Walking/ Sightseeing TourThe Blue Train (Blue Train) > External review
 |
| ||||
Slow train to Cape Town
Article in The Times about The Blue Train from Jan 2008Overall rating:
100 out of 100
|
This article appeared in The Times colour supplement of 19 January 2008 (page 65), an issue largely devoted to travel. It is about the "fabled" blue train between Cape Town and Pretoria and its "mobile poshness". The reviewer describes its "gracious, club-like" rooms with "inlaid mahogany" and "as many staff as passengers". Amazingly, the compartments have baths, "nearly full-size", equipped with gold taps and shower fittings, where you can watch the bath water moving around with the movement of the train. An observation car is provided for a "three-sided panorama".
Part of the attraction of such "serious country-crossers" is to see the "peculiar juxtapositions" of the country. He describes cameos, for example of a young black man being arrested as the train pulls out of Cape Town. 200 miles later the train passes through Matjiesfontein, a settlement which once stationed 12,000 British troops, and is now a tiny restored outpost of early 20th century britishness. Johannesburg, "huge and indeterminate" is a mixture of "extravagant outlines of new hotels" and a "sudden scatter of tin roofs". The neighbourhoods of Soweto, by contrast, are "rapidly improving".
This review is an interpretation of the above mentioned author
Germany
France
Sweden
Poland
Italy
Greece