Tam Coc to Hoi An

My train wasn’t until 5:46 pm , so I had a chunk of the day to kill in Tam Coc. The homestay very nicely offered to organise a taxi for me, so I essentially had until 4 pm to wander around.

I went back to the cat cafe, and was mostly treated as a terrain object by tiny kittens.

Sometime over the course of the day, the proprietor of the next place contacted me to ask whether I would like a car to pick me up from the train station; Naturally I said “yes please”, because I would be arriving at 8:30 in the morning having probably not slept very well on an overnight train.

I got back to the homestay in plenty of time, to find that the taxi was already there, so got to the station even earlier than my already somewhat paranoid arrival time. I was actually there early enough to hear all of the announcements and witness the boarding process of the previous train, so I had some idea of what the experience was going to be like.

Car 8, Bed 11. I was the only male in the compartment, so tried to be nonthreatening.

How to sum up the trip? Glad I did it, don’t want to do it again.

This was a first class ‘soft sleeper’, which I think means you get a mattress and pillow and a blanket and three people to share the compartment with. ‘Soft’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that description.

There was a sign by the toilet telling people not to squat on the seat/bowl, and I’d thought that there was no chance of that given how much the train was rocking. Well, I was wrong, there were shoe tread marks on the edge of the bowl.

There was DRAMA in the compartment, and I stayed the hell out of it as much as I could.

• Older French lady wanted an early night, and asked that the lights be turned down at maybe 9pm
• Older Vietnamese lady had a succession of calls on speaker. Also had her probable husband who was in another compartment visiting pretty regularly
• French lady got pretty annoyed over the next few hours
• I stayed out of it, because I didn’t want to be dragged in as the other foreigner, and neither side were really covering themselves in glory there; 9pm in a shared space is a pretty unrealistic time to want lights out, but older Vietnamese lady was being damn inconsiderate
• Older Vietnamese Lady eventually left the train in the late evening, which may explain why she didn’t really care about sleeping time

I slept a bit. Not for long periods, and I was not comfortable by the end of it, but I wasn’t just lying awake hating everything all night.

Did get to see some countryside, because the train stopped a lot on final approach to Da Nang, arriving maybe 45 minutes late? Probably letting other trains past or something?

Disembarking at Da Nang was delightfully chaotic; Get off onto the platform, then walk across the other tracks to the station building.

Happily the driver was still there, and it’s nice to be able to completely bypass all of the taxi folks & home in on the sign with your name on it. I nodded off a lot on the drive to Hoi An. The driver I think spoke almost no English, so communication was of the form of showing me the destination he had & waiting for a nod or thumbs up. He did point out the alley I needed to go down to get to the homestay, similar to the plain Hanoi where there’s no vehicle access to the front of the property.

I have a room to myself again, because why not?

I had a much needed shower, and went for a walk, more to stretch my legs & move around than anything else, though breakfast/lunch did happen. It might be disagreeing with me in a minor way, so I’m keeping an eye on that.

Eventually had to take an afternoon nap just to remain functional, but then I wandered back through the Old Town to the river, where lights & lanterns were happening.

After I’d seen my fill and avoided enough “please buy this thing” folks, I headed back. Sleep time.