This post is a little segue from the brevity of my travel diary, and expresses my experience on the Vietnamese night train between Mui Ne and Danang.
We purchased our tickets through our hotel travel agent in Ho Chi Minh city, we avoided a lot of hassle doing this as we just let them book all our trains and buses and tours in one go and made sure that all the times tied up nicely and that we’d have someone taking us to the bus station etc… This was all worth the small fee they charged.
Vietnam is a country that won’t break the bank of any western traveller and the people are generally friendly and reliable.
We arrived at Ga Binh Thuan train station by taxi, costing us about $40 from a meter and taking about 50 minutes if I recall correctly. We felt a bit perturbed as the taxi seemed to be taking us down unlit streets into the rural countryside. Being a bit of a paranoid technophile I checked my GPS maps on my phone - we were off the grid, but we made it there safely and in one piece.
Sadly, I had left my phone on the back-seat of the cab and it was forever lost to me. This I hadn’t realised until I was on the train and speeding moving towards Danang.
Upon entering the terminal building we went to the ticket counter to check we were in the right place by showing our tickets at the counter. We were pointed to some seats and gestured to wait. I met some Italian tourists doing the same journey and began chatting to them until the train arrived and some train worker (or local, who knows) pointed at us where to stand after looking at our tickets.
We quickly boarded the train and were taken to our cabins. My friend and I were split and had wholly different experiences. My friend’s cabin looked quite clean and nice, sharing with three other Vietnamese people he climbed aboard the top bunk and settled in to read.
My story is a little more interesting. Upon arriving at my cabin, passing people sleeping in the hallways and occupying every piece of space, I find that there was someone sleeping in my bed (Goldilocks moment). I listened, but didn’t understand, the exchange between the conductor and the lady in my bed and she climbed out and the conductor pulled out a mattress and put it in the supply cupboard for her. I was now in my own bed, in the room, without any bed sheets, near the toilets - I’m guessing I was in the Vietnamese ‘local’ carriage.
The corridors smelt of piss and cigarettes.
Without a phone to accompany me I had no alarm, no clock, and no music to pass the time. I woke in the morning to a lady selling coffee - an extortionate price that you can very easily haggle for as she just fills up from the hot-water boiler at the end of the corridor from instant granules. I hadn’t realised at the time, but I only slept very little and had woken up at about 6am and still had 5 hours to pass on the train, luckily my friends room cleared out about 6am and so I joined him in his cabin which was much cleaner, and didn’t smell of urine and tobacco.
The train itself was generally clean and comfortable but the toilets required footwear beyond sandals to enter. It is not one used much by travellers as the infrastructure is limited, the pace is slow at best, and flying is much quicker and quite reasonably priced. The trains themselves resembled those of the trans-siberian or trans-mongolian routes with four people per cabin with a hot-water boiler at the end of each carriage. If you have a mug and some tea bags or instant soup you can keep yourselves sated. People will come around in the morning offering food and drinks, but we passed on everything but coffee. Similar trains will take you from Hanoi to Sapa.
The views are quite interesting, you get to see the Vietnamese world pass by from small villages to larger towns.
You voyeur on their lives like a nano-second fly-on-the-wall documentary passing by without commentary.
I’m a sucker for the nostalgia of train travel, the idea of going on a journey to get somewhere has much more appeal than just travelling from point A to point B, you miss out all the appendices and footnotes along the way.
The weather wasn’t the greatest but that doesn’t seem to put off the Vietnamese who seem to carry on their day-to-day with indifference.
Pulling into Danang a little late, we disembark and look for a taxi. We’re approached by a guy offering to take us to Hoi An for almost half what we had been told taxis would cost. We thought this was a good deal, so we went for it. We followed this guy out of the station and past the taxi rank - at this point we asked where his taxi was. He didn’t have one, he had a car and he’d drive us into town for a good price - we were weary and, although my experience with the Vietnamese has always been good, we decided to go with a metered taxi instead. We were on holiday and at the time we weren’t penny-pinching enough to try to save ourselves $20 - but each to their own. I’ve taken similar opportunities (and more suspect) in China, Hanoi and Cambodia and have enjoyed the conversations with the kind-hearted locals and have always taken away with me positive experiences - this was just one situation where we went with our gut and decided to take a metered cab.
The journey to Hoi An took about 45 minutes and we arrived there in time to be exceedingly ravenousness and on the hunt for some delicious local delicacies.
Overall I enjoyed the train trip, but I think I’ve been spoiled by trains across Europe, Japan, Russia, China and Malaysia. I can recommend the trip for the experience, scenery and conveniences of leaving one place one evening and arriving the next morning in the next and saving a nights expenses in hotels.