Maximum speed 60km/h: On this train trip it’s the slower, the better

“No jabberwocking on your phone,” says Rohan Vos, the witty, formidable founder of Africa’s luxury train operator, Rovos Rail. “They are verboten, especially in the dining car. We want you to enjoy the ambience.”

Vos does endorse a good old-fashioned “jabberwock” aboard his lovingly restored former South African Railways carriages. Which is just as well, for my companion and I haven’t stopped jabbering since we met in high school more than 40 years ago.

Lounging around in the Rovos Rail Lounge Car.

Where some Rovos guests see the coming journey in tangible terms – twin tracks meandering for 1400 kilometres between departure point and destination – Tracey and I perceive it as an opportunity for a solid three-night, four-day gabfest. Now living on different continents, we rely on WhatsApp for snappy updates.

But there will be no need for tech – or brevity – on this languorous journey. Our decades-old conversation will progress face-to-face; it will advance in unhurried rhythm with the train – which is expected to reach a maximum speed of 60 kilometres an hour and, depending on conditions, will sometimes slow to a crawl.

“But we’ll get you to Victoria Falls sometime this week,” Vos says.

Click-clack, chit-chat. We assure him our schedule is flexible.

Capital Park, Rovos Rail’s private station and Pretoria headquarters, soughs with the breath of steam locomotives past as we prepare to depart. The station was built by South African Railways in 1948 and acquired by Rovos Rail half a century later. The restored precinct includes a museum filled with retro ephemera: a signal box lever, a train driver’s billy can, a steamer trunk hung with vintage clothing. Those were the days, sighs former train driver Willem Ras, who now works at the museum.

Full steam ahead, at a very slow pace.

“A steam engine speaks to you,” he says.

Even if it tried, the diesel locomotive pulling us to Victoria Falls wouldn’t get a word in edgeways. Besides, the real romance of this journey resides in the wood-panelled carriages, the lounge car’s leather chesterfields, the wheeze of wheels beneath us as Pretoria’s koppies (small rocky hills) recede. And the joy of savouring a long friendship.

There are no schoolgirl squabbles when determining who sleeps where in our deluxe twin suite: Tracey gets the window, and I get to open the blinds early each morning in an effort to disrupt her slumber.

“You can sleep when you’re dead!” I chide. She erupts with laughter, and so the dictum becomes our mantra.

For a while, the unfolding world halts our discussion. Hammanskraal passes by, its dirt roads so orderly they seem to have been swept clean. Bela-Bela appears in sight of the rose-flushed Waterberg mountains. The sun sets at Mookgophong, its luscious beams refracted through thickets and glass. Storm clouds swell as we approach Polokwane.

Ready for service in the dining car.

We get going again at our dinner table for two. Cape Malay bobotie samosas, rack of lamb with chimichurri dressing, pot de creme with mascarpone quenelle: a vast improvement, we agree, on our youthful Peck’s Anchovette and Marmite sandwiches. We gabble as we get into bed, and continue long after we’ve turned out the lights.

“Did you fall asleep on me?” Tracey asks when I open the blinds next morning.

A room on board Rovos Rail.

I’m suitably contrite. The last thing I remember is the rails rocking beneath me like a boat’s hull, the train sailing like a ship across an ocean of bushveld. Sometime before dawn, the stilled engine woke me; I cracked the blind and saw the station’s signpost: Musina, South Africa’s northernmost town.

“From here on, this will be baobab country,” says train manager Jan-Paul Pieterse. “They only grow above the Tropic of Capricorn.”

From the observation car, we watch South Africa disappearing behind us, a scattering of dwellings, a child running onto the tracks.

“Bye bye!” he calls.

The train squirms across the Limpopo River, an aqueous border merging with a low ceiling of cloud. Beside us, women cross the bridge on foot, belongings wrapped in bright fabric and piled on their heads.

Zebras at the waterhole.iStock

“We’re privileged to be on this train,” Tracey says.

There’s no sign of officialdom at Beitbridge Station’s immigration checkpoint on the river’s northern bank; just a huddle of curio sellers, and hand-painted signs saying “National Railways of Zimbabwe” and “Ladies 3rd & 4th Class” above a bathroom door.

“I found our high school toilet!” Tracey says.

Train staff take care of border formalities as we stroll along the platform. Shell-pink foxgloves grow between the tracks; beside the locomotive, train drivers Ricky Pretorius and Jan Oosthuizen are deep in conversation. Is there anyone more chatty than us? Yes, as it turns out.

“The whole thing is an adventure for me,” says Pretorius, who worked as a metro train driver in South Africa for 35 years before joining Rovos. “I never thought I’d see how they do it in Zimbabwe. We don’t know the roads here, so we use pilots. And we drive slowly so we can enjoy the wildlife.”

The Zambezi River and the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.iStock

The men paint a hypnotising picture of the night-time shift. Spectres flash before their eyes: the Southern Cross, dangling like a chandelier from the coal-black sky; elephants slipping ghost-like through the shadows; and the occasional UFO, hovering above the summer-lush baobabs.

“I saw them between Dete and Kennedy, between two o’clock and four o’clock in the morning,” Oosthuizen says. “It looked like a highway, lights going this way and that way.”

He pulls out his phone to show us a video of the spectacle.

“Not satellites,” he says, and we have to agree.

But phones are verboten, we remind ourselves, and we must quit chattering with the drivers because the train is about to leave.

Southern Zimbabwe rolls by, sandstone koppies girdled by iridescent knobthorn trees. At Gwanda I jump off the train to scout the market, and return with two bead bracelets: green for me, gold for Tracey, to match tonight’s dinner outfit. We dolly up in the en-suite bathroom, reminiscing about yesteryear’s miniskirts and discos.

Tonight we have company, American passengers Allison and Steve; we’re not too exclusive, it turns out, to dismiss fresh chitchat or make new friends. The four of us are a perfect match, conversationally speaking; even Steve manages to get a word in. Soon we’re making plans to meet up again; perhaps we can find a cow horn in Victoria Falls to use in lieu of a conch.

Again I fall asleep mid-chinwag, and in the morning open the blinds with a cry of, “you can sleep when you’re dead!” A man is lying flat on the railway line beside us; he grips the tracks and performs successive pushups. We could do with some of those, Tracey says over breakfast. We’re entering Hwange National Park now, and elephants appear in the window, disrupting our tete-a-tete.

Our repartee must be stilled to a whisper on the game drive in Hwange. It’s not an imposition, for the wildlife robs us of speech: zebras slinking through silken grass, an elephant in musth, African clouded butterflies falling like confetti.

All that rain makes for a happy herd.iStock

“This year is amazing because of the rains, the animals are so happy,” says guide Teo Ndlovu. “Look at that impala ruminating – she has four stomachs.”

“I wish I had four stomachs,” Allison says at dinner that night.

On the third night, Tracey surprises me by falling asleep first. Has her tongue worn out? The final kilometres roll woefully beneath us as we approach Victoria Falls next morning. Talk slows, too, as we rue the hasty flow of time. Beside us is a deep valley stuffed with plump mopane canopies; they look like gilded pincushions in the early light.

“We tend to speed across landscapes,” I pipe up, “missing the essence of the journey.”

“Isn’t that life?” Tracey says.

Then my friend of more than 40 years offers up the perfect solution.

“Sleep when you’re dead,” she says.

THE DETAILS

TRAIN
Rovos Rail’s Pretoria to Victoria Falls journey costs from $4980 a person twin share, and includes accommodation in a deluxe suite, all meals and beverages on board, guided excursions and applicable entrance fees. See rovos.com

FLY
South African Airways (flysa.com) flies from Perth to Johannesburg five times a week, with connections on Virgin Australia from Sydney and Melbourne. The Gautrain (gautrain.co.za) departs regularly from OR Tambo Airport for Pretoria; Rovos Rail’s departure depot is a short Uber ride away.

The writer travelled as a guest of Rovos Rail and South African Airways.

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