The Train

The Train
They say that you should, at least once, take the train that runs from Saigon to Hanoi, the famous reunification express. We decided that we'd take, or rather, brave, the sixteen hour train journey, from Hoi an to Hanoi. It was a night train and it was loud, bumpy and down right crazy.
The noise of the train could just about be blocked out the loud musical that blazed from the television screen. The food was icky, apparently (it was meat based, so I didn't have it, but Paddy said that I wasn't missing anything). The toilet was the worst we had ever seen, it was the kind of train toilet that you see passed around as an email attachment entitled "disgusting toilets of the world" or something like that. It was swirling with a strange smelling mixture of various pees and poos along with a smell of food. When you flushed the toilet you had to jump back to escape the wave of urine based water that sprung up at you and covered the toilet area. I wanted to take a picture, but I didn't have any film left.
We seemed to be the only Westerners on the train, and the conductors were wary of us. At every stop they asked us, and us alone, if we were getting out at this stop, and when we said no, they got suspicious and asked to see our tickets. I was getting angry at this, Paddy said I was being irrational, we fought a lot.
When we got off the train, we were again, exhausted, lifeless, hungry things. The desire to sleep could only be combated with the desire to eat. We forgot to take our tickets with us, thinking that we didn't need them now that the journey was over, since we had already been checked a million times. We were wrong: we could not exit the station without our tickets.
We fought amongst ourselves, fed up, at this stage, of the hassle of traveling for sixteen hours straight. I went back to the train to get our tickets, but it was locked up and they wouldn't let us in. We waited. Eventually, they let us go.

The train was something we had to do, it was like a babtism of fire for real backpacking as we saw it, struggling, suffering, roughing it. The worst thing for me was that we hadn’t got any cash with us on the train, we didn’t prepare for this, we ran out and couldn’t find an ATM anywhere. This really frustrated me, more than that it sent me into a sprial of panic, sixteen hours of a train with no food and no money until we got to the other side. I grew up poor and I hate to be without money, when you know what its like to worry about money, when you have been without it most of your life, you find it terrifying to be without it, even for a day for you remember, tragically, just how little poor people count in the world.

We had arrived in Hanoi: we got a taxi to a hotel which we found in lonely planet. It had closed down, so we went to the next hotel, which was better looking anyway. We got to our hotel room as sleep came easy to us, the great relief.
We were positioned at a place called Bia Hoi junction, the perfect place for sampling the local 10 cent beer.