Racing Up the Coast to Hanoi

We casually caught a taxi to the train station for out 10pm departure, with plenty of time to spare. However, when we arrived we were told the train had already left!! We pulled out our tickets, and sure enough they said 20:00 - damn international/military time! We had been doing so well up until that point. We reluctantly spent another 15 bucks and hopped on the next train to Nha Trang - the "beach capital" of Vietnam.

The train was packed and noisy, and it reeked of durians, but we settled into our top-bunk hard sleeper beds and tried to sleep (the ear plugs only help so much). Like roosters at sunrise, every Vietnamese person on the train woke up at 5am and started yelling - so we didn't sleep very late. We got off the train at about 6:30, had some pho for breakfast, left our bags at a hotel, and walked down the street to check out a Buddhist temple.

This was definitely an impressive one. It was a bigger and more elaborate temple/monastery complex than most of the simple pagodas we have come across - covering an entire hill that overlooked the city with its campus. We were greeted by a friendly monk at the entrance to the main prayer hall who asked where we were from. When we said Canada he became very excited and pulled up his shirt to reveal a maple-leaf belt buckle. He gave us a tour of the complex, explaining the various Buddha statues and making us "pray" to him (shake incense at him) before we took pictures. After climbing to the peak of the hill where there was a 25 meter tall white Buddha, he asked us for a whopping 200,000 dong donation "because monks need to eat". We gave him 6 bucks, and he tried to take my compass, but I assured him it was worth way more than 30,000 dong. He left us, pissed, and we escaped down the hill.

We spent the rest of the day laying on beach chairs by the cool water of the South China Sea. I finished off another book while Brian went to explore some Cham towers and a small fishing village where he spent the afternoon with some locals. After a week of intense traveling and exploring, a lazy day on the beach was exactly what I needed.

We hopped back on the train for another night ride up the coast to Da Nang. We arrived 4 hours late and hopped in a taxi with some German girls we had met for the ride down to Hoi An. We stopped at rock formation called the Marble Mountain, where we went to explore some caves and pagodas.

Before I left for this trip I read a book called Fourth Uncle in the Mountain - about a Vietnamese boy who grows up with the influences of a local animist/mystical religion in the Mekong Delta. (If you haven't read it, you should - if you have, this will make sense to you.) There is a scene in the book where the boy ventures into the remote jungle mountains by the border of Cambodia to study meditation with a 200 year old Buddhist monk. Hiking up the Marble Mountains and squeezing into narrow cave entrances that open up into huge caverns with tiny beams of light peaking through the ceiling, illuminating the smoky, incensed air brought me right back into the story of that boy - very cool.

We made it down to Hoi An before sunset and checked into a hotel in the middle of the Old City. Hoi An is a former Portuguese port, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is filled with beautiful colonial, stucco buildings that glow a deep yellow in the evening sun, women with traditional conical hats, and tailors and cobblers that produce custom clothing and shoes in only a few hours. We found a tailor and ordered suits and shirts to be made for the next morning. I got a black cashmere suit and a pastel green shirt for only 60 dollars. Later along our stroll through the town, I found a cobbler to make me a pair of very nice suede sneakers for less than 20 bucks - custom made to fit my feet. We spent the evening on the waterfront drinking bia hoi, the world's cheapest draught beer - 15 cents a mug!

The next day we did a walking tour of the city, got some great photos, drank a few more bia hois, picked up our clothes, bought duffel bags for 2 bucks to put our suits in, and got back on the train for the 18 hour trip all the way up the coast to Hanoi.

This ride was much worse than the last one. They only had one hard-sleeper, air-con bed available. Brian made the sacrifice and took the bed in the fan room with a piece of plywood, a straw mat, and 20 inches of head room, where he suffered for the duration of the 24 hour ride. (Yes, of course it got to Hanoi 6 hours late.) We spent a lot of time standing in the hallway of the air-con car - there is nowhere else to go unless you are sleeping in your bed that has no room for sitting up. I met a couple from Barcelona with whom I had hours of great conversation to distract me from my boredom. Unfortunately for Brian, this all took place in Spanish, so he was left out of the loop. (At least he could pick up the general topics.) We exchanged information at the end of the ride and they invited me to visit them when I study in Spain this spring.

Once again, like clockwork, the Vietnamese were awake and screaming at 5am. I've come to the conclusion that there is some obscure linguistic quality to the Vietnamese language which necessitates screaming everything said to ensure successful communication in the early hours of the morning. Fed up, Brian and I began screaming English to each other in retribution, and no one seemed to notice.

We spent the rest of the day on the train doing whatever we could to distract ourselves from not being able to sit or sleep or do anything comfortably. Finally, we got off the train at 4pm and headed into the city to begin our adventure into the Tonkinese Alps of the northwest.