All Aboard the Night Train.

It sounds so romantic: we're taking the night train to Sapa.

First a little backstory. I've been teaching a class in technical English to a group of safety engineers for the state railway design bureau. They're a great group and they keep telling me: "You must take a ride on Vietnam railway."

Turns out that this is sort of like one of those deals where you taste something and make a terrible face and say,"This tastes awful, try it."

When it came time for my students to give their presentations on railway safety issues, they had a litany: the rolling stock is at least twenty years old, there's no money to do proper maintenance on the rolling stock, track, bridges, etc., maintenance and safety staff are not all properly trained or motivated, safety procedures are haphazardly conceived and enforced, the track has widening gaps between the rails, the signaling system is all mechanical instead of electronic and prone to failure, and "people have no sense."

I had trouble understanding what they meant by that last one, thinking they couldn't mean it literally. But they could: "People throw rocks at the train. People remove the crossing gates and get hit by the train. People put things on the tracks that cause the train to derail. Sometimes the signal doesn't work, so the engineer has to keep blowing the horn to clear the crossing, but people keep trying to cross on their motorbikes just in front of the train (In Vietnam? No way!) People have no sense."

The reason that there is a night train to Sapa is that the railway system is in such disrepair that the train can only safely travel about 15 - 20 miles per hour. So the 200 mile trip takes about 8.5 hours. We were told that our train was 26 years old. This was mentioned as a feature. But we were assured that it had been upgraded with Western toilets!

So the romance was a little tattered to begin with. Then there were the accommodations. Only a few of the trains to Sapa have air-conditioning, which is clearly a must. Then one must decide: hard sleeper or soft sleeper (basically, do you want to spend the night on a wooden bench or a thin mattress)? We are not yet so acclimated to Vietnam that we are comfortable sleeping on wood, so we chose soft. It's four to a cabin, so we were cautiously looking forward to meeting our cabin mates, hoping to avoid children, farters, and snorers, in that order.

In the event, our guide picked us up with almost no time to spare, and we raced through Monday evening traffic, then sprinted through the sweltering hodgepodge of trains, people, taxis, and hawkers to our train, attaining our startlingly cool compartment with just five minutes to spare.

We were glad that Buffalo Tours provided us with a guide at the
last minute, because otherwise we would never have figured our where
our train was in time.

Once we found the train, the crowds seemed to melt away.

Our spacious cabin. Dibs on the top bunk.

A cool and happy monkey.

The bunks were hard and narrow, the journey slow, but otherwise uneventful. We had only one cabin mate: a young Vietnamese man who spoke good English and neither snored nor farted for the whole trip.

P.