Storms over Vietnam

Travel day today. There isn't an awful lot to say. 12 hours of it, give or take, were spent on a train.

Travelling from Hoi An to Danang by taxi, we made it to the train station with plenty of time to spare. The waiting hall was full of soldiers, maybe a company or two. Collecting any group of Vietnamese men of that size, meant only one thing, card games. The waiting hall was more a gambling den, full of extremely animated soldiers, than it was a waiting hall. The trains were the only thing giving it away.

Having boarded the train, the sights out the window began to repeat themselves quite quickly, especially because so much of the countryside was covered in a few metres of muddy brown water, as a result of the heavy rain that the country has had over the past few weeks. That's not to say that there weren't some sights though.

There were cemeteries where the flood waters were lapping at the foot of graves. There were forests of fruit trees, with flood waters staining their lower branches. And there were plenty if water buffalo wallowing in the great brown river that had temporarily invaded their paddy fields.

Having seen more than enough Vietnamese train food pass us by on previous train trips, we decided that today would be the time to give it a go. There is nothing particularly fancy about the train breakfast/lunch/dinner, but it is something that the locals quite enjoy. It's pretty inexpensive by European standards too. And so we shared a meal of barbequed chicken pieces, tofu, sauteed cabbage and rice. It was quite delicious, and though it was served out of the most ratty looking catering gear, we both are yet to feel any gastro-intestinal issues. This is always a good thing.

Arriving into Nha Trang about 12 hours after leaving Danang, we ran the gauntlet of taxi drivers touting for business, got ourselves into the cab that we wanted, and headed to our hotel. After a quick check-in, it was time to head out for some dinner, at a local Indian restaurant. After a lot of Vietnamese it was time to for something slightly different.

First impressions of Nha Trang - it's a run down, budget version of Surfers' Paradise. with a large number of Russian visitors, judging by all the signage in cyrillic.

More news on Nha Trang to come.Read more