We Are Totally Taking First Class Back!

While some people are travelling in the lap of luxury through Europe (and complaining about it), others (i.e. ME) have braved the perils of the Vietnamese rail system and lived to tell the tale. We dragged ourselves out of bed at the ungodly hour of 5.10am in order to catch the train to Lao Cai, a town on the Chinese border and an hour away from Sapa, our ultimate destination.

We spent a number of hours yesterday dealing with Hanoi train station. After standing in line for ages due to the Vietnamese habit of pushing in and being sent to various different other queues and rooms, we were finally told that tickets to our destination would not be sold until a few hours from that time. When we finally got our tickets, the only seats left were 'hard seats', which is basically fourth class. Although strongly advised against taking such seats by our beloved guide book, we had to get going, so we took the plunge...

... And I think I can safely say that this was one of the worst trains in the entire world. I wish I had taken a picture of the outside of the train, but it seems that at the time I was too horrified. Let's just say it looked like it was about to fall apart. The inside was not much better (see photo), with hard wooden benches. The only saving grace were the fans that were bolted to the ceiling at regular intervals. This uncomfortable and extremely sweaty journey lasted from 6.10 in the morning until 5.00 in the evening. And with eleven hours travel time you'd think we'd have gotten quite far. But that would be too easy - this dreaded day trip managed to get us only 340km from our place of departure!!

Despite the pain, the trip had some great scenery (as usual) and was not without it's amusing incidents (the type of amusing where you either have to laugh or cry). Most of this was caused by the fact that Vietnamese people do not seem to have any concept of personal space. The people on the opposite bench started the journey by sticking their smelly bare feet on the very limited space on our seat. Although they didn't speak English, I'm pretty sure they then asked me if I was 2 months pregnant (the chunky-moneybelt-under-dress effect) and consequent to this belief started buying strange food from the train vendors and giving it to me. They also laughed at how hairy Josh's legs and face were (rubbing and touching them), told us we both needed haircuts and, I believe, recommended a haircare product in a magazine they were reading.

By the end of the trip we were all hot, tired and grumpy. The weirdness of it all was capped off when one of the women on the train scurried over to us, took our bag of rubbish from under our seat, tore it open, took out some empty bottles and bread that we didn't eat, then hurled the (plastic) bag out of the train window and scurried away again. The tension was thick in the air as all the people around us saw Josh and I look at each other in disbelief, then as we started laughing hysterically, so did everyone else!