The Lowe Road
February 2008
{Warning: If you decide to undertake the following journey, be prepared to be mistaken for a smack addict and offered opium by H’mong grandmas in Sapa.}
OFF THE RAILS
With luxury rail services now available in Vietnam, is train travel a viable option to get to the northernmost parts of Vietnam? To gauge how far the quality of train travel has improved, Dave Lowe went off the rails to find out.
Day 1
I had originally planned to take the 5 Star Express from Saigon to Nha Trang. It was killed instantly at the ticket office on Pham Ngu Lao street, where I learned the train was to be out of service until mid-April.
Off the rails indeed.
So with a room at the Victoria Sapa the carrot at the end of a very long stick, my journey began just after 8 pm at Nha Trang station.
(Which followed a brief visit to the Oceanographic Museum in Nha Trang. There, a blonde Swedish mother carrying an equally blonde baby was walking around, looking at the exhibits. The Vietnamese there ignored the fish and stared at the woman and her baby, who were sweating in the heat. Exasperated, the Swedish woman spluttered, THE FISH ARE IN THE TANKS!)
In a light rain, a crowd of vendors, travelers, students, soldiers and grandmas gathered to board the Reunification Express, first built in 1899 by the French that later re-connected the country in 1975 in a symbolic move that signaled the end of the American war.
The journey was not unfamiliar: in 1993 I took the very same train from Hanoi to Saigon, a journey that lasted two nights and a day, a total of 44 bone shaking hours. Then, windows were covered with bars, smile starved staff patrolled the aisles like Aeroflot cabin attendants to ensure not a single sheet or pillow went missing, and food was an uninspiring choice of rice and fish, or rice and fish.
Surely things had improved in 15 years?
When I stepped aboard and found soft sleeper #4 in railcar #12, I found a tartan blanket stretched across the thin mattress, no sheet, and a pillow as thin as a Sunday edition of the New York Times (and just about as comfortable).
Nothing was different. Not one thing.
(Well, at least the bars had been removed from the windows)
Before I could jump off, the Reunification Express left the station with a shriek and clattered off toward Hanoi.
In my cabin traveled a sullen husband and wife from Thanh Hoa, a fresh faced soldier from Ninh Binh, and an Australian woman reluctantly traveling in a group, who instantly let loose a tirade against her lame leader and her twat travel mates. As she stood there as flabbergasted as I was at the condition of the carriage, a rail employee tore the door open with a bang, handed out fresh sheets to us like prisoners in Cell Bock H, and disappeared. We never saw her again.
When the Australian lady heard I was going all the way to the Chinese border, she burst out laughing.
Five minutes later another sour faced rail employee came in and took breakfast orders from the Vietnamese. As soon as he wrote down the information, he stood up to go, completely ignoring the Aussie girl and myself. The Aussie girl burst out laughing again.
Apparently, according to the service manual at Vietnam Railways, foreigners don't eat breakfast.
And apparently they don't read in bed either.
Within five minutes the Thanh Hoa couple had slammed the door, locked it, and killed the lights. As the train gathered speed it rocked and shook like a high rise Tokyo apartment in an earthquake. I could barely sleep in the commotion, remembering the overnight trains I had taken in India, where chai wallahs and Saddhus had wandered the aisles at all hours of the night, selling tea and salvation to anyone who was still awake.
As I looked up at the ceiling just inches from my head, a nasty bout of claustrophobia fueled by movie flashbacks of being buried alive in coffins and being trapped in a plane full of snakes dashed through my head.
Exactly how many hours did I have to left to Lao Cai? Oh, only about thirty two.
In a panic I hopped off the bunk and headed to the end of the carriage for some fresh air, where I found all the doors had been padlocked shut. Even the windows wouldn't open. When a staff member in a filthy blue smock caught me fiddling with it, she shouted at me to get back in my cabin.
Day 2
The next morning, eyes blurry from tossing and turning, lack of sleep, and breakfast deprivation, I staggered down the pitching hallway to see the magnificent Hai Van Pass covered in mist and fog pass by the window. As the train wound its way through tunnels, twisting tracks and finally emerging above the stunning Lang Co peninsula, a smile spread across my face: a cart passed by, I bought a phe sua da from a vendor who was more interested in correcting my Vietnamese pronunciation than giving me the coffee I so desperately needed.
Having slurped the lot of it down in one gulp, and as the caffeine took effect, I watched the scenery pass by the window. The vendor turned her back to it and launched those all important questions:
Where’s your wife?
How many kids do you have?
Who’s taking care of your family altar?
When she received her answers, she grunted, handed back the change and moved on. When I asked her why she didn’t care about the scenery, she cried, ‘I’ve been riding these rails for 22 years!’
Two hours later, the Reunification Express pulled into Hue station where a heavy rain fell from a grey depressing sky.
Bidding farewell to the bitter Australian (who was no longer laughing), the young soldier, and the Thanh Hoa couple who didn't even look up from their Cong An newspapers to say goodbye, I hopped off railcar #12 and ran to railcar #2, where I found seat #12.
The rest of my journey was to be in soft seat class.
The curtains in car #2 were the same material as the blankets in car #12, giving a distinctly Sound of Music feel to the journey. (Though I did see employees of Vietnam Railways playing a guitar and belting out folk tunes thankfully, I never saw any of them wearing uniforms stitched out of this itchy cloth)
My new seatmate turned out to be a black bereted resident of Vinh heading back home from a quick vacation in Danang who chatted to me in lilting, musical French. Most of the passengers in the car were also from the north. All except for one: a girl from Saigon brightly introduced herself and said she was off to see the northern part of her country. As Saigon Girl prattled on about her plans to see Hanoi and Halong Bay, no one talked to her.
As the hours passed, the landscape changed abruptly. Palm trees vanished, and tiny villages tightly packed inside groves of bamboo were busy with farmers harvesting rice.
Food carts continued to come through the train at regular intervals, one sold ALOHA potato chips, another pork soup served in kindergarten sized bowls, another pushed grilled mystery meat, and yet another just ice.
The vendor who had sold me that ca phe sua da that morning gasped when she saw me and said, 'Why are you riding down here? You're supposed to be in car #2! Let me see your ticket!'
When I explained that I wanted some variety, she just shook her head and muttered, 'He must have run out of money or something,' before pushing her cart on.
In Vinh, the bereted man got off with a hearty au revoir, replaced by a quiet accountant on his way back to Hanoi. After he had too asked the all important questions, he turned his back on me to play Tetris on his cell phone.
Ten passengers also boarded in Vinh, all carrying IKEA bags stuffed with clothing and all were wearing crash helmets. Which they never removed.
Did they know something I didn't? Was a crash imminent?
Shifting in my ‘soft’ seat restlessly, which by now had become as comfortable as a hard wooden bench in a drafty medieval French church, I settled in for the remaining 8 hours.
Within two hours:
Saigon Girl had thrown up in a bag;
A fistfight had broken out between a passenger and a vendor, when the passenger accused the woman of overcharging her by 1,000 Dong;
And a screaming baby had blown out my eardrum.
Time to find the dining car.
When I reached it, I discovered the tables were packed with chain smoking staff playing cards. One of them waved me off, while I waved my hand at the wall, where a tantalizing all natural ‘spa’ menu laid out the choices.
Rice and fish. Rice and pork. Rice and chicken. No soft drinks, only beer. No tea, only coffee.
As I waited for my order (I took the chicken) I looked around. Virtually every surface could have used a good scrub down. Even the windows were greasy. If there were luxury services in Vietnam, this was not it. In fact, I half expected to see the calendar on the wall to read ‘March 1993.’
As I walked back to my soft seat, I realized it could have been a lot worse. In Ethiopia, on a train ride to Harar, the train car had been pockmarked with bullets. In Sri Lanka, the train to Galle was so full of people I jumped off the train at the first station, where a three wheel driver tried to poison me with a tainted bottle of Orange Fanta.
Before I reached my seat, I stopped, noticing that all the doors were still carefully padlocked shut. (I guess the helmeted passengers could just head butt their way out in an emergency) Only now, I smiled. At least they prevented me from jumping from the moving train...
When the sun set at seven p.m., the cigarettes came out. Ignoring the ‘No Smoking’ signs completely, passengers lit up so aggressively the carriage filled with blue smoke so quickly a whole shop full of Virginia hams could have been cured. It did stop the baby from crying though, and Saigon Girl didn’t throw up again.
The last forty five minutes was pure hell. Time stood still as the train stopped at virtually every station, offloading sacks of rice and Minsk motorbikes, taking on more passengers wearing crash helmets.
The Reunification Express pulled into Hanoi's main station exactly 20 minutes early.
After 26 hours on the move, I virtually clawed my way out of the rickety carriage to the tracks where crowds of crash helmeted people dragged luggage of every imaginable size to the terminal.
Staggering around, gratefully sucking in great big lungfulls of fresh air, I had been travelling about as long as a flight from London to Australia. Taxi drivers came up and gruffly demanded $10 to take me to a hotel in the Old Quarter. But I shook my head, tears in the corner of my eyes. Though I longed to be ripped off for a 5 minute ride, I still had one more long haul flight in front of me.
Gritting my teeth and clutching my ticket, I found track #2 where I boarded the Ratranco Express for Lao Cai.
Finding my upper berth in carriage #8, I nodded a hello to the two elderly women with blackened teeth in the lower bunks, who I found were off to a nephew's wedding in the Chinese border town. Looking around, the Sound of Music curtains had been replaced with real cotton material, the walls were covered in fake wood laminate straight out of the Brady Bunch’s family room, and the pillow was now as thick as two Sunday editions of the New York Times.
Things were looking up.
Right on schedule, the Ratranco Express lurched out of the station, and the business suited attendants came through the train, smiling broadly, chatting in limited English, checking tickets and passports, plumping pillows and serving tea.
Within ten minutes the elderly women had slammed the door, killed the lights and were snoring away. Five minutes later, head spinning from over 24 hours of constant rocking, vomiting women, screaming babies, and rage inducing textile patterns, I joined them.
Throughout the night I slept fitfully as the train lurched and swung wildly from side to side like a drunken water buffalo; after midnight a quick peek out the windows revealed rows of tiny huts with single swinging light bulbs serving as the only illumination. There was no moon. The two dowagers beneath me snored their hearts out.
Day 3
At the ungodly hour of 4.30 a.m., the friendly attendants suddenly turned nasty.
'LAO CAI! LAO CAI!' they screamed as they pounded the doors with their fists. The train was still moving.
When the two elderly women were slow to open the door to the racket, the attendants gave the door a sharp kick for good measure.
Flipping open the door which they had jimmied with their master key, they turned on the lights and rudely evicted the old ladies from their bunks. The staff stripped the sheets, pillows and blankets with a single flick of their wrists. We were left standing in the corridor, barefoot, shivering, red-eyed and sleep deprived, pulling on shoes and dreaming of sleep.
Suddenly the train screeched to a halt.
Lao Cai.
Tumbling out in the pitch darkness, where a thick, cold mist swirled around the feeble street lights lining the tracks, the temperature was about 7 degrees. In the silence, a few dogs barked in the distance, and the train station had a distinct Casablanca meets eastern European border crossing feel to it.
Blindly following the crowds of Vietnamese and Chinese passengers moving towards the crumbling terminal, who shouted and screamed at each other, the end to this journey was just meters away.
Almost.
Stepping through the entrance, where fresh air and freedom awaited, a nightstick is shoved under my chin by a gray-haired security guard in a drab olive uniform.
'TICKET!' he screamed.
Lack of sleep prevented my brain from understanding these simple words, and I just mumbled something and pushed on towards freedom.
'NO TICKET! NO EXIT!' the man screeched, pushing the night stick harder against my chin as he grabbed my bag to stop me.
I had no idea where my ticket was. It could have been wrapped up in the blankets hastily yanked from underneath me for all I knew.
I reached into my pocket, expecting only lint. When the ticket magically appeared, I shoved it into the face of the bastard security guard and let go. It fluttered to the ground like a feather. Before it touched the ground, I was off.
An hour and a half later, I’m wandering the streets of Sapa, waiting for my room to be readied at the Victoria. As I stumble along through a Stephen King mist (the entire town was wrapped in a chill so cold and fog so deep you could barely see five meters) out of the gloom appears a H’mong grandma, fully decked out in her tribal gear and holding the hand of her grandchild, who whispers, ‘marijuana? Hash? Opium?
To which I turned to her, slack jawed. Was it the eye bags, the incoherent muttering, the shell shocked look in my eyes that made me look like a drug addict? Or all three?
Apparently it was all three.
When I waved her off, she shook her head and said, ‘too bad, veerrrryyyy good smoke.’ And then she disappeared into the mist from where she came.
Waiting in line at Hanoi’s Noi Bai airport two days later, the Australian grandmother in front of me recoiled (but not in the way I expected) when I told her an elderly H’mong had offered me smack in Sapa.
‘No one offered me heroin,’ she said sadly. ‘No one.’