Our train finally arrives.
Boarding the replacement train.
The view out the window.
Sunday, April 14, 2024
Our train finally arrives.
Boarding the replacement train.
The view out the window.
Yesterday was the hardest travel day of the trip so far. We didn't have to go all that far. Nha Trang to Hoi An is less than 500km. For some reason both bus and train options are only available either overnight, or very early in the morning.
We decided to book a train which was scheduled to depart at 03:56 and arrive at 13:30. Nine hours sounded doable, and the early morning start was preferable to having to do a full overnight on a bus. Unfortunately it didn't really go to plan.
The train was delayed and didn't depart until nearly an hour after the scheduled time. It then headed north for about 30 minutes before stopping at an unscheduled station where it sat for the next three hours. There was no information about why we weren't moving. We were very lucky to have a tour group sat nearby with a host who went to find out and kept us in the loop. Part of one of the tunnels had collapsed while being worked on.
We were eventually moved onto buses and driven to the other side of the damaged tunnel where we boarded a different train. It was now 10:30 and we had only made it about an hour into the trip. The replacement train carriage wasn't the same as our original and the air conditioning was much weaker which meant that things got very hot during the middle of the day.
We eventually arrived in Da Nang at 18:30, five hours late, and we still had to take a 40 minute taxi to Hoi An. The whole journey took 16 hours and we'd only travelled a distance equivalent to London to Newcastle, or Auckland to Palmerston North.
I don't think I can recommend train travel in Vietnam. The schedules are unhelpful (trains start or end from Hanoi or Saigon and the departure times only really make sense at those locations) which means you'll probably be starting or ending a journey in the middle of the night. The infrastructure is old which means there are lots of speed restrictions where you can watch cars blast past (and road traffic is pretty slow in Vietnam).
Luckily we shouldn't need to do such a painful journey again as we've changed our plans a bit to avoid it. I really like catching trains usually but this was just too much.