Orient Express

In 1950, award-winning Time-Life photographer Jack Birns was derailed from an assignment in Rome by another intriguing photo opportunity. His alternate route--which would take him thousands of miles across Europe--would start on the English coast. He would then cross channels, continents and tense borders and conclude the journey in Istanbul, Turkey. The focus of the assignment was Birns' means of travel--a train known as the Orient Express.

Here are three tweets I would have sent from my recent stay at Santa Barbara's just-reopened El Encanto hotel if I hadn't been busy behaving like royalty and pretending the Internet didn't exist: - Arriving Encanto. Tab for a 375-sf room w/fireplace and regal bathroom: $575 for 1 night, $35 for pkng, plus tax. Hey, what's with extra stairs? - Sunset on terrace. Ordering abalone. Below: lush grounds, distant sea, SB's red roofs. We're 200 ft above normal life. - Waiting for dinner.

Question: Does the special Orient Express still go to Istanbul from Paris and, if not, is there other train service? Answer: The Orient Express is now a tour train but doesn't go all the way; however, the Istanbul Express runs daily between Paris and Istanbul in 2 1/2 days via Milan, Venice, Trieste, Zagreb and Belgrade. The Istanbul Train, operated by Great Journeys Ltd., travels four times this year from London to Turkey on 15-day tours.

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, a prolific British composer, arranger and pianist whose film scores were nominated three times for Academy Awards, has died in New York City. He was 76. Bennett died Dec. 24 after a brief illness, his publisher Novello & Co said in a statement. [For the Record, 2:50 p.m. PST, Dec. 30: A previous version of this post cited the title of the film "Far From the Madding Crowd" as "Far From the Maddening Crowd. " ] In 1967, Bennett was nominated for his first Oscar for the score of " Far From the Madding Crowd.

Quite a few of the city's more frolicsome party animals stampeded over to the Santa Fe Depot on Saturday for the fourth annual Orient Express Gala, a party that, most guests agreed, turned out to be both a hoot and a howl. Irving the indigo snake, a sinuous, slinky, slithering six-foot segment of serpentine sinew and scale, made the scene.

At a time when computer games were just starting to mature to the point where Solitaire was no longer a novelty, a magical little prince appeared to steal the hearts--and numerous late-night hours--of just about everyone who met him. He was the Prince of Persia, as his enchantingly inventive game was called when released in pre-CD-ROM 1990. Playing the game, created by a wunderkind named Jordan Mechner, was fairly simple.

Goodwood Travel said today that next month it will bring back for one journey only the famous London to Istanbul railroad service aboard Europe's historic Orient Express. "For more than a hundred years the Orient Express has symbolized the ultimate in luxury train travel," said Goodwood Travel, a tour operator based in Canterbury, England.

Recently, my good friends Lew and Louise Mitchell, who were just named "Restaurateurs of the Year 1986" by the California Restaurant Writers Assn., invited me, along with a few friends, to an informal dinner at their Orient Express restaurant on the Miracle Mile in Los Angeles. "I think it's time," Lew had said, "to do a vertical tasting of Jordan Cabernets. And while we're at it, Louise will dazzle us with some dynamite Chinese chow."

Not so very long ago, in the vast land stretching magically from the Bukovina to the Inn and from Galicia to Bosnia-Herzegovina, lived in relative peace and prosperity a population of many tongues, creeds and hatreds, watched over by an aged two-headed eagle. Then came the Great War. By the time its travail ended, new states--some with newfangled names--had sprung up as though from dragon seed.

It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time: touring Turkey by train. Turkey was at the top of my list of countries I had yet to conquer, and trains have long been my favorite mode of transportation. Conjuring images of the old Orient Express, I envisioned lounging under a silk-shaded sconce in my plushly upholstered, wood-paneled compartment as the Mediterranean coast glided past my window. There were, it turns out, a couple of problems with that picture. Turkish passenger trains didn't travel along the Mediterranean.

Luxury passenger rail company  Eastern & Oriental Express offers a seven-day trip from Singapore to Bangkok with some off-the-radar stops and excursions in Malaysia and Thailand. Fables of the Hills starts at Singapore's train station and includes visits to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), tea plantations in the Cameron Highlands (Malaysia), the island of Penang (Malaysia), the "monkey training college" in Surat Thani (Thailand), where monkeys learn how to pick coconuts, and the famed River Kwai bridge (Thailand)

It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time: touring Turkey by train. Turkey was at the top of my list of countries I had yet to conquer, and trains have long been my favorite mode of transportation. Conjuring images of the old Orient Express, I envisioned lounging under a silk-shaded sconce in my plushly upholstered, wood-paneled compartment as the Mediterranean coast glided past my window. There were, it turns out, a couple of problems with that picture. Turkish passenger trains didn't travel along the Mediterranean.

After a trip last month from Paris to the Loire Valley on the Pullman Orient Express, I decided there are trains to get you where you want to go and then there's the Orient Express, for cross-cultural lessons and pure, unadulterated joy. Just as in the glamorous heyday of train travel in the early 20th century, it is all polished service and old-world style, right out of Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express."

A weeklong luxury train tour of England, Scotland and Wales will be offered six times, May 3 through October, by Orient Express Trains & Cruises, which runs the Venice-Simplon-Orient Express in Europe and other lines in Asia and Australia. The "Grand Tour of Great Britain" will be the company's first weeklong tour of Britain; its other excursions there last a day or a weekend. Passengers will travel by day on the Northern Belle train and stay overnight at hotels along the way.

A dark and mysterious thing has happened. Agatha Christie's masterful Belgian detective of an earlier time, Hercule Poirot, has disappeared. The wax-sculpted mustache with tips saluting the heavens like tiny cathedral spires? Gone. The "twinkle" in the eye? Gone. The "mincing gait with . . . feet tightly enclosed in . . . patent leather shoes"? Gone. The vain, prissy, fussy, dust-free, dandified, sexually ambivalent, immodest little man who sees "with the eyes of the mind"? Gone.

The Orient Express rode into the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday: Orient-Express Hotels Ltd., owner of the fabled train and luxury hotels around the world, rose 4% in its NYSE trading debut after raising a less-than-expected $190 million in its initial public offering. The stock (OEH) gained 75 cents to $19.75 in first-day trading of 5.5 million shares.

Passengers must maintain an exotic fiction aboard the new Eastern & Oriental Express train between Bangkok and Singapore. During the two-night, 1,200-mile journey of pampered luxury, they must learn to live in the past, back in the colonial days when Europeans and Americans could scold the "natives" for not polishing the silver or remain aloof from Asian villages just outside their windows. The fiction on the E&O starts with gracious greetings from the carriage stewards.

It was a decision made in heaven. Rosemary and I are sure of it. Pretty sure, anyway. For 10 years, my wife Nina, my sister Rosemary, her long-time friend Dante DiPaolo and I have visited some of the most exotic, entrancing places on the planet, and we have specifically done it because of one person who does not go with us. Or, if she does, the airlines and hotels don't charge us for her. Let me tell you how it was. We were Rosemary, Betty and Nick, the Clooney kids.

For the first time, the luxury Venice Simplon-Orient-Express is offering a special routing through the Swiss Alps via Lucerne this summer; its regularly scheduled runs go through Zurich. On July 19 the train will leave Venice, Italy, on a route that includes Verona, Italy; Innsbruck, Austria; Lucerne and Paris. The journey ends in London via Hovercraft. The trip may be taken as an eight-night package, priced from $4,895 per person, double occupancy; that excludes air fare from L.A.

A bit of train history was up for sale last month when 23 of the original Orient Express carriages that ran between Paris and Istanbul before World War II were put on the market in Switzerland. Swiss travel operator Reiseburo Mittelthurgau, which bought the cars in 1993, said it had become too expensive to run its luxury train tours, which go to Moscow and Beijing and also make day trips from Switzerland. Those tours haven't been marketed in the U.S.