Exploring the rail Vietnam
berth equipped with a mattress, sheet, pillow and blanket. There were already two people inside – Tri and his wife Mei.
They turned out to be Boat People who had fled Vietnam in the 1960s and settled in the UK. They were back on their annual family visit, and Tri filled in background as to why the train was so significant. When North and South Vietnam finally made peace half a century ago, one of the first things the reunited country did was to repair its 1,072 mile north-south railway.
The trains that connected the former enemy cities of Hanoi and Saigon, running mainly along the coast, became known as the Reunification Express.
Today there are usually five train sets working the line at any one time, mostly comprised of sleeping cars so travellers can choose to do a chosen sector of the journey either by daylight, or overnight. We did a bit of both.
Conversation turned to war. This year is a significant milestone for Vietnam, being the 50th anniversary of the American withdrawal from a conflict that inspired many protest movements and cinema stories, from Forrest Gump to Apocalypse Now.
It’s thought that 20-year war killed up to four million Vietnamese as communism and capitalism clashed.
Tri and Mei were happy to talk about the devastating impact it had on their family, but Tri warned us we were not likely to find many others who would.
The war was too painful a memory, and also too long ago for most of today’s population, mostly under 30.
After rainy Ho Chi Minh, stepping off that first train in the seaside resort of Nha Trang, bathed in sunlight, was something to treasure. Here another war has had an impact, because until very recently this was the resort of choice for large numbers of Russian tourists.
Equally absent were the Chinese, kept at home by Covid travel restrictions. It meant that from the rooftop pool of our hotel we could see several other rooftop pools green with disuse.
On the plus side, that meant prices were very competitive, with every shopkeeper and restaurateur delighted to see us.
And we had the silky sands and the lazy sea practically to ourselves. The water here was so warm it was like taking a bath. After Nha Trang we stepped back on the train for the next overnight journey, this time taking the four berth soft sleeper up to the Imperial City of Hue. We didn’t book the whole cabin, thinking that the remaining vacant berth was unlikely to be filled, but a lone man crept in late at night, and didn’t stir when we left the train at Da Nang in the early morning. It may have been only 5am, but the taxi drivers outside on the station forecourt all knew where we wanted to go: Hoi An. This former river port from the 15-19th centuries is Unesco-registered and thronged with visitors from Asia and Europe. Its distinctive pastel-yellow shophouses were full of designer, arty things of far more interest to us than the international branded goods that dominate Ho Chi Minh’s malls. Its ancient Japanese-built bridge was crowded with couples doing selfies and Insta-poses – and in the evening the river was aglow with lantern-lit sampans.
It was a great place for a couple of days. From Da Nang we boarded the train north to Hue, the former capital of Vietnam back in its pre-colonial, imperial days. This was just a four-hour journey so we did it by day, with the Express picking its way laboriously along the spectacular coastline of the steep Hai Van peninsula, revealing homemade fish traps in hidden bays, as it searched for a way through from the tropical south to the subtropical north.
In Hue, which had been a key wartime front line between the Vietcong and the American-backed south, I made a determined effort to ask about the war.
Downtown had bars with military echoes called DMZ and Heart of Darkness, but the students I spoke to outside looked blank: “What war? With the Americans? The Americans are our friends.”
It was almost as if it had never happened. But it had. In Hue we walked around the Citadel, a former forbidden city filled with temples and pagodas, much of which has been rebuilt or left empty since the war years. Then we cycled out along the banks of the Perfume River to the tombs of the emperors of the Nguyen dynasty, via a village of incense makers.
Then it was time for our
last train journey, another overnight sleeper to capital Hanoi. By now we knew the system, and the Reunification Express, with its thin mattresses, had become like an old friend. So it was with a solid night’s sleep behind us that we arrived in our final destination in the early morning, and said goodbye to the train.
My son, who is at the age of being gung-ho about everything, wanted to get to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum before the queues started building up for the day, so he jumped on the back of a motorbike taxi – a very common method of travel in Vietnam – and disappeared into the throng.
As for us, we took a more conventional cab to our hotel. At our age, we can only deal with one delightful method of transport at a time.