24 hours on a train and only moving 10 meters.



It was time to move on in a southerly direction.
Let’s go to Hue and get some one-way rental scooters to ride to Danang and Hoi
via the Hai Van Pass, but of course, let’s check the weather forecast
first. It was obvious that with a
typhoon in the area there would be rain, but how bad would it be?



At night we checked the weather on TV and
watched how Hue had been hit by a tropical storm with large parts of the city
inundated. So, forget Hue and lets head for Danang and Hoi An. My mate Eric,
who owns and runs www.getupandgovietnam.com (a travel agency) with his lovely
partner Hue, booked the train to Danang which was to leave at 7.30 pm. In the meantime, we downloaded the Ap "Grab" which is like Uber. I had never used it before and tried it out. Excellent! Your phone lists where you are and you just type in the destination. Immediately you see the price and distance. Within two minutes a car arrived and, although the young driver did
not speak a word of English, we got to the station hassle free and there was no
issue of extra charges etc. We are sold on it now.



The reservation on the ticket was car 9 sleeper, 24/25 but, on entering the train, we were ushered to number 11 which turned out to be a recently refurbished compartment with better beds, bottles of water, biscuits, and even a lampshade. Great!
The ride to Danang would be about 16 hours. The train tracks are all
single lines which means that the trains runs fairly well on time as they need
to stop at certain places to let the train coming from the opposite direction
pass. During these quiet periods, we could hear the rain bucketing down.As a matter of fact it hardly ever stopped raining. At 5 am we arrived at the city of Vinh and were still there 4 hours later. Many announcements were made but all in Vietnamese. In the end we were advised to get off the train and board another train back to Hanoi as the track
had washed away and roads were closed so continuing by bus was not an option.
One of the conductors pointed to a coach which we entered. The coach was
bursting with people sitting on wooden benches, crying kids and smoking
grannies all around us. Hmm - it always becomes interesting when things go pear shaped.
We found a place and sat down. Luckily it had stopped raining and all
the windows were open as during stops the power to the fans goes off. Wow - ten hours of agony on a wooden seat was not something we had anticipated. After 15 minutes Frank got up and walked through the train. Glad to see him back with
the message that he had found a sleeper compartment for 6 people but they would
only allow two foreigners to make use of it. Great! We were now on our way back
to Hanoi again passing through flooded towns, drenched rice fields and people pushing
their bikes through waist deep water.

A long day with nothing to show for it? Not really - we shared our cabin with a couple from Switzerland and we were engaged in interesting meaningful conversations until very late. Our hotel was full so we checked in next door. A long 24 hour journey has placed us 10 meters
away from where we had started out.