All Aboard! – Departing Saigon, Vietnam

Our train departed at 7pm from Saigon on the night of April 14. We got a sleeper cabin with four of our very own little bunked cots all in a rather small space of square footage for the 16 hour trip travelling north up the skinny country coast of Vietnam. To be honest, it was a little bit grimier of a space than we had anticipated to be spending the next 16 hours in (…my little head was thinking, perhaps a bigger room with a table and maybe even our own sink, a separate nice dining car, you know like what you see in the movies?….but not so much. That little fantasy poofed out of my existence the moment I put my bags down), anyway they did have clean looking sheets on each cot, but I’m not sure the last time that the blankets had been washed. Our cabin DID have air-conditioning, which we were thankful for, but it wasn’t the strongest blast of cool air a person had ever felt. Despite the non-smoking signs posted inside the cabins and throughout the train…. out in the hallway you’d see staff walking around, smoking a cigarette in which the second hand smoke would linger right into our little cabin through the ac vent for smokers and non-smokers alike to enjoy.
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However – after we got settled in and moving, the whole atmosphere really wasn’t all that bad, or at least I guess we just sort of got used to it. After all, we weren’t that much cleaner than the interior furnishings of the train, having been out and about in the hot sun prior to boarding, so I guess you could say we fit right in. Let me say though, that the actual part where we got to ride the train and have the experience of looking at the countryside and watching the cities from the train made up for the 1/2 star accommodations; and in the end, the train ride itself was one of my highlights of the vacation.

My FAVORITE part though was when we finally departed the city of Saigon. The train whistled to announce its departure and we slowly began to move along. It didn’t take much time to get used to the gentle almost hypnotizing swaying of the car as it rustled along the tracks. We picked up some speed, but not a whole lot while we were still in the city. It was dark already and this part of the ride I think will stick in my memory for ever. The train went right through town, through the back alleys of businesses and people’s houses. If I would ever have to sum up the inside of homes at night in SE Asia, I’d tell people to think pastel green and blue colored walls with dim fluorescent lights illuminating the inside. We saw many a room that were just that. The train was travelling at the perfect speed for us to get a simple snap-shot glimpse through lit up windows of the interior of houses at night, particularly dinnertime. It was almost like looking at one of those viewfinder toys, getting a slideshow of images that portray typical city-family life in Vietnam at night. Anyhow, we’d get just a glimpse of a very short allotted, synchronized amount of time of a family eating dinner, then immediately following there would be the window of the next house of people sitting on the tiled floor watching television, then timed just perfectly there’d be an internet café full of teenagers playing computer games, then a pool hall, then another family eating dinner or washing the dishes, then an office building of people meeting inside, and every once in a while it’d be just a dark back wall of a tall building, and then the next moment, which was my favorite image, we’d be blinded by hundreds of bright headlights from moto-drivers that filled the entire road like a solid wall; people just waiting at the train crossing looking straight at us crossing by – it was like this flash of brightness for a total of one second…and then the next second…complete darkness while our eyes adjusted back.

The rhythm of the train glided along the rails as we eventually saw fewer and fewer buildings. Then the city lights soon disappeared into the atmosphere of the darkness when shortly thereafter we were out of the hustle and bustle of the city and into the quiet countryside … and the only light we could see were the stars up above .

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The next morning we woke up very early to some faint morning light in a slightly different landscape. It was beautiful. We were in the midst of rural countryside close the coast, surrounded by random green mountain ranges which showed through the windows on either side of the train. There were hazy white clouds floating in and throughout the peaks which were the backdrop for quaint farming villages up early, hard at work in their fields which looked as if they were a quilt made of lime green, yellow ochre, rust and forest colored patches of fabric. It was quite picturesque to say the least, and my pictures taken through the window of the train most certainly don’t do it justice, as per usual.

The train made a few stops that morning where some people got off to either end their trip or pick up something to snack on. Will managed to find some rice and chicken for breakfast, (which I understand the chicken didn’t really amount to much) while the rest of us just ate the Ritz crackers and Oreos we had bought the night before to hold us over for the ride. We were to arrive at our destination around 12:30pm so we had the morning to enjoy looking at the landscape passing us by. We watched the countryside as the morning colors began to change while sun began to rise into the warmer part of the day. As we grew closer and closer to our stop, the city of Danang, my father anxiously watched out the window for familiar scenery. He was looking for a certain mountain range that he knew very well almost forty years ago. We were headed to a part of the country which was close to where he served as an infantry soldier in the US Marine Corps, from 1969 to 1970.

We went on a tour to the Queson Valley & Mountain area where he served a few days later. But first we had some sightseeing to do in the ancient seaside town of Hoi An, about 45 minutes from Danang which would be our next stop for the following four days.

Anyhow, we enjoyed the remainder of the train ride, but were ready to get off once we finally did arrive in Danang. We grabbed our bags and spotted the guy holding a sign with my dad’s name on it. Our tour guide was ready to take us to the small but ancient seaside town of Hoi An.