiest of travellers, shall be sticking with the train.
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