Train from Da Nang to Nha Trang

Inside Da Nang Station

The 8-hour train from Da Nang to Nha Trang was the second overnight train ride, and the third of four train trips I took in Vietnam.

I had so much fun of the first train ride, in which I stayed up all night celebrating New Years with a bunch of drunk Germans, that I knew there was no way this train ride could be more fun.

The first thing I noticed when I boarded the train was how dingy it was. The trin I took from Hanoi was pristine. This first-class sleeper carriage had the same basic style, but lacked the finer details of the previous train. The trash cans were missing. There was no TV, no storage under the bed, the floor was dirty, the beds were not made. Had this been my first train I wouldn’t have minded, but having already experienced the superior train I was a bit disappointed. Fortunately my berth mates were really cool. They were a young couple form London and we stayed up until odd hours chatting. It was a calm night but still very entertaining.

I wrote the following in my diary that night:

“Staring out the window of our moving train, looking at the pitch black darkness. The sky is like a black pearl, a very deep, deep purple, lighter in the horizon. In contrast to that the trees are completely black. There is some extra exhilarating about looking at a night scene from a moving train. Usually when you look at a scene of the countryside, a forest or a rice paddy, at night you imagine it being still and quiet,  but looking at those scenes with the noise of the train, that churning, moving across the tracks at a fast pace, that speed, it’s neither still nor quiet, and something about that is exhilarating.”

Outside Da Nang Station