Some Time at Home
After Ba Na the girls and I took a little time to relax. Settling into a couple of weeks of early school mornings, sunsets over the mountains and lots of tasty food. As everyday ticked away the permanence of life in Vietnam grew ever stronger and the doubt of my return to the US began to pervade my thoughts. Another canceled flight, another setback. Would it ever end?
Especially in a land where everything is so very different from what you once knew. The language, the food, the rules of the road, traffic lights, the condiments on tables, the staples in a refrigerator, candy, everything is different. I can’t explain it to anyone who has never lived in such a different place. The idea of home and what it once was, what it once meant was becoming a dream that I had woken from abruptly. The memory slowly fades until it becomes harder to recall. The color of things, the taste of things, the feel of things. Your mind begins to fill in the gaps until you can’t remember what was real or imagined.
Living Two Lives
I had officially become a father to two little girls here. Calling for me, Ba oi, and requesting my aid. Opening a bag of chips, help getting water, or to be carried up flights of stairs. It was sometimes difficult to be separated from those back in the states, especially Maggie and Davin. But I was now needed here too. It was beginning to be such a pull on my heart.
With immigration services halted, I had no way of knowing when or if we would ever all be together. Was I destined to live two lives? Caught in the hellish depths of political and bureaucratic bull shit. I couldn’t get a flight home that didn’t get canceled much less and updated status on an immigration claim. Would any of this ever end? Only time would tell. So for now we do what we have been doing, we live our life, and we wait.
Time Marches On
Time was becoming harder to catalog, more difficult to find meaning in. My time in Vietnam was not ruled by the same markers that guide one through days as it had back home. Church was not yet back in session, but even then days only seemed to have meaning by day or night. Weekends had no significance. Monday was the same as Friday. School went on into the weekend here so that wasn’t a help. I was losing days not in a tangible, I’ve misplaced them sense, but in a meaningful sense. Often checking my calendar not to see what the date was, but what day of the week it was.
The construct of time was so different here, and I was beginning to adjust to it accordingly. It was reshaping my thoughts and how I looked at life. Schedules are guides here. If a bus says it will depart at 3, it may not arrive until 4, and depart at 5. I was losing that strict meaning of timing and scheduling that was once so important back home. People don’t panic over these things here, you just deal with it and move on.
Adapting
My mind once recoiled in horror if I thought I would miss anything scheduled, ie. a bus, train or ferry departure time, a doctors appointment, anything. Here none of this seemed to matter. It was once very alien to me, the way life is approached here. People don’t schedule their lives around eight hours of sleep, and if one becomes sleepy at midday they just go take a nap. There was such a casualness to time and life that was both refreshing and infuriating. Though I did eventually manage to accept it, and a relaxing wave of peace washed over me. How would I ever return to the stresses of the western world?
A Rooftop Birthday
There always seems to be a birthday on the horizon. This time it was Su’s turn. She was turning 8 and we had invited some of her friends over for a little rooftop party. That morning Diem and I had gone out to gather ingredients for the event. At the request of the birthday girl I was to prepare some fried chicken and homemade French fries. Kids are the same all over the world,it would seem.
We ordered a cake from Bo No bakery and had a little breakfast at a local restaurant on the river. We made our way back to the apartment and I began to get to work. The girls arrived home from school, Diem dressed them to the nines as it were, and our guests began to arrive. It was a wonderful time under the stars in the cool night air. The cake was perfect, the food was delicious, of course I would say that, and I think Su had a really special evening.
A Weekend Excursion
And so life continued in this manner for some time until we planned a little trip with the girls to a very special place. A place I had tried to reach since the first time my feet stepped foot on Vietnamese soil almost 20 months ago. Only 92.4 kilometers, or 57.41 miles from Da Nang, it continued to elude me until this very moment. The Imperial City of Huế. Said to be one of the most beautiful cities in all of Vietnam. The capital of the former Nguyen Dynasty and last dynasty of Vietnam. It’s a city steeped in legend, lore, and most of all, ancient architecture.
I had waited some time to explore the ruins, walk the burial grounds and stand in wonder at the towering structures of the once powerful city. But first we had to get there. Not exactly an easy route lies between Da Nang and Huế. The famous Hai Van mountain pass that juts into the sea and stood as a divider between empires for centuries stood between us. A motorbike was out of the question, the difficult terrain was just too much and we had Xu and Su with us. We discussed a bus, a private car, but I had another form of transportation in mind.
The Reunification Express
The train line was originally completed in 1936 under French Colonial authority. Connecting Hanoi in the north, to then Saigon in the South, It was and still is the backbone of Vietnam. It is no surprise that during WWII, the resulting war with the French and eventually the American campaigns, the railroad would be damaged countless times upon its length. With the fall of Saigon in 1975, the new government’s number one civil engineering project became the rehabilitation of the train line.
In what has been praised as an incredible engineering achievement, and accomplished amidst the difficulties of stabilizing a new nation, the line opened to full service by the end of 1976. In less than two years Vietnamese engineers and construction workers had rebuilt a staggering 1,334 bridges, 27 tunnels and 158 train stations. To commemorate the first great civil accomplishment of a newly united Vietnam, the line was renamed the Reunification Express.
Tickets
We needed to purchase our tickets for the train, but these things always seem harder than they should be. I’ve learned in my time here, that unlike the rest of the world, you get a better deal on site for everything. In the US you always save money on tickets by purchasing online, here the opposite is true. As prices are regulated by the government no one gets a break. So if you purchase through an online broker, you’ll pay more as they must get their cut. It’s always cheaper in Vietnam, bus tickets, train tickets, even domestic plane tickets, to purchase on site.
Diem dropped the girls off at school a few days before our departure and took a quick trip to the station to procure our tickets. For a soft berth room with 4 beds, though we only got three as Xu was free and had to use one of our beds, it cost $25 usd. Very affordable. Oh, and that was one way, so for all of us to travel to Hue and back was $50 usd total. Again, not a bad deal. The morning of departure DIem and I packed for the weekend and arranged to pick the girls up early from school.
Heading For the Station
With everything packed Diem headed out to pick the girls up and I toted our luggage to the entrance downstairs. I called a taxi which arrived relatively quickly. I talked to the landlord for a few minutes, he had been hounding me to come to his house for dinner, and I assured him it would be so when we returned. Diem arrived shortly with Xu and Su, we loaded up in the taxi and headed to the train station.
I was getting a bit excited. Not that I don’t do enough exploring these days. But the train to Hue and the exploration of its historical sights had been on my list for some time. It was a slow ride to the station, as most rides are, and Xu fell asleep in my lap in the front seat.
The Route
Below you will find an interactive map of the train route. I couldn’t find a train map so I had to create my own. The section in red indicates tunnel sections. You can see as we leave Da Nang we immediately head into the steep mountain side of Hai Van. It made for an incredibly dynamic landscape and beautiful scenery. There are only three ways from southern Vietnam to Northern Vietnam as you can see on the map.
Still in 2020 the treacherous mountain has proven to be difficult to manage. The original Hai Van Pass as you can see by its winding pattern west of the train tracks, the newer tunnel QL1A opened in 2005 for passenger cars, you can see further east of the mountain road, and the train itself are the only ways still to cross this narrow pass tyhat divides Northern and Southern Vietnam. Can you imagine if New England and The southern US were connected only by a thin strip of land that had three ways to get through. It really is amazing to think about. And is no wonder the Hai Van Pass has always been as far south as everyone from the Han Dynasty of China to Kublai Khan himself could manage to reach. The Thermopylae of Southeast Asia.
The View
At times the view seemed otherworldly. Lush, absent of any signs of civilization. An unspoiled and overgrown landscape reclaimed by nature. We passed by beautiful undisturbed beaches void of the usual markings of an ever encroaching humanity. Pristine and isolated, yet less than 20 miles from one of the largest cities in Southeast Asia.
No Steaming Locomotive
The train was slow and anything but nimble. Not much of the track or train had been upgraded since reopening in 1976, and many of the trains date back to much earlier than that, but it did the job. When it wasn’t curving around mountain cliffs overlooking untouched bays, it was traveling through smaller cities and mountain jungle villages that seemed to just pop up in the window out of a thick green void of nothingness. Poverty existed in noticeable amounts as we trudged through some of the more isolated areas. Though we weren’t exactly on the luxurious Orient Express, the look in the eyes of many we passed told the story of a longing even for these modest accommodations to anywhere but there.
The path was often laden with homes, clothes lines and children on old beat up bicycles that I could literally reach out the window and touch. The train was old, slow and safety wasn’t a high priority, so I was able to hang off the train or out the window to get some amazing photos. Though I learned quickly to always keep at least one eye ahead, I had to tuck in rather quickly once for a tight tunnel entrance, and once or twice had the back of my head smacked with a jungle vine that drug against the lumbering train.
Some of My Better Pictures
Frozen in Time
It was just such an amazing journey. I could have been in 1900 or 2000. A small cart would come by selling boiled eggs, simple noodles, coffee, and maybe a soda if you were lucky. It was another world and an experience I believe is worth a trip to Vietnam alone. Slowly rumbling through ancient pastoral scenes, wilderness and modernity on the old reunification express. It may very well be the highlight of everything I’ve ever seen or done in Asia. A truly memorable and unforgettable experience. But alas our nearly three hour ride is almost over and we must prepare to disembark. For tonight we will dine in the last capital of a lost dynasty, the Imperial city of Huế.
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or Click Here for an awesome, at least I think so, video of our ride on the train.
