The book club at work picked Around the World in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh for our December meeting and I’m so glad I was encouraged to read it. It’s a travel memoir where (almost) all the travel is by train and was actually already on my TBR.

Rajesh has a chatty, witty, conversational writing style, coming across as very open and honest from the start, where she shares the discussions she and her fiance Jem had about the trip before deciding to travel together. This was Rajesh’s second epic train adventure, as she had previously travelled alone around India (also in 80 trains). But that was before she met Jem and in a country she knew at least a little. This time, most of the countries she was heading to would be new terrain for her, and of course it would be nice to share the adventure.

So the couple hop on the Eurostar armed with Eurail passes and a fairly detailed plan for travels through Asia and America – but for some reason almost no plan for Europe, which quickly causes them problems. Perhaps it was a simple misunderstanding, but Rajesh had failed to realise beforehand that Eurail passes only really save you money if you make a plan and stick to it. Otherwise, in most of Europe outside the UK, trains are cheap enough that you may as well pay as you go. With their attempt to be spontaneous, their journey gets off to a rocky start of fines and fees that makes her writing about Europe decidedly gloomy.

This was not a good start. I have never in my life travelled for more than three weeks at a time, but even the first time I took the train alone to the south of France, aged 18, I had done more research and enjoyed a smoother experience than this supposed travel writer. I certainly know not to go to a dry cleaner with my dirty clothes, but instead find a self-service laundry, if I want to have any money left.

Such rookie mistakes could have been amusing anecdotes, had they not been formulated as faults in the system itself, with Rajesh taking no responsibility for her own failures. But thankfully, their European leg is covered in one short chapter and the book became much more enjoyable for me as they crossed into Russia.

“As a gesture of goodwill, we had bought him a Magnum ice cream, which he had accepted, then laid on the table in front of him. We’d sat at the edge of the berth quietly licking our own ice creams, wondering what would happen next. The temperature was pushing forty degrees…Few exercises were as excruciating as sitting in silence, watching a rejected ice cream melting.”

As they near Russia, the couple discuss their fear that they may experience racism in Russia. Rajesh is of Indian heritage while Jem is half-Malaysian. They have heard bad things, which seem to be confirmedwhen, on the train from Riga to Moscow, they are the only passengers subjected to a prolonged and slightly rough check of their cabin and luggage – they are also the only brown people on the train.

However, around much of the journey – certainly in most of Asia, which is by far the majority of their route – they experience their skin colour as a small advantage. In fact, travelling through Tibet and meeting Tibetans on a Chinese train, Rajesh is a little embarrassed by the profuse thanks she is given by Buddhists for “her” country’s protection of the Dalai Lama.

The journey is not trouble-free after Moscow, though. Rajesh is determined to like the older, rougher trains the best and she does romanticise the lack of facilities, the delays and the smells. Perhaps because these were the problems she anticipated, having experienced them before, she is prepared for stuff like not being able to wash several days in a row. When she learns that some of the roughest sections of the journey are going to be upgraded she mourns it as negative thing.

Which is where my second problem with this book arises. Rajesh appears to ignore the fact that badly maintained, unreliable railways might be good for travel writers but are pretty rubbish for their local users. She is such a snob about older-is-better that she is predisposed to hate Japan’s clean, fast, punctual trains. She does reluctantly admit that they have their own character, and are not as sterile as she had expected, but she keeps her descriptions here very short. She omits to mention, for example, that Japan’s railways are so central to daily life that rail passes were the first widespread form of card payment – accepted by convenience stores and vending machines long before debit or credit cards.

It must also be said that for a book whose title includes “around the world”, Rajesh does skip over quite a lot of the world. Her journey doesn’t include any of Africa or Latin America or Oceania. And the parts she does cover aren’t in a neat loop travelling continuously east from London. On reaching north-east China she and Jem skip about back-and-forth to cover Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan before hopping by plane to North America. Here, they do a big loop of the USA and Canada before flying back to China in time for a guided tour of North Korea.

In a particularly fascinating chapter, Rajesh and Jem follow the route of the Death Railway through Thailand (it originally continued into Myanmar but that section no longer exists). To make it a little less impersonally ghoulish, before the whole undertaking, Rajesh interviewed a British former prisoner of war who had been transported from prison in Singapore to help build the notorious railway. This is a really effective means of injecting the historical detail without it reading like a Wikipedia summary.

“It shouldn’t have taken more than three hours from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi, but we broke down three more times, finally stopping in the middle of the jungle where creepers with pink flowers dripped down towards the tracks. A couple of hawkers started to work their way up the carriage, one selling fish cakes and noodles, the other dragging an ice bucket stacked with cans of Nescafe…A Dutch family swapped a few of their bananas for a couple of my Snickers bars and between us we were managing to forge a pretty decent meal.

‘It’s so lovely,’ said the mother. ‘We have a word in Dutch, gezellig, which means that there are no boundaries and that everyone is sharing and getting along…it’s a word that describes an atmosphere or feeling, like we are a train family.’ ”

The trains in America are all largely alike aside from the people on them, so that is what Rajesh concentrates on for a chapter, and entertainingly so. Sharing a language helps, I suppose, as she is able to recount far more conversations in this chapter than elsewhere. She touches on the fact that most American trains are slow, infrequent and sparsely used, while failing to comment on the car culture that has arisen as a result or the fact that such distances could be covered to great effect by high-speed trains if the country would only invest in them. Apparently Rajesh and I have very different views on what is great about train travel.

The tour of North Korea is of course fascinating. I like that Rajesh is aware of the problematic nature of travelling to a dictatorship and enjoying its state-sanctioned hospitality. She decides, not unreasonably, that she cannot judge a country without going there herself. She makes the same decision about Tibet, though at least there she goes into some detail of China’s erosion of Tibetan culture, the laws imposed on its people, and even the negative effect of increasing high-speed rail access to the region.

Overall, I enjoyed Rajesh’s candid assessment of each train and her sense of humour, as well as the friendships she and Jem made along the way. There is a theme of relying on the kindness and decency of strangers. Despite Rajesh’s gripes about some of my favourite places in the world to take trains, this book succeeding in rekindling my love for rail travel and my very real wish to do more of it.

Published 2019 by Bloomsbury.

Source: Christmas present from a friend.