Chaos surrounded us. Informal porters rolling luggage carts zigzagged between cars. Commuters spilled from the bus terminal onto the sidewalk, where they sat on suitcases and duffel bags. Minibus taxis zoomed through the congestion, pedestrians be damned.
Our car crawled past a barbed-wire fence and reached a sliding gate, where all that separated my wife and me from the empty lot on the other side was a security guard. “Blue Train,” I said, and the guard waved us through.
We pulled up to a blue carpet next to Cape Town’s central train station, where two butlers in blue vests and white gloves greeted us by name and unloaded our luggage before ushering us into a waiting room that was decidedly more upscale than the one in the adjacent building for bus travelers. We lounged on plush sofas with a few dozen other passengers, relaxing to piano music and enjoying a spread of fruit, pastries, sandwiches and sparkling wine.
I had traveled to this stunning South African metropolis, where the ocean meets the mountains, last December to indulge in a bit of Gatsby-like luxury by taking a trip on the country’s legendary Blue Train. It’s an adventure that turns a two-hour flight (plus a 45-minute drive) from Cape Town to Pretoria into a two-night, 994-mile experience, with all the pampering and beautiful vistas you could possibly ask for.
The Blue Train, whose origins date back a century, is meant to evoke exclusivity. And that’s exactly what you feel when you’re waiting in the lounge, a separate world from the gritty urban commotion outside. The tin shacks you flew over when landing at the Cape Town airport were out of sight, as were the people who approached your car asking for money, and those who pitched tents on street corners in the shadow of glossy condominiums and waterfront restaurants.
The whiplash between excess and destitution is something that I still haven’t grown comfortable with in my nearly four years as the Johannesburg bureau chief for The Times. South Africa is the most unequal country in the world, according to the World Bank, a reality on display almost anywhere you travel across this vast nation of more than 60 million people. The inequality is in many ways the legacy of apartheid, a decades-long racial caste system in which the country’s former white-minority government violently segregated nonwhite South Africans into communities that were left to rot.
During the thick of apartheid just over 40 years ago, Joseph Lelyveld, one of my predecessors in this job and a former executive editor at The Times, chronicled this same trip on the Blue Train in an article for the Travel section. Although it was the country’s only desegregated train at the time, it was rare to see Black passengers because of the high cost. The train, he wrote, offered “a window on a society that is compartmentalized on or off the rails.”
Lelyveld, who died last year, added, “Outside the train, you can catch some reasonably telling glimpses of the uneven ways in which land and labor are apportioned under the South African system.”
Now, three decades after that racist system had been undone, I wondered how the trip and the country it showcases might have changed. Racial segregation is no longer legal, and South Africans may now live and work wherever they want, regardless of skin color.
But from the moment I walked into the lounge, I realized that this trip would offer a firsthand view of the staggering inequality and racial divide that continue to bedevil South Africa.
The cost of the train remains prohibitive for many. Rates, which include seven meals and as many drinks as you want over a roughly 54-hour trip, start at nearly $4,000 for two people for the lowest room type in the low season, and climb to more than $6,000 for the most luxurious rooms during high season. Third-party vendors offer significantly discounted packages for South African residents that include hotel stays.
My wife and I accounted for two of the four Black passengers. The dozens of other passengers were white — mostly foreigners, but also a handful of South Africans. It was the other way around for the staff: All but one of them were either Black or colored, a multiracial classification in South Africa.
Our departure time came and went while we waited. The train manager stood at the front of the lounge to offer an explanation: Someone had pelted the train with stones as it approached the station that morning, and technicians were repairing a shattered window.
While the pelting could have been the result of youthful mischief, I couldn’t help but think about something many South Africans have told me: The ostentatious display of excess by the privileged few can feel like a slap in the face to the masses who have been excluded from post-apartheid prosperity. And few things scream excess more than a train with hot showers, air conditioning and an open bar crawling past settlements where many people live in shacks without running water or electricity.
The Blue Train was established when the moneyed elite from around the world descended on South Africa in search of gold and needed a way to get from the Cape harbor to the mines near Johannesburg. Naturally, the workaday passenger coaches wouldn’t do the job. That led to the creation of coaches decked out with what were sumptuous features at the time: card tables, ceiling fans and sinks with hot and cold water.
When it was time to go, our assigned butler led us down the hallway to our suite, one of 37 on the 18-car train. The suites vary by bed type and bathroom amenities. Ours had a double bed that was folded up into the wall during the day, leaving a two-seat couch to lounge on while we soaked up the view outside a big window. Our bathroom had a bathtub with a gold, hand-held showerhead. Our cabin featured a television with Netflix, (spotty) Wi-Fi and a remote control for the curtains and blinds.
The train evoked a sort of Gilded Age, with paneled walls, brass sconces and Italian marble tiles. There were two lounge cars (one for smokers) with plush sectionals and a curved granite-top bar. For formal meals there was a dining car with white tablecloths.
Prickly nuances and captivating scenery
We took off around 2 p.m. on a Thursday, with our arrival in Pretoria scheduled for late Saturday afternoon. Because we were leaving late, there was no formal lunch; instead, the staff set up light bites in the observation car — the last car on the train, with the biggest windows.
I loaded up a plate with grilled prawns, risotto balls, chicken with a sweet chile glaze, and skewers with cheese, tomato and cucumber, and settled in as the train crept out of central Cape Town. The first part of the trip cut through several townships, the outlying communities that the government restricted nonwhite South Africans to during apartheid and that today still largely suffer the effects of poor investment.
There were piles of trash on either side of the track in some places. Cube-shaped tin homes hugged the tracks so closely that it seemed as though the corrugated roofs of some might scrape the train. A private security car drove alongside the tracks; a staff member later told me that security escorted the train through certain urban areas to thwart potential vandals. Some locals stared as the train jogged past, while giddy children waved and smiled.
As we took in the humble communities in front of us and the gorgeous green mountains in the distance, a loud thud rocked the observation car. Almost everyone snapped their heads around, wide-eyed. Someone had whipped a rock at the train.
“What kind of people are they?” sighed a South African passenger, who told me she was worried mostly about what visitors might think of her country.
Some visitors had ample opportunity to develop those opinions before they boarded.
“Many things changed. Positive,” a Swiss woman sitting near me told a white South African woman, reflecting on the difference between her first trip to the country in the early 1980s and now. Back then, everything was separated, she said.
But the South African passenger explained to the Swiss woman and her husband how society, in her view, had broken down since the end of apartheid. She described downtown Johannesburg as “a no-go zone” and said if you drive there alone as a woman, “definitely, you will be hijacked.” It was a place full of squatters who burn down buildings, she said, suggesting that things went downhill when South Africans once confined to townships got their freedom.
“With integration these people all moved into the city center, and now it’s a mess,” she said.
Those sentiments are not surprising. I’ve heard South Africans of all races and ages complain about lawlessness and decaying infrastructure. Crime rates are high across the country, and a fire in Johannesburg that killed dozens two years ago brought global scrutiny to the city’s blight.
There are complicated reasons parts of South Africa are struggling. But no one seemed in the mood to delve into the prickly nuances of mass dispossession, inherited wealth disparities, poor governance or the influence of global finance. We were just under three hours into the trip and the scenery became so captivating that pretty much everyone in the car fell into a silent awe.
The train, perched above the Little Berg River, snaked its way through a valley north of the wine town of Paarl, with rocky green and yellow hillsides around it. We chugged on through Western Cape province landscapes so consistently majestic that you could easily begin to take them for granted. Flat fields where cattle foraged were illuminated gold by the setting sun, with hulking mountains in the background.
An ‘honest’ landscape
The train stopped for a water refill at the Worcester station. That’s where we were served dinner by the attentive staff who were eager to spoil us. Dinner was meant to be an elegant affair, with men asked to wear blazers and women evening dresses. Options for the three-course menu included raw salmon, rice noodles, pumpkin soup and lamb noisette.
The stop was scheduled for about 30 minutes, but the train stayed for more than an hour and a half, through our entire dinner. No explanation was given. Some South Africans had warned me before the trip to be prepared for unexpected delays. The country’s rail infrastructure has been beleaguered for years, in part because of corruption and mismanagement within Transnet, the state-owned rail company that owns and operates the Blue Train.
By the time we were moving again it was nightfall, too dark to see what my predecessor, Lelyveld, had described as a “dramatic ascent through the Hex River Pass, where it loops back on itself 16 times in the course of climbing 1,600 feet in only 15 miles.”
When we retired to our room, the bed was neatly prepared by the butler, who had left chocolates on our nightstand. In the morning, the lush greenery of the Western Cape had given way to the brown shrubs of the semi-arid Northern Cape province. The scenery was different but no less spectacular. This was the Blue Train at its finest, showcasing South Africa’s vast and diverse beauty.
There was something honest about it, too. The landscapes themselves told a story of South Africa’s journey as a nation. The train rolled through Hutchinson, a former railway junction in the Northern Cape where you could see that the glory days of South African rail were in the past. The brick buildings in the old station were gutted and abandoned, without roofs. But we also got a glimpse of what could be part of the country’s economic future, passing a wind farm and a solar field.
Breakfast was pastries, fruit, eggs, bacon and French toast. We crossed the mighty Orange River, and then it was lunch time.
A little later, we stopped in the city of Kimberley for the trip’s lone excursion: the Big Hole diamond mine. The first diamond discovery there was made in 1871, setting off a rush that would eventually make Kimberley one of the most productive and largest hand-dug diamond mines in the world. It closed 43 years and 14.5 million carats later. Decades after that, the famous diamond company, De Beers, which got its start in Kimberley, funded a museum on the site.
We browsed the exhibits, which included a replica underground mine. From a suspension bridge that shakes with the wind, we got a view down into the Big Hole, which looks like a turquoise lake at the bottom of a deep crater. A plaque on the bridge paid homage to the people of the Royal Bafokeng Nation, an ethnic group whose laborers died working at the Big Hole — a nod to mining’s exploitative history in South Africa.
‘You see what you see and you keep going’
That evening, I polished off salmon for dinner and we made our way to the lounge car for a night cap. A saxophonist played cover tunes and the blue carpet turned into a dance floor. The festive vibe was indicative of the South Africa I have come to know: a place of joy and creativity.
As we rumbled through communities south of Johannesburg the following day, in the final hours of the trip, I thought about how the mood from the night before played against what I saw out the window: dilapidated factories enveloped in bushes and weeds. This area, once a manufacturing hub, was now a sad marker of the country’s industrial and economic decline.
“It’s two worlds,” a French tourist who was visiting for the first time told me, explaining that what she’d experienced in the country was unlike anything she had encountered as a humanitarian worker in West Africa.
She was talking about the extreme poverty and extreme wealth that live side-by-side in present-day South Africa, but she might have said the same thing to Lelyveld had she been on the train with him four decades ago.
From the comfortable confines of the Blue Train, I saw a South Africa that was similar to the one that Lelyveld saw: the breathtaking beauty, the rank poverty, the racial segregation. But a train, like a cruise ship, has its limitations. You see what you see and you keep going.
I’ve had the benefit of exploring the country at a more measured pace. I’ve met Black entrepreneurs thriving in disinvested townships. I’ve been to swanky restaurants where the diners are Black and white and they’re all dressed to the nines and swirling their wine with the same level of pretension. I’ve seen the ways in which South Africa, though far from perfect, is a very different place than the one that Lelyveld explored.
And so when we arrived in Pretoria, I hopped off, appreciating that this trip had allowed me to see the country in a way that few others have, but knowing it only told part of South Africa’s story.