The rain in Vietnam falls mainly on Nha Trang; or so it seemed.
Our last day there we did have grandiose plans of swimming and then lounging in the shade all day, but we were almost confined to barracks by the precipitation. It didn’t actually rain for the whole day; if I said that it did I’d be telling big big lies, but it rained very regularly and very heavily.
We went all the way next door for breakfast, and pottered around the hotel room, waiting for it to be lunch time so that we could go and have tropical shakes again.
Check out was midday but that only meant that we had to move our bags into the other room by then, and leave them there until 5pm. It was a bit sad that what we really wanted for lunch was pizza instead of something properly Vietnamese, although I guess the sakes count as Vietnamese, don’t they? In the restaurant there was what you might call a ‘portly gentleman’ from the Gold Coast talking at some German tourists who had long since ceased to be interested what ever he was talking about. But they were distracting him from bothering us…
It’s difficult to describe just how good these tropical shakes were; one day I will learn to make one properly, and then people will come around to visit, and we will set them down and show them what we mean.
We took our time over lunch and then wandered over to the beach again for one more look, although we could see more clouds appropriating the sky and didn’t really want a repeat of yesterday’s debacle where we had to grab all our beach stuff and run to stand under the pavilion. I liked the beach at Hoi An far more anyway, because there were a few buildings around the waterfront but not many, and because the sand was not so grainy.
On the way back to the hotel we stopped for important things like a chocolate bar and a bag of M & M’s to take on the train to Saigon with us, while Catherine spent about ten minutes bargaining with a lady of some sets of postcards. In the end she did get her price, and set one of them back to her current place of employment with a caption on the back saying not much more than ‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’, then a pause for breath, and then Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha-ha’. And so forth.
Having no room other than the luggage room to loaf around in after lunch, when the rain came along again, then stopped for a bit, then came again, we loafed around in the lobby, on the hard wooden chairs. I wrote some travel journals, and posted them, and resolved to try and write more quickly next time.
At 5.30pm we were catching a taxi back to the station for our final overnight train, of this trip and of our entire trip, which would be pulling into Saigon at …. (wait for it)… 3.30am.
Hooray!
Come 5pm I went to the little supermarket across the road and got some snacks for the trip, like a packet of biscuits marked ‘Tiger Energy biscuits’, and some more bottles of water, and something which had a picture of TIm Tams on the front of the packet but was really just a weak imitation. 5.30 arrived early and we didn’t really have our bags properly sorted when the taxi arrived to just pick up and go, but with a bit of extra fiddling around we got into the taxi in several connected pieces, and arrived at the train station pleased to find our train already waiting. We weren’t late; it was early.
And it was brand NEW!
Yes, no kidding. I got on first of the group and had to pinch myself when the door labelled ‘auto door’ did actually open automatically.
‘Am I still in Viet Nam?’, I said to myself. ‘Yes. I must be.’ The whole train was new. The beds in our cabin were new. The corridor and the lights were new. The TV in our cabin was new, and so were the wood shavings around the screw mounting that held the TV on. The speaker playing awful music was new, but it got old, and Adam reached up and turned off the music to the whole carriage. I didn’t hear anyone complain.
Each cabin had a room service menu, and some little cacti in a pot on the windowsill, and a telephone! Unthinkable! And we would have to get off halfway through the night…. why? Anyway, we were too busy luxuriating in the newness to care, until the phone rang. Catherine answered it, but all she could hear was someone giggling. Then Tuan came walking along from his cabin, still giggling. Turns out the bit of laminated paper which we thought was instructions for calling room service was actually just telling you how to call other cabins… so he thought he’d give it a go.
We seriously contemplated, and at one point even put into action, a plan to just stay up all night so that we could enjoy the new new new train cabin for as long as possible. The only way we could do this was by playing cards, but I was already tired from a rubbish night’s sleep the night before, and kept making odd mistakes like putting a 7 on top of an 8, which you can’t do, or an 8 on top of a 7, which you can’t do. Adam cracked first and went to sleep, and we all followed on at about 10.30pm.
Greg
