Thursday, 24/08/2006, Somewhere between Saigon and Hanoi
Wow! Vietnam has a seriously beautiful and magnificent countryside. The train pulls through the middle of it, trough the green jungle, along the coast, passing small villages with only a few houses, then through the mountains…
The long-haul train I am riding in is interesting. Like in an aircraft, you get a blanket, and three (more or less) warm meals, breakfast instant noodles, lunch, and dinner. And they come through with a trolley and sell snacks and drinks (Remember? They used to do this in German trains, too. Oh, sweet nostalgia…).
But even with this „comfort“, 29 hours in a train seat are quite stressful. Especially when you have a TV (yes, they have TV in the carriages) with probably the world’s worst speakers blaring away at you. They preferred short theater pieces and music acts, and the sound quality was just awful. They do have a pretty good speaker system, but they only used it for the announcements and the description of the area we were just passing through.
The biggest surprise though were the railway stations in Saigon and Hanoi. Both cities, with six and three million inhabitants respectively, have railway stations with only two platforms (yes, two, t-w-o, in numbers: 2)!
Friday, 25/08/2006, Hanoi
So I’ve finally arrived in Hanoi. I had my breakfast at a small café on the other side of the road opposite of the railway station. Then I used the rest of my 5-liter water bottle to get a bit cleaned up. And then I tried to see a few things in Hanoi, to spend my time. But that posed a bit of a problem…
First I went to see the B-52 lake, where a B-52 crashed during the Vietnam War after being shot down. Well, it is a small bassin, with a bit of wreckage sticking out. Not much to see there, so I went on to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. Which was not open on Fridays… I substituted with the Ho Chi Minh Museum, for which opening I had to wait for a bit.
The museum contains mainly pictures of Mr. Ho, and some documents written by him. This was a special exhibition for his 116th birthday, additional to the usual exhibition, which shows the hsitory of the independence and reunification fight of Vietnam in some symbolic displays and arrangements. And finally I wanted to see the Army museum – which was closed on Fridays as well :(.
So I had enough of closed museums, and I took a cab to the airport. I did not realize that it is quite that far outside the town, 25 km, so I was lucky that I had just enough money. After giving my last 16 US$ to the taxi driver, I realized that I still had to pay the departure charge of 14 US$, so I had to get some money, even though I had tried to avoid that.
And then I went back to Bangalore, via Bangkok (another 10 US$ service charge before departure) and Singapore, from where I will be leaving back to Germany on Sunday morning. So this wraps up my trip around Asia, through the center of Indochina. I have had a lot of new experiences, and I would not want to miss a single day of it. I saw some of the most beautiful sights, made by both man and nature. And I met many new people, mostly friendly. A nice two weeks, and sure a worthy end to my time in India.