Hell Train to Hue

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Welcome to my nightmares.

This particular nightmare takes place on the night train from Ha Noi to Hue.

I get to the train station in Ha Noi an hour before the train is due. A train pulls in just as I arrive. But where is it going? I can't quite figure it out so I just give my ticket to the conductor and he lets me on. Must be right then.

My ticket has number 22 on it (my birthday number and also today's date!) but the rooms are numbered from one to six. Eventually I work out that it's actually my bed number that's 22 and I have to look into the rooms (as the room number is not printed on the ticket) to find out exactly where bed 22 is hiding.

I open the door of the cabin and find my bed. It's a six bed cabin and mine is in the middle which, given the choice, I would have gone with anyway. The top bunks are practically touching the ceiling and everyone sits on the bottom bunks. Middle bunk is safest, the biggest drama is the person on the bunk above stepping on your foot on the way up/down.

A Vietnamese man walks in, nods and throws his stuff onto the other middle bunk.

Within about a minute of being on board, the very loud Vietnamese music begins. It blasts not only from both speakers within my cabin but also from the speakers just outside. I find two Americans outside my door seeking protection from their speakers as apparently, I'm lucky to be in the place where the speakers are the quietest.

Then two very tattooed, pierced-up Swedish girls enter and take top bunks. They're actually really nice and look just as perplexed as I do when it all kicks off later in the journey.

I get into my bunk after peeling off an array of long black hairs from my sheet and begin to read my book.

Beep. Beep beep. Beep beep beep beep beep. What is that? Ah got it. It's the Vietnamese guy texting. He hasn't figured out how to turn the sound off and I don't think the noise bothers him too much.

After texting for around five minutes, he has quite the number of phone calls to make. And he is no exception to the volume of the Vietnamese. Who are even louder when they are on the phone.

Okay, so this isn't actually too bad. There are only four of us in here.

And then the train stops.

An old woman walks in and shoves her bags under the table. Then two more women with a child each make their way in.

How many people are there? Right now, I'm counting seven adults and two children in my six bed cabin.

Then the old woman left. So six adults and two children. It's getting a little claustrophobic in here. At least the door is open.

BANG. Door slams shut. And stays shut.

The man gets up, leaves and returns with hot food that smells uncannily like my dog's food and shuts the door behind him. Wow, six adults, two children, one dog food (no partridge in a pear tree (yet)) and it's smelling just great.

He eats his food and texts with the beeps for about half an hour and then I can see him slowly drifting off to sleep. Ahhhh no more beeping. But wait... he's snoring. I don't know which is worse.

Then one of the children (the one who is about two years old) starts screaming, not in a crying way, more like an excited, high pitched, shrill kind of way and the Vietnamese man is awake again. And this time, decides to play a very, very repetitive driving game on his phone. On, of course, full volume so that he can hear it above the screaming child. I really want to grab it and throw it out of the window. The phone that is, not the child.

The baby is now singing and I think 'I can probably sleep through this, being champion sleeper and all' but then the coughing begins. The other child is a little sick and doesn't seem to be able to stop coughing. Eventually though, he falls asleep and for reasons beyond me, his mother wakes him up and continues to wake him up every time he falls asleep for the next two hours.

The man has finally stopped playing on his phone and has drifted back off into a peaceful, snore-filled sleep. And the snores are getting louder. And it is getting so unbelievably hot in here. I may kill someone.

The baby's singing has become quite loud. The singing turns into screeching and the screeching turns into screaming and then comes the crying. Well at least she's woken up everyone in the cabin who was asleep. I was getting a little jealous of them.

Oh. What is that smell? Smells like smoke! It is smoke. Whilst it is no smoking in the cabins, it is perfectly fine to smoke just outside the cabin allowing the smoke to drift back into the room. Wonderful.

The baby sings for about two hours more and then, finally, falls to sleep. And so do I.

I wake up around 5.30am because of the heat in the room. I'm burning up! Need air.

So I stand outside (outside in the corridor) with the smokers. Not exactly the kind of air I was after but the window is open and I stick my head out. As I do so, a plastic bag and other plastic debris comes flying passed my face. Huh?

Then the conductors walk down the isle picking up rubbish from the floor and chucking it straight out the window. All sorts of plastic and polystyrene fly out and then it strikes me just how many piles of rubbish there are along the tracks, in the countryside, all the way to Hue.

One of the women in my cabin comes out with a big bag of rubbish and out the window it goes. Poor Vietnam.

Then a man with a trolley full of food comes hurtling down towards me and the woman with the kid. I let her into the cabin first seeing as she has a baby in her arms and all but the man with the trolley is in such a rush to get where ever it is he's going that, quite forcefully, he pushes me into the cabin and has enough time to turn to me and says 'hot café?' I don't think so, no.

I jump back onto my bed and the conductor, with a real sense of urgency runs into the room and shouts 'HUE?'

'Yes, yes I'm getting off at Hue.'

'Okay. COME OUT.'

So I start to gather all of my belongings and he's back.

'HUE. COME OUT.'

Yeah, alright. Give me a sec to get my backpack on.

I was the first person off the train and had to stand outside with the man from guest house waiting for the rest of the guests to get off the train. It was ten minutes before the train left so why I had to disembark quite so quickly, I will never know

I think leaving that train has been one of the happiest moments of my whole life. I reached my hotel, sat down on my bed and was out like a light.

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