Sayonara Saigon

We were to be leaving Saigon at 7:00pm that evening, on the sleeper train bound for Da Nang. Before then, though, we had a spot of business to attend to. As STA had not been able to match the quote we had seen online for the flight from Xi’An to Kathmandu we had gone to book it that night, only to find that the one flight that was of an use to us (only one stop-over and 9 hours in total, rather than 2 stops and 19 or 21 hours journey time) had gone. We had looked at the other options but none of them seemed plausible, and flying from another city, or flying straight into Delhi didn’t seem like a good plan either. So we had to act fast to make sure that we could get out of China, as we didn’t want to go through the visa process again by telling them that our plans had changed. So the best we could do was book the flight for the day after the one we wanted, and hopefully book another night in the hotel in Xi’An, and hope the Chinese government don’t find out.

So with all that done and dusted we left the hotel and headed for the Water Puppet show. We didn’t know exactly where it was, but had heard that it was somewhere near the War Remnants Museum that we had been in the day before. When we arrived the place was closing for lunch (yeah!) so we had a walk round the streets nearby and found the cathedral. We also found the Post Office too, but that wasn’t as majestic.

Ho Chi Minh cathedral, with traffic

We grabbed a late lunch and bought supplies for the train journey, and managed to find someone who could sell us a kicky-thing. We plumped for the cheaper ($1 rather than $2) one as we didn’t know how good we would be at it, and didn’t want to waste loads of money (a dollar). We managed to find a relatively quiet spot in the park, essentially so we wouldn’t embarrass ourselves in front of the locals. We only got two kicks into the game before we were interrupted by two girls walking past that offered to show us how it was done. So, with the teams now two on two we began kicking the kicky-thing, with varying degrees of success. Soon, another passer-by fancied his chances and joined in with us. It was good fun, for a while, but it was just too hot to be jigging around so much, especially as we couldn’t get a shower before getting the train. With a lot of effort put into the game and a reasonable amount of sweat absorbed into the t-shirt, we sat down with our new-found friends and chatted away.

Me and my minions, before the rest joined us

The day before James had taken a walk through the park after his kip and sat down on a bench. Legend has it that students will come up to you and talk to you in order to practice their English. This had happened to him yesterday, and it happened again today. Whilst having a quiet discussion with our kicky-thing buddies they were keen to ask us about the English language and English culture. We responded, naturally, but had been split into two distinct groups – me, with Amy and Kendo, and James with Fi. As we sat there on the benches, more and more people walking past took it upon themselves to stand by us and join in, or simply listen to, the conversations that we were having. Soon we had about 20 people gathered round us, each of us having our own separate groups having our own conversations. After 5 minutes or so it seemed to me that James had a bigger group than me, but after about 20 minutes I heard him remark, “hey, it looks like he’s got more people than me!” to which I just smiled and carried on discussing Unilever, the people on the money and English vs Vietnamese marriages. It was brilliant fun, and even though we knew we needed to leave by about 5:00pm it was almost half past by the time we left our minions and headed back to the hotel.

James, with HIS minions

We grabbed a taxi to the train station, and it was rush hour so it took a stupid amount of time to get there when it was within walking distance. Once we had identified the train we should be climbing onto we found our carriage and dumped our bags in our booth. It seemed pretty basic. Most worrying of all was the fact that there was no curtain to pull across, so we would be out in the open with our two bunk-mates, as it were. They were still to turn up, and they would be up top as we had specifically booked the lower ones, with more room.

Coach 9......brilliant

As James had gone outside to wander round and take some photos an elderly woman entered the booth and sat down on James’s bunk. It seemed that she was being dropped off by her family and that someone, presumably, would be picking her up at the other end of the journey. Even so it looked like she would be above Jimbo, which seemed implausible given her age. Plus, we had been hoping for some more young German girls like we had got in Thailand. Our other bunk-mate turned up soon after; a young Vietnamese girl who spoke very little, if any, English. As we sat there, we realised that we should let the elderly woman take a lower bunk as it wasn’t easy to get up top. We managed to get the message across to her and she seemed very grateful. She didn’t offer to pay the extra for the lower bunk, but that was fine, it was OK by us.

We settled in for the long journey – leaving at 7:00pm and arriving into Da Nang at 12:00 noon, hopefully. The old lady went to sleep soon after we left the station, as did the other girl in our booth. As we (me and James) typed up blogs and read the Lonely Planet guides I noticed something move out of the corner of my eye. But I couldn’t identify it. Maybe it was one of those weird eye things you get that you can’t look at properly, you know the ones. But then I saw something move again, in a different spot to before, and there it was……the head of a little mouse, popping up from underneath the table. It had climbed up the luggage in its search for food and only found my wandering eye. I informed James of our extra bunk-mate and we moved luggage round (quietly, so as not to wake the others) but we couldn’t see it. It meant that we shoved as much stuff that we could manage up top rather than leave it down below as the last thing we wanted was for a little mouse to munch through the lining of our rucksacks or set up home in one of my shoes!