Clickety-clack choo-choo

Clickety-clack, Clickety-clack, choo-choo-choose your train wisely! Trains and Champagne. I’m neither an Anorak nor a Trainspotter, but I love the huge beasts: skinny bandy legs, new black lace-up shoes, the dress 6 inches off the floor when kneeling—a very wobbly chin. I'm petrified I’ll cry. Guarding me is a huge grey army trunk.

I nervously clutched a stiffly starched Panama hat. It was me, waiting for the Steam Train to fast-track me to Pretoria and boarding school. That was the beginning of my morbid fascination with trains. Since then, I've taken a few train trips and even dared to throw my Panama hat and a train cushion into the Crocodile River, as one does!  

During my years working in Cape Town, I commuted by train, always sitting in the same seat with the same companions, reading the Cape Times, War and Peace, and everything by Ayn Rand, and smoking like a chimney. I've slept on the Trans Karoo and taken a day trip to Matjiesfontein on the Shosholoza. I found my way around the Underground in London, Lisbon, and Singapore. I've had coal in my eyes on more than one occasion, and poor Precious has been dragged all the way to Simon's Town to see "Jenny," our only remaining locomotive!

Next time I go to Canada, I'd like to take the Trans-Canadian Railway trip. For my next very important birthday, I'm going to take the Rovos Rail from Cape Town to Dar es Salaam! I can't wait to hear the conductor shout "All aboard" and the whistles blowing.

Christine Baker Kline’s Orphan Train, Pelham One Two Three, Agatha Christie’s Death on the Orient Express, and, most recently, The Railway Man by Eric Lomax are some of the books I’ve read and have on my bookshelf, all of which are emotive.

The list of movies and lyrics is, of course, endless. My all-time favourite was Dr. Zhivago, and I have visions of being Lara, standing in the snow, wrapped in fur, waiting to board a Trans-Siberian train. Some of my picks are:

But I’m being sidetracked. We decided to take a round-trip and ride an overnight train from Hanoi to Sa Pa. We’d received conflicting reports from friends who’d taken train trips in Vietnam, so, not to be put off, I did a lot of investigating. I found there are many options, either traveling like the locals or opting for the tourist trains. As often happens in life, one gets what one pays for!

I must confess that our Indian experience taught us to book a coupe instead of a four-berth compartment and to upgrade as much as we could afford. There are many options, and the website clearly outlines them for certain routes. Tickets may be purchased online and will be delivered to our accommodations 24 hours before a trip. This posed a problem, as we would be in Halong Bay on a Junk!

The decision was made for us when we discovered that we needed Vietnamese visas to visit the country and that we needed an invitation from a travel agent. Because our airline tickets had been booked from South Africa, we thought it appropriate to ask a Vietnamese travel agent to handle our rail tickets and one or two other reservations.

Our Vietnamese travel agent was Kool from Blue Sky Travel. She did a sterling job; all we had was an email address, and that’s how we communicated with her. She adjusted our itinerary umpteen times until we were 100% happy. She arranged the necessary visa documentation and made our rail reservations, following our instructions to the letter! Kool even called the Church Boutique Hotel on a Sunday to confirm delivery of the tickets two days before our departure and to confirm that they would be in safekeeping until we needed them.

Several "Tourist Train" companies offer various options, and even some hotels in Sa Pa include a train journey among their specials. It turned out that each company would shunt and hook up to the diesel locomotive due to depart for a specific destination. Our passage was booked on the Frangipani Express.

Passengers are instructed to report to the station one hour before departure and to board once the carriages are prepared. We were pleasantly surprised by the efficiency of the entire system, and once our tickets were checked, we were directed to our carriage. We had requested a coupe, but to our surprise, we were assigned a four-berth compartment, which was very welcoming, and we relished the extra space. Our bunks had been prepared for bedtime, and we were welcomed with flowers, fruit, water, and cool, wet wipes. The facilities were communal but adequate.

Once again, we were impressed by the electrical connections, which enabled us to charge our telephones, iPads, and small laptop (not that we’d use them in the mountains!).

We had a very comfortable night, but I did think the end was near on a couple of occasions as we hurtled along at breakneck speeds. The wide-gauge tracks in India made for a smooth journey, so the narrow-gauge tracks in Vietnam were far more harrowing. Leaving Hanoi in the dark was a tad disappointing, as I realized I might’ve seen the hovels and squatter shacks along the tracks. I had a brief glimpse, and it was astounding and horrifying, as I thought it was unique to India.

During the wee hours, I was woken by an ear-splitting screech and a loud thump that sounded like an explosion. Stupefied, I lay there, waiting for the concertina of carriages (I’ve seen too many movies on this subject). From now on, I think I’ll concentrate on “A Brief Encounter”! Of course, my Precious had set his alarm to wake us in the morning; his timing was a guess and hours too early. I needed my beauty sleep, but I bounced out of bed, tail wagging and rearing to go. Only much later did the attendant come around with delicious Vietnamese coffee and condensed milk.

We passed rice paddies, homesteads, and tiny villages barely visible in the mist as we made our way north into the mountains, giving us a taste of what lay in wait. Sometimes it felt as if I could touch the sidings as the tracks were laid in cuttings through the hills, overgrown with tropical forests and exotic plants.

The journey was over far too soon, and I looked forward to our return trip in two days.

We'd heard that in Dalat we could take a short 10km trip to the small village of Trai Mat in a Russian-engineered "box" car. The station was built in 1932 as an imitation of a station in Deauville, France, and still retains its Art Deco design. The journey is fascinating, offering a glimpse of the countryside and revealing the scale of the flower-cultivation industry. Mountainsides are covered in flowers, particularly chrysanthemums, all grown in hothouses for a constant supply, I suppose. 

We had a two-hour layover in Trai Mat and used the time to rest and walk to the very popular and well-known Pagoda. On our way back to the train, we spotted children walking home from school in their school uniforms, old-fashioned and so typical of the propaganda posters we've seen.

I highly recommend the services of Blue-Sky Travel in Ho Chi Minh City, and do ask for Kool. She's really cool! I'm sorry I never got to meet her when we visited there. Time is always of the essence, and we didn't have the opportunity to do so.  

Vietnam Railways:

While I don't type to the beat of "The Locomotion" as I did at school on my old Olivetti ball-head, I still enjoy the music because it gives you the rhythm of the rails.