Weather now becoming much cooler, I finally make it to the train station in Hanoi. The train trip was going to have me making my way through the dense tropical moutain ranges of Vietnam through midnight tropical skies onto an early arrival in Nanning, China the next day.
The trip was quiet, hardly anyone on the train- which was surprising. This was common in the region, I was told by some Chinese guards speaking broken English. Enjoy the train to myself and a few others- I was to get a rude awakening a few weeks later!
I had a great sleep in these soft sleepers, with the train maintaining a speed of about 145km/h. Super quiet, the trip was uneventful except when someone was hit by the train, Vietnam side of the trip. I remember the train quickly stopped at a village intersection- then seeing men on the platform running to what I thought was them getting on the train, or quickly exchanging/picking up goods (usually alcohol), but it got weird when I then saw women and children running after the men, followed by the town dogs following after them!!! It seemed like every man and his dog were running towards the front of the train (no pun intended lol)…We sat there for 45 mins. I thought this is bizarre, usually we would pick people up and then leave again. Thats when I looked out the train towards the front and saw people huddled along the track. I asked and was told that someone was hit off of his moped- Vietnamese have a habit of really riding anywhere, anyway and anytime. I feel sorry for the guy, but last I heard he was still alive. All was fine within the hour and we resumed our steady climb up into the old jungle mountains of Vietnam.
Slowly made my way into China and the more North we went, the more poorer and dirtier and colder it became.We arrived in Nanning very early in the morning- the morning was damp, cold and drizzling.
I had noticed some Mongolian ladies board on the previous night and up until that point, I had felt embarrassed of the amount of luggage I had accompanying me on my trip- that was until I saw what those ladies had. I had no idea what they had, but it was at least 20 bags of luggage, piled up all along the passageway of the train. And it turned out that I met these two Mongolian ladies- well we didnt actually ‘meet’ per se, because both of them didnt speak a word of English but they had befriended me in a kind of silent way to follow them out of the train station (5am) to get ‘breakfast’ the following morning in Nanning. Hummm well. We crossed the road and made our way to a corner snack-breakfast shop where commuters came by on their way to work to get some food and then quickly disappeared into the shadows of daily grind.
The Mongol ladies kindly bought a selection of food, fried dumplings of some sort, boiled rice served in water (a savoury type of Chinese cereal??!) and some other deep fried vegetable stick things for the 3 of us. Im not a morning person by nature in my later years, and the thought of eating all this greasy thick heavy food at 5am was way beyond my squirmish levels. They chowed it down and encouraged me to also, but I kindly refused and just nibbled on some fried vegetable. We then also stocked up on train supplies, they bought some sugared-coconut shaved rice crisps, and this fruit juice +milk combo drink. I thought Id try it also, and it was a weird taste to start, but eventually it grew on me and became a daily staple throughout my stay in China….and in the end I was sad to part ways with it!
Bellies fulls, supplies stocked up, we hobbled back over to the train station sipping boiling hot water (custom thing in China) and feeding these sugar rice crisps to a family of koi fish in a pond outside of the station and off we went bound for Beijing.
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