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M and I had to get back to Saigon and thence to Canada. As this was the time of year when students were travelling en masse, there was no room on the famous Reunification Express, which has been running non-stop (a forty-hour journey) between Hanoi and Saigon since 1976, three years before Paul Theroux wrote about it so grumpily The Great Railway Bizarre. We would have to make our way by stages — a couple of big leaps if possible, rather than several smaller ones. The prospect was not entirely unpleasant. As Vietnam is a tall, skinny country, virtually all its trains (like Chile’s) run on a north-south axis and usually come with a view of the sea at least part of the way. Also, the fares are quite low. Prices fluctuate, but let’s put it this way: if you can stand to sit in a noisy jam-packed coach the entire way (as we were not — not this time), you can theoretically travel almost a thousand kilometres for seventy-five thousand dong, about five U.S. dollars, at least in the cheaper monsoon season when the temperatures get damn close to forty degrees except during the couple of hours a day when rain comes down hard enough to wash out roads.

So it was that we were on the overnight train to Hué. It was made up of eleven passenger coaches painted Soviet railway green and one nearly paintless freight car, pulled by a bright red diesel locomotive. The passage of 850 kilometres was scheduled to take twelve and a half hours. That isn’t a poor showing given that that the train, nominally an express, isn’t especially fast. Vietnam’s narrow-gauge track limits speed and the train frequently slows and even stops dead for significant periods, waiting on sidings for slightly quicker ones to pass.

For a socialist society, Vietnam maintains a perplexing class system on its trains. Despite Highway 1, the coast road going the whole length of the country, trains are still the primary means of moving people and stuff between the south and the north. During the French and American wars, both insurgents and Westerners were forever trying to sabotage rail traffic in each other’s sectors. The Viet Minh and later the Viet Cong proved effective at this, planting agents within the workforce at key points. For today’s traveller, the basic distinctions are between coach seats and berths on the one hand and between Hard and Soft on the other. In the simplest possible terms, you could say that coach passengers sit and berth people recline, that Hard tickets imply sleeping fans while Soft suggests air con. In practice, the matter is more complicated, particularly as regards population density, food quality, and basic hygiene. For this first leg of our discontinuous trip down the length of Vietnam, M and I were going Soft berth, top of the line.

In the commotion of settling in and preparing to get under way, a Vietnamese woman poked her head in to ask if her child could come look at the foreigners. We willingly obliged. The compartments are designed like those on old European trains and decorated in washroom green. One difference between a first-class sleeper and a second is that the former has a large window. Whereas in second class all you see from an upper berth is the blur of grass and the ends of railway ties, in the first-class equivalent you can look out at the life you are passing. All through Hanoi and its suburbs, houses and shops extend to the edge of the right-of-way. As the train slowly rattled past, we saw families in their nightclothes watching television. Even in Hanoi, however, the sprawl has an outer edge, and well before we ourselves were ready for lights-out we were deep in a rural reality.

Vietnamese trains move much like the geckos you sometimes find onboard. They lie deceptively still, resting and perhaps thinking. Then they frantically dart across a short distance. The process is repeated at intervals so irregular that their enemies in the wild can never predict their movements. Between major cities the rail timetables are crowded. At any given moment there’s always a southbound train, designated by S and two or three digits, or a northbound one, with the N prefix, leaving in thirty minutes or so. In earlier days, the stations were full of hissing steam engines, like the one built in 1945 that is preserved outside the station in Danang. Steam locomotives are still used sometimes for freight, especially for shunting round the yards, as in China. Cambodia was the last place I was aware of that had used steam to move passengers.

Although the Vietnamese engines are relatively up to date, some of the rolling stock is fascinatingly decrepit. It looks even more so when it’s burdened by overcrowding at peak times. In the parlour cars, passengers often stand or sit in the aisles and hang out the windows. In the Pullman cars, large numbers of Vietnamese, previously unacquainted with one another, share berths, two and even three to a narrow one-person bed. The trains were especially crowded when we were there. Yes, because so many students were barging up and down the countryside.

A distressing feature of the trains is the Vietnamese pop music piped throughout. Occupants of individual compartments can turn it down and sometimes off in their own spaces, but the noise spills over from the corridors, leaving the air as heavily sound-polluted as before. The stuff is kept on for hours after sensible people have dropped off to sleep. It comes on again at 0530 or 0600 hours at the latest, blasting everyone back to wakefulness. Only for a few hours during the night are the songs turned off. This is perverse, because it ensures that no one will be awake to enjoy the comparative peacefulness of these interludes.

In the darkness somewhere, we passed Dong Ha and the Ben Hai River, the boundary between North and South Vietnam imposed by the Geneva Accord of 1954. The famous Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) was reckoned from an imaginary line drawn down the centre of the river. When U.S. forces supplanted French ones, the DMZ became heavily militarized indeed. To the extent that the American War had battle lines at all, this is where the American front lines were, facing the river, looking north to the origin of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with which so much U.S. policy was concerned. That morning when the speakers came on and threw us out of bed, cursing, we had to scramble to get our gear together and get off the train, which was stopped at Hué’s station for only a few minutes.

After waiting in Hué for a day or more, we were about to resume the southbound trip by getting to Nha Trang. We realized we were in for a dispiriting time when our train simply didn’t show up. Other trains, with later departure times shown on the timetable, came and went, and we were left shifting our weight from foot to foot. Enquiring elicited nothing because we don’t speak a word of Vietnamese, but also because railway personnel seem to believe that the schedule is a divine reality, not an estimate or a guideline, subject to revision. To question the schedule is simply not done; to point out, politely, that the schedule may be mistaken is to transgress some inviolable etiquette. Through intermediaries, we finally learned that our train was late because the whole affair had been expropriated by the army. Sure enough, the station began filling with officers dripping with braid and carrying cheap plastic briefcases full of relevant paperwork. Once their documents were processed, their train, which I suspect had been loitering just out of sight on a siding, slunk into view, sheepishly, I thought. It quickly departed with a full load of mid-level personnel, for this was neither a VIP train nor a troop train, but something in between, bound where and for what purpose we couldn’t tell. Ours followed, even more shamefacedly, in about an hour and a half. It was a poor substitute.

For one thing, it was second class. The locomotive was identical to the one on our original Hanoi train, but the carriages were even more battered. They were more primitive-looking somehow, with metal grilles in the windows instead of glass. Even out on the platform, the smell from inside the carriages got into our nostrils. It was dark now, and the night promised to be a long one. Our assigned compartment was the nearest one to the squat toilet. We weren’t certain whether this was a plus or a minus. Because the spaces in the grilles were big enough to admit a small hand, we had to sleep with our feet facing the windows and stash all our gear up by our heads, using our spare clothes as pillows.

We were sharing a compartment with a young English couple. When the male half, who had drawn the lower bunk, sat down, he noticed insects that seemed to resent the intrusion. He got up and pulled back the thin mattress to find the wooden surface underneath alive with bug life. He went off, bracing himself against the bulkheads of the pitching car, to find someone to complain to, but returned only with a fresh set of bed linen, recently washed, but still greasy to the touch. He settled in for a while, but grumbled loudly. Then he hit on the idea of climbing up top, to pass the journey with his girlfriend (as though her bed wasn’t infested — he must have reasoned that the insects weren’t the climbing or flying varieties). As I lay there in the top berth across from them, feeling relatively secure (M and I had done as the guidebooks suggest and brought our own sheets in which to wrap ourselves), I couldn’t help seeing them facing each other in the lotus position, playing cards. I dozed off for a bit and when I woke, the friendly hand of cards had turned to foreplay. I tried to get back to sleep. For various reasons, this wasn’t easy.

In the slot-like aisle between the two tiers of beds was an all-purpose table. It was supposed to lie flat against the wall until needed, when a hook could be unlatched to let it swing out and a leg would descend to support it. The latch was broken and the damn thing banged against the wall at every curve in the track, however slight. I tried everything I could think of to fix it, including padding the underside with clothing to deaden the noise and stacking all the backpacks on the floor underneath to keep it in the fully extended position. Nothing worked. What’s more, people kept barging into the compartment unannounced: cops with red collar-tabs and high-peaked caps, conductors demanding to see our tickets once again, hawkers selling really dreadful food at exorbitant prices. M and I arrived somewhat bedraggled after yet another twelve-hour trip.

Days passed before we were willing to risk train travel again, and by then our luck, it seemed, had turned. We were ready to take the train from Nha Trang to Saigon. This time, the hours weren’t quite so gruelling. The train was intended to arrive at 0400 hours after departing at about dinner time. Here we learned a valuable lesson. There’s a point beyond which it doesn’t matter what category of ticket you buy. What matters is the age and condition of the train, which is purely a question of the luck of the draw. This time the cars were clean and the compartment had once been decorated and instead of Vietnamese pop tunes we got a documentary — not too long — about the history of Saigon. The colour scheme was a bluish mauve. There was glass in the window and curtains over the glass.

Only once did things look as though they might turn on us. M had the top bunk and I was in the other top one, across from her. Down below were two New Zealanders who didn’t come in until late, as they were off partying in another coach. Behind M’s head when she lay down was a luggage storage area with double doors. One of the doors kept working its way loose and gently banging her on the skull. Remembering the table from hell, I tried several times to tie the two door handles together, using, for example, one of my bootlaces; nothing would hold. She was about to sleep facing the other way, with feet instead of her head in the line of danger, when an idea struck me: a condom. I got out the only one I had and knotted it tightly around the handles. It gave a bit on sharp bends but was elastic enough to spring right back into place, silently. The fact that it was the lubricated kind made it easy to tie as emergency hardware, though, as I might have foreseen, this also meant that it gradually worked its way loose as we slept. When this happened and the doors flung themselves open, striking M on the cranium, the condom flew up in the air and landed, we thought, on or in the sleeping bag of the Kiwi woman down below. While I held the doors together manually, M had to inquire of the not-yet-quite-asleep fellow passenger. “Excuse me,” she said. “Our condom seems to have come loose. I think it might have gone into your bedding. Would you mind checking for us, please?

“Bugger!” said the New Zealander. “Now I’ve heard everything.”

I was mugged by the realization that we had just become the travel story she’d be telling people back home in Auckland. Fortunately, she didn’t know our names.

Noel Coward said that the melody and lyrics of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” just “popped into my head” during a trip from Hanoi to Saigon. Of course, he was travelling by motorcar, not train.