The journey to Seoul from rural Japan

Kansai Airport Station

Going back through old albums I realized I never wrote that much about my trip in Seoul in March of 2014. I was living in rural Japan, busy working during the week, and at that time in March, I was preparing for two overseas guests to visit me for a moth. I probably didn’t have time to reflect on all the interesting things I experienced in Seoul. I was probably consumed with preparation for my guests, planning more trips, and just trying to get through the day. My three-day adventure in Seoul with one of my best friends was a wonderful experience, and deserves a place on this blog.

So I will begin again, as all things begin, with a journey.

I am surprised after taking this long trip from my provincial village to a major airport so many times that I never bothered to record how long and cumbersome it was. That is truly a feet in and of itself. Here is the breakdown:

1.    40minutes: Drive my car from my small village (Kawamoto) to a bus stop in a nearby but slightly larger town (Oasa). The drive is on a one-lane road with no street lamps. In the dark, it's a little lonely and scary. There are often monkeys, boar, or other animals that come out onto the road so you must be very alert and careful. 9 out of 10 times I would be the only car on the road for the entire journey. I remember this feeling like the lonliest part of the trip.

The road from my village to the bus stop

2.    1 hour and 20 minutes: Board the Iwami Express from Oasa station to Hiroshima Station. This bus come every hour and takes people from Oasa (on the outskirts of Hiroshima prefecture) to the main Hiroshima Station. It is quite popular and usually fills up by the time we get to the station. I always rode this bus because the only bus that comes directly to Kawamoto leaves only once a day, and doesn’t line up well with things like flight schedules.

3.    1 hour 30 minutes: As soon as I arrive at Hiroshima Station I jump on the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Shin-Osaka station. If I am traveling during peak season I will have tried to purchase my shinkansen ticket a week or so in advance. Otherwise, I just buy it at the station for the next departing train. They leave from the upper platform, so then I ascend the escalator, find my reserved seat on the train, and relax for an hour and a half.

4.    50 minutes take local train (Limited Express Haruka) from Shin-Osaka Station to Kansai Airport Station. Once I arrive in the bustling Shin-Osaka station, which feels worlds away from my tiny quiet village, I maneuver through the crowds to transfer to a local train which will take my directly to Kansai airport. I can usually get a seat on the train, and the journey lasts for almost an hour.

5.    2 hours: Board a plane from Kansai Airport to Incheon Airport. The business at the airport is usual – I arrive about two hours early, get my tickets, and go through security. Japanese airports are pretty efficient and predictable. For this particular trip to Seoul, I met my friend at the airport station and we got out tickets together. Though I had been traveling all day, it felt like my trip began at that moment.

6.    1 hour: Ride the Express train from the Airport to Seoul Station. Once we landed in Seoul, we were relieved to find that their train system is just as robust and efficient as Osaka’s or Tokyo’s. It was very easy to catch a train from the airport to the main station, but it did take almost an hour.

The long train ride from the airport to Seoul

Total travel time: 7.3 hours, not including waiting at the airport, or the waiting for buses or trains in transit. In other words: all damn day.

A Few Words on the Vietnamese Train Experience

I took four train journeys in Vietnam, 2 day rides and 2 overnight rides, starting from Hanoi and ending in Saigon.

To read about each experience go here:

Hanoi to Hue

Hue to Da Nang

Da Nang to Nha Trang

Nha Trang to Saigon

In this post, I will share my general observations of the journey from north to south.

Clockwise from top left: Hanoi, Dn Nang, Hue, and Nha Trang Stations

Stations

The quality of train station improves from north to south. Hanoi has one of the worst train stations I have ever seen. It appears to be little more than a freight station that was converted into a passenger station as an afterthought, or perhaps out of necessity.  There are no restaurants, and the only places to buy food are from street vendors intent on overcharging foreigners. The layout of the station is confusing, with multiple “waiting rooms” with no purpose.

Compare this with DaNang, in the middle of the country, that has a proper loading and unloading zone, that has a bilingual arrival board, that has free bathrooms and even a bookstore.

Compare this with Saigon, that has real platforms, so passengers don’t have to jump three feet from the train edge to the ground. Saigon also has escalators, a coffee shop, TVs, and multiple restaurants. It is definitely the most advances and cosmopolitan station in the country.

Train Quality

I rode a first-class sleeper three times, and the quality also deteriorated from north to south. I suppose this depends on which train you get.

At best, you will have diming lights, trashcans, storage under the bed, working AC, windows with no cages on them, clean sheets, a TV, and a shelf next to your bed. 

At worst you will have none of these things.

The S19 was superior. It has the cleanest cabins and was the newest.

The S7 Version 1 was a similar style to S19, but was grungier, dirtier, and a bit more basic.

The S7 Version 2 was appalling. I feel bad for people who only ride this train.

Left: SE7 hallway; Right SE 19 hallway

Left: SE 19 berth, Right SE 7 berth

General Comfort and Ease

All four of the train rides I took left precisely on time, and arrived precisely on time – to the minute. Never once did I have my ticket checked by a guard or staff member.

My travel agency sent me a scary letter of telling me everything that could go wrong on the train. People stealing my berth, scammers trying to overcharge me, thieves. But I experienced none of these things.

Recommendations

I do recommend taking the trains in Vietnam, and definitely booking a sleeper carriage instead of a soft seat for longer journey. I also recommend the travel agency Vietnam Impressive, as they were thorough and delivered the tickets to my hotel each time. I recommend buying food at a restaurant in town and bringing it on the train. Vendor near the station my try to overcharge, and the quality of the food on the train is questionable. It can be a very fun experience with a group of four, but there is a good chance you will get lucky and have cool berth mates if you are only a couple or solo traveler. 

Train from Nha Trang to Saigon

Nha Trang Station

The journey from Nha Trang to Saigon takes about 8 hours. I had initially thought of doing another overnight journey, but the schedules were awkward, and I didn’t want to arrive in the wee early hours fo the morning, or leave in the middle of the night, so I bit the bullet and decided to ride out the journey form 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. I booked by tickets while still in the U.S. with a travel agent online. Though I paid a premium for this service, I'm glad I did it because the first-class sleepers were filled every time I rode the train.

Though this was a day journey, I assumed I might want to sleep on the train, so I purchase a sleeping berth, and am very glad I did. After spend 2.5 hours in a  soft seat from Hue to Da Nang, I never wanted to do that again.

I was lucky to have a bed to rest in during the 8-hour journey, and my berth buddies, a young, English-speaking Vietnamese couple, were really cool, but the carriage itself was anything but first-class. It was even grubbier than the train from Da Nang to Nha Trang, which the added feature of bars on all the windows, obstructing the view.

View through the caged windows of the train

I wrote the following in my diary from the train:

“I am on the train now and this is our last train ride in Vietnam. I am certainly grateful. I still love trains and prefer them to all other modes of transportation, but I have learned that I cannot sleep on them, and should not use them for overnight journeys. This was only a day journey, but a long one. 8:30-4:00 roughly. I reserved a sleeper car, anticipating that I  would want to nap on board and I am so glad I did. After the first journey I worried that it was a waste of money, or that it would be awkward with two berth mates. But after riding from Hue to Da Nang on the first-class seats, I realized that I made a good choice. The seats were so narrow, dirty, and uncomfortable that I could hardly enjoy the mere 2-hour journey. It was crowded and I felt people in my space all the time. Better to have room to deal with two strangers than 60. It ended up being the right choice.

The only gripe is that our train carriage is physically inferior to the first one we boarded in Hanoi. It seems that the further south we go the worse the condition of the trains gets. DaNang to Nha Trang was only slightly worse than Hanoi to Hue. With no small reading lights, no TV, no trashcan, and no storage under the bed. This train is of a completely different class. The table is much smaller, too small, in fact to do any real work. The walls are stained and old. The windows have cages on them, so it is not possible to look out into the countryside without seeing it through grid wires. Though I can feel the AC, there is an old, dusty fan overhead, probably not is use for the last few years. I believe this is an older carriage, perhaps one of the originals, and thus it has quite deteriorated. I was spoiled and naive to think that all the trains would be as nice as the first one we rode. But I don’t mind."

Our grubby beds

Hallway of the train

"Today I walked through the entire train from our car 10 to car 1 - the dining car. I need dot get lunch for the two of us. When I got to the 7^th care I began to hesitate, not want to go further. A staff member saw me and tried to ask why I needed but he didn’t speak enough English to understand my response “food” or “eat.” He was smiling and friendly, he wanted to understand. So I tried to mime the word “eat” for him. First I bit into a hamburger, but he didn’t understand. I pretended to put barrier in my mouth, but he didn’t understand. Then I got the idea to pretend like I was slurping a bowl of noodle with chopsticks - and then he understood! He motioned for me to go ahead. The dining car was further. I walked through the hallways of the first class sleeper cars, the second class sleep cars (which were newer and nicer than the first class, but contained 6 beds instead of 4), and then the soft seats, with which I was familiar, and then finally the hard seats. This was like a journey back in time. From modern comfort to prehistoric simplicity. The hard seats were crowded with people, and more crowded with their many belonging, mostly large bags of rice and grains and crates they were hauling on their long journeys.  I tiptoes around bamboo floor mats, many of which were occupied by sleeping passengers. I stepped over a woman’s head while wearing a dress and surly flashed her. When I got to the ding car, I found it filled with old men smoking. I ordered from the menu, and received two large trays of food which I had to carry with both hands. My journey toward the dining car was much simpler. When the train swayed I could balance myself by grabbing hold of the edges of seats, but with the tray sin my hand I could not. I bent my knees and walked slowly through the aisle, but still I sway to each side with the train, almost falling over every time. The passengers on the hard seats kindly pushed me along so I wouldn’t fall as I stepped over bodies sandbags of rice. I kept my gaze low to the ground and repeated “thank you” in Vietnamese.  From behind me I could here their chuckling of approval at my attempt. It almost sounded like a cheer.”

Iced coffee on the train

Raw papaya and spicy salt on the train

Lunch set mean of pork belly, egg, and greens

Lunch set meal of chicken, pork belly,  and greens

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