We failed to get soft sleepers for this 8 ½ hour journey so find ourselves in a 6 berth hard sleeper compartment on the 05.40 from Nha Trang to Da Nang that we miraculously got to ourselves. The carriage had obviously just been vacated by people travelling up from Saigon. We had to remove used sheets blankets and pillows, but decided to get the train attendant to remove the used Pampers nappy that was peeking out from under the lower of the 3 bunks. Insulating ourselves by wrapping in our sarongs we managed a couple of hours rest before being woken up by the “charming” screech of Vietnamese piped music that suddenly began to sound loudly trough the speaker system. At the station by 5.20 am we failed to find any bananas, so we breakfasted (and lunched….) on the coconut biscuits that Gill dropped on the floor and deciding not to partake of the constant trolley offerings of soup, rice and chicken trollied past our door (see pic). But the scenery – we spent the whole time looking at the miles of verdant jigsaw of paddy fields in the foreground, with jagged forested hills in the distance. This was peppered by stick like figures in this medieval landscape, wearing traditional conical hats as they bent double attending their fields. As the train passed nearer the coast in places we also saw the traditional making of salt. All you need for life is here – water, rice and salt. In contrast to this simple lifestyle, we are writing this blog on the computer…… The field and ground alongside the railway tracks are littered with big, heavily decorated gravestones – some isolated in the middle of the paddies, and some in huge graveyards,many of which are victims of the war. We stopped at one point to let another train pass and the whole place was crowded with these graves. Sadly, our Vietnamese reading skills are not yet fully developed, so we have no idea where we were! Ant has now turned into a trainspotter, excitedly pointing out passing trains, and checking for accuracy the times were arriving and leaving stations on the pasted up timetable – in Hanoi, we will be buying his anorak.
