Leaving town on the Reunifcation Express

I'm waiting for my bus to Quy Nhon, so I figured I'd post some journal excerpts.

Xmas eve in Saigon was quiet, so I resolved to try to make it to Nha Trang for Xmas night.

On Xmas morning I slept through my alarm, so when I woke up I was in a bit of a hurry to get things done. I raced to the Chinese embassy by motorcycle taxi, where I collected my passport and visa and paid in US dollars, the only currency they'd accept. You know you've been away from home for a while when your own country's currency looks and feels fake.

After the embassy I stopped at a Vietnamese bakery for a baguette, a pair of egg tarts, and what appeared to be some sort pistachio cake, I'm not sure. I then hurried back to the train booking office to buy a ticket on the Reunification Express to Nha Trang. It's a 7 hour ride, and the soft seat ticket was $10.

I tried to take pictures on the train, but the windows were dusty and they didn't turn out very well. So I wrote down a lot of observations and made some sketches:

The huge expanse of blue sky that I'd hoped to see in Saigon, but did not, is here, complete with fluffy white clouds.

There are legions of trees in rows going back from the train as far as I can see, and they've been continuing for miles. They're each tapped at human height, so I assume they're rubber or something.

There's a kid in an Adidas shirt hip-deep in a rice paddy. Rice paddies are the greenest things I've ever seen. As I observed in Thailand, I think there should be a Crayola color, Paddy Green, and it'd easily be the brightest crayon in the box.

The soil is a rich red color where it's bare of vegetation, but it's not bare very much. There are what seem to be baby banana trees in plantations. The trees are no more than 5 feet tall, but each has a cluster of yellow hanging from them. There are two types of houses here: shacks and porticoed, collonaded shacks. Some trees have brown leaves hanging from their branches and surrounding them on the ground. Winter in Vietnam? In other places the ground is a grey-pink color. I'm not sure if there's a pattern to the soil or what it means. (I later figured out that the brown trees and the grey soil are the result of burning to clear land. There were whole stretches of countryside on fire.)

Banana plantations stretch to the horizon after the hills pass and the ground flattens. The ground gets wavy again. Dotting the rows of banana trees are larger trees, standing like scarecrows or sentinels above the rest. The sentinel trees have fans of spiky leaves. I was already thinking about how tropical flora looked prehistoric, and these trees look like the back and tail of a stegosaurus. (My journal here has a sketch of the tree and a sketch of a stegosaurus).

Hills seem to come out of nowhere. This one is rocky, with patches of black. It's terraced about halfway up one side, but the other side is overgrown with vegetation. (Now there's a sketch of what the shacks look like, on stilts and the slanted metal roof also functioning as the back wall.) We cross a bridge and pass a much more gently rolling hill. This one isn't studded with rocks, and there's a patchwork of crops all the way up. White birds, in pairs, fly above the orchards. This is apparently more banana country than rice.

Actually, I'm not so sure those are bananas. The train slowed down, and now I can see that the yellow clusters are blowing in the wind, which bananas would be too heavy for. I think they may actually be coffee plants, but what do I know? I took a picture of one up close while the train was moving slowly, so I'll look it up later.

(At this point I figured out that there was a dining car with windows that opened, so I spent the hour before sunset hanging out there and taking photos. They also served excellent and cheap food in the car. I got roast chicken over rice, stir-fried bean sprouts, and soup all for $1.30.)

I keep seeing things that make me think about the war. The railroad I'm on was bombed, of course, and so was every bridge in the country, so each one we pass over is new. Every time I see someone missing a limb I wonder whether it happened during the war. Or maybe it was afterwards, as he was plowing his fields and triggered an unexploded shell or mine. Maybe it was just an accident, but it makes me think. On the motorbike today, at a stoplight, I looked over and saw a man with a heavily scarred face, and realized he would have been about 17 or 18 during the war.

And here, now, on this train, I see how beautiful this country is. As in Thailand, the colors seem so intense. Maybe they actually are more intense, something about the sunlight near the equator. But I don't really have words to describe the colors here, so hopefully some of the pictures I took will convey them.

The train arrived in Nha Trang about 2 minutes late, much to the credit of the Vietnamese train system. I actually only knew it was my stop because of the timing- there was no other indication. I decided to hoof it down to the backpacker area from the train station. I had planned to take a motorbike taxi, but they annoyed me as I walked out of the station, so I kept going. It's funny how that works. I'm so anti-tout and anti-heckling that even when I want the service they're offering, I'm still put off by it.