The Route:

Ulanbaaatar -> Ulan Uday -> Irkutsk -> Lake Baikal -> Novosibirsk -> Ekaterinberg -> Perm -> Moscow

Upon boarding the train we were shown to our cabin which we were to share with two Mongolian guys, who had each brought a number of boxes and suitcases. It wasn’t long before we realised that this would be no ordinary train journey but what we came to term the ‘Great Train Bazaar’ from Mongolia to Moscow…

Winter was only just receding so we were the only ‘tourists’ in our train compartment. By nightfall of the first evening, as we were approaching the Russian border check point, the two young Mongolians we were sharing our carriage with suddenly jumped into action (having slept all day) unpacking their rather large boxes and suitcases. Our compartment was soon full of leather jackets, piles of jeans, sparkly tops, blankets and shower curtains(!). We stepped into the corridor to give them some room and were greeted by the sound of rustling cellophane which was being hastily torn off bundles of clothes left, right and centre before being thrown onto the floor of the corridor to create a sea of plastic. Various items then began to be distributed by a Mongolian of wrestler build throughout the cabins. to look like personal goods, so when we eventually returned to our bunk we had acquired a new wardrobe of clothes hanging on our coat hooks as well as two rather fetching leopard print blankets! The Mongolians in our carriage just grinned and as we would all be on the same train for the next five days, we thought it best to go along with whatever scheme was being hatched.

By the time we reached the check point with Siberia, all was still and there wasn’t a plastic wrapper in sight. The Russian border police were obviously suspicious but were also fairly pleasant to us and soon passed on to the next cabin to interrogate its occupants. There was a blizzard outside (a fitting Russian greeting, we thought) and we were bemused to see several men carrying half naked, snow covered mannequins onto the train and dumping them in the corridor – they looked somewhat gruesome and a little bit freaky, forming slushy melted ice puddles on the floor.

The next morning we awoke to find an apologetic Mongolian stripping the leopard print blanket covers from our beds and pointing manically outside (not what you want when you’re waking up in Siberia in mid-winter). We pulled on a few layers and looked out to see a large crowd of Russian women and men gathered on the train platform. A rather large man then swung past our cabin carrying the clutch of mannequin legs now bedecked in Levi jeans, followed by an equally large woman holding their torso counterparts, which she had dressed in some sparkly clubbing gear – a little cold for Siberia we thought, but perhaps we’re just soft. This marked the official start of what we came to term the Great Train Bazaar – the frenzied buying and selling of goods which happens all along the train line until Novosibirsk (the largest city in Siberia, where the authorities started to crack down on the activity). Not so here as everyone from grandmothers to train staff and police officers were joining the fray to barter for handbags, purses, fleecy covers, spandex outfits and leather jackets.

With entertainment such as this, the five days soon whizzed past and we even made some Mongolian friends by trading an M & S manicure kit for a fleecy blanket – one of the best bargains of our travels we thought!

The journey itself through the snowy Siberian landscape, the immense ice-covered Lake Baikal (where we sampled our second Omul – a distant relative of the Salmon, caught from icy holes in the lake and smoked), the Ural Mountains and onwards through the cities of the Golden Ring surrounding Western Russia was captivating and we never tired of waking up to forests of snow clad fir trees.

Everything about the train oozed that 90′s vision of space-age chrome and glass, made even more 90′s in essence by Jackie Chan punctuating the news broadcasts flashing up on the carriage’s TV screens to announce his latest tiger-saving project with some Kung-fu moves. The first few hours were relatively relaxed with passengers reading newspapers, working on laptops or watching other screens but it wasn’t long before the smells from the dining car wafted their way through to our carriage causing a mass exodus to the heart of the train where a rapid-fire service of microwaved rice, meat and sauce was taking place (don’t try and ask for the vegetarian option unless you are the type who enjoys sowing chaos and confusion). The food was unexceptional but tasty and more importantly, given our general state of health at this point, packed full of microwaved oils and vitamins.

Our train from Shanghai arrived at Beijing in the late afternoon where we managed to find a cab to drive us to the happily-named Sunrise hostel, a short walk from the Forbidden city. As we drove away from the station, the sun began to sink, setting the murky haze of the city’s main arteries alight with the fire of a million headlights. The honking cars, bicycles, carts and masses of people pouring out of office buildings made a stark contrast to the clinical and calm surrounds that we’d just spent the last 6 hours in.

The following morning, we had an early start as we had decided to join a group from the hostel who had hired a mini-bus to Mutianyu, a popular segment of the Great Wall that has been restored and geared up to tourists. The two hour journey there was uneventful but one of the team from the hostel animatedly warned us not to lose heart over the Disneyland-esque entrance to the wall as once we were up there, we didn’t have to ‘stick with the crowds’. It didn’t take long to understand what he meant – we were greeted by crowded tourist market selling over-priced tourist gifts and refreshments (and various photographic opportunites – most oddly perhaps, involved posing with a camel). This soon gave way to a brightly coloured cable car which lifted the tourists who didn’t fancy the climbing the stairs up to the top. The cars passed over a giant toboggan slide which allows visitors to whizz back down from the wall the fast way when they’ve finished. We could now see why the word ‘theme park’ had been used so many times in connection to the wall.

What isn’t made explicit in any of the ‘info guides’ is that most of this stretch of the wall has been entirely reconstructed – in that it has been completely re-built with new stone over the original (a common theme in China, as it turned out). One of the guys from our hostel reminded us of what our guide had said on the way here and suggested we walked along the wall to point 1 where the new construction ended and we could see paths of trees and overgrown shrubbery stretching beyond. After a long climb up some very steep steps, we came to see what he meant – through a window of the last watch-tower was sign labelled ‘Dangerous, Do Not Enter!’, which he beckoned us towards… “This”, he said proudly, “is the old ‘disrepaired’ wall and is still an unofficial walking route for the adventurous. Just follow the scrubland and you’ll soon be among the eagles”.  With a quick glance behind us we took off along the path and were soon completely alone on the crumbling remains of a magnificent stretch of wall. Though it wasn’t obvious from where we had joined the wall, we could now see that we were in the middle of a mountain range dotted with sections of old wall and small stone-built forts that had been slowly overgrown by shrubs and trees over the years. Looking eastwards towards the snow-capped mountains, we could clearly see it snaking onwards into obscurity, circled over by eagles whose calls echoed between the peaks.

After a wonderful hour spent amongst the crumbling stone, we traced our steps back, descended the almost vertical staircase of the reconstructed wall and re-joined our group for a late lunch in one of the tourist outlets. We got talking to a man from Israel who had been working in Shanghai and was now making the most of exploring China before heading home. He asked us if we had yet visited the Arts District 798 in Dashanzi, just outside of the city’s centre, yet – which we hadn’t. “If there’s one thing you do in Beijing, make it that – you won’t be disappointed”. We only had two full days left in Beijing, and on one of those we were due to transfer to a hotel near Beijing central station, from where we were due to catch our train to Mongolia, so we had to make a call on what to see but decided that the arts district was definitely one of them.

The next morning we decided to take a cab to south of the Dàshānziqiáo flyover where the now defunct military warehouses which house the 798 Arts quarter (a sprawling settlement dedicated to freedom of expression comprising of art studios, galleries, bookshops, cafes and stalls) can be found. Factory 798 (as it is also referred to) became an underground arts hub and refuge to Beijing’s contemporary artists who were evicted from their Old Summer Palace residences by the government during the 1980′s. The site of the old factory with its industrial chimneys and sweeping ceiling arches offered inspiration as well as space to those who set up studios there and the area began to grow by word-of-mouth, in time attracting international artists to the area too. Industrial remnants are interspersed with exhibits that make use of materials scavenged from the old factories themselves, while quaint artists’ shops, cafés and residences now occupy the smaller buildings. It is now a fashionable hub of high-profile galleries, catwalks and event spaces for trend-conscious companies. Most of the exhibits are completely free but art can be found around every corner – from carparks to chimney tops – no space is left unadorned.

Inside buildings played to host to spotlighting one or two particular artists. One sculptor fashioned subjects that looked as though they were drowning or swimming in a pool of lrippling iquid cast from dark iron. It wasn’t clear if they were winning their battle against the tide, but fittingly for the area, the focus seemed to be in the struggle.

Another exhibition, Bashir Makhoul’s “Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost“, was set out as a maze of confusing holographic pictures, each simultaneously displaying a Middle-Eastern streetscape contrasted with an equivalent one made out of old cardboard boxes, to look like a ghost city.
In another brick-interiored industrial outhouse, blown-up photographs were being carefully ignored. I particuarly liked the contrast of this photograph with the group in front inadvertantly mimicking one of the pictures in the gallery, transfixed by their iPhones and tablets instead of the nude woman just behind them.

We were completely absorbed by the arts district and only noticed the fading light when the cold started to seep in. Stalls roasting sweet potatoes over a fire had sprung up next to an old steam engine which helped to warm us up. As the temperarture continued to dip, we made our way to the exit, not realising how tired we were until we flopped down in the hostel and slept for a full 13 hours in our clothes.

With one day left in Beijing before our departure to the Gobi desert, we decided to get up early to try and beat the crowds to the Forbidden City. It was so cold that the trays of milk drinks we had got used to seeing around the city had frozen tops and the groups of men who were usually outside playing Mahjong and dice were nowhere to be seen.

We got to the Forbidden city early, but not early enough to escape the mass of tour groups all colour coded by hats and led by guides carrying large flags and megaphones. We made efforts to avoid the sea of red hats (many clinging onto children dressed as little emperors) and headed to the side rooms instead, which gave us a bit more space to breathe and take in the detail. We spent a lot of time looking around the emperor’s theatre, which was still complete with trap doors and a wonderful selection of 1920′s vinyl recordings of the dowager empress’s favourite eunuch troupe. Next we visited the treasury within the Forbidden City, a collection of buildings housing some very extravagant teapots and trinkets including an amethist massage roller, a disgustingly striking headress made of brilliant blue kingfisher feathers, and an incredible golden astrolabe with pearls representing each of the star clusters. If you look closely at the signs outside each building you can see that they many were once upon a time sponsored by a certain American company, which has since been discretely painted over.

After a morning’s exploration of the Forbidden City, we made our way back to our hotel to prepare ourselves for the onwards journey. We could see Beijing’s Central Station, with its mass of crowds, from our 20th floor window and it felt strange, as we watched the people below disperse, to think that this time tomorrow, we’d no longer be in China…

The distance between the Shanghai and Hangzhou is 177 kilometres, but we got there in under an hour, travelling at 300km/h. This was our first experience on a High-Speed Train in China and its speed (in comparison to the open windows and gentle motion of the trains we had taken in South East Asia) was something of a shock – though we managed to take a few mildly blurry shots with our camera.

Once we pulled out of the station, the fringe of Shanghai’s vast suburban construction belt soon came into view. The evidence of fast expansion was hard to miss and we passed hundreds of small apartment blocks built in neatly arranged streets, in addition to slightly less sturdy looking housing blocks surrounding construction sites (perhaps for the people working on them). Considering that the city is still growing at a rate of a million people a decade, this construction is probably necessary but it was almost difficult to detect where the urban sprawl of Shanghai stopped and Hangzhou began.

We arrived in Hangzhou in the late afternoon, expecting to find a little tourist town surrounded by tea plantations. Our research should have been more thorough: the centre of Hangzhou is less of a country retreat and more of a sprawling metropolitan city housing 4 million people. When tourists speak of Hangzhou they are more than likely referring to the lake and ‘People’s Pleasure Garden’ which is about a fifteen to twenty minute bus ride from the city centre. After getting stuck in a long queue of traffic on the lake road (which is nearly always backed up with fuming coaches carrying daytrippers from the surrounding cities) we eventually got to our hostel which was located a few minutes walk from the famous “West Lake”.

It was one of the first hot days we had experienced in China so far and so we waited until evening to really explore our surroundings. After the majority of the day tourists had gone home, we found the lake to be rather beautiful and peaceful. It helped that all the magnolias had started to blossom leaving a wonderful scent in the air at dusk. The West Lake itself is pretty big and it takes about two hours to walk all the way around it so we decided to leave that for another day.

The next morning we were awoken at 6am to the sounds of Big Ben chiming. It took me a while to remember where I was and with bleary eyes, I opened the blind in our attic hostel room to find a schoolyard below and groups of children lining up in a very orderly fashion to the sound of the bell. The children then began to sing (a mixture of English and Chinese songs), making it impossible to go back to sleep, so we decided to head out for the day. As we were up early, we asked some people in the hostel about journeying up to the Lion’s Peak of Hangzhou, where Lóngjǐng (translated in English as Dragon Well), one of the most famous teas in China, is grown. What’s more, we had heard that the picking of the highly valued first flush had just begun and if we visited the right pickers we might be able to buy some at an affordable price. Luckily there was a bus stop just near the hostel along the West Lake road and about half an hour later a bus with some vines painted onto its side pulled up – so we were pretty sure it was the right one. We weren’t entirely confident as to where we should get off so we slightly winged it and travelled through a few villages, where we could see people returning from their early morning tea pickings with the leaves balanced in baskets on their heads. About 10 minutes later, the bus stopped ascending and the land flattened out with miles and miles of tea plantations before us. The bus came to a stop and as we realised we were almost the on only ones left on it, we decided that this was as good a spot as any to explore from. It was the right choice as we found ourselves conveniently outside the Green Tea restaurant, which we had heard about from someone in Shanghai. The queues outside were already forming so we decided to take a ticket and try it out.

We were glad we joined the queue early as it continued to grow until early afternoon. We found the location slightly better than the food but the menu choice and variety is pretty unbeatable and the free green tea on tap enriched the view of endless rows of tea-bushes that we could see from our table.

The more interesting items on the menu were Deep Fried Shredded Lotus, Spicy Bullfrog, Traditional Style Braised Duck Feet and Tea Tree Mushroom Stir Fry. We went for the Green Tea Roast Chicken (which was absolutely delicious, seeing as we had been mainly surviving on noodles for a couple of days by that point), followed by stuffed tomatoes and a mixture of boiled vegetables and potato.

The Green tea restaurant sits next to the National China Tea Museum, which is attached to a tea school and teaching rooms for those studying tea at university! Tea is taken pretty seriously here (you get the impression that they’d heavily disapprove of a bag of PG Tips or Tetley’s) and as well as a centre of learning the nearby fields are also a very popular backdrop for bridal photography – I think we saw about five or six different bridal parties all jostling for the best position while we made our way through the tea fields.

The Tea Museum itself contains a wealth of information which we are woefully ignorant of in the tea-drinking West, surprising when you consider how culturally important tea has become in Britain, at least. As we were coming out of season, we arrived to find the museum half empty and were greeted by a resident tea expert who took us to a back room full of glass teapots and kettles. She showed us many of the traditional tea preparation methods and allowed us to sample a wide variety of teas that they grow in the research plots in the museum.

One difference that she pointed out between tea preparation in China and Europe is that the Chinese always fill the entire pot once and empty it before brewing the tea for real. This ‘rinses’ any nasty taste from the outside of the tea leaves and warms the pot before allowing the tea to soak and release its real flavours. Different kinds of tea also need brewing for different times, and some black teas can be refilled over 10 times, yielding different combinations of flavours each time you pour.

Green tea drinkers also tend to drink the tea with the leaves in the glass (whether the tea leaves float or not is a matter of good luck!) and much care and attention goes into choosing the right blend for the mood and social setting, much as a wine would be selected in Europe. Green tea is by far the most popular kind of tea, followed by Black tea and then Oolong tea, which is often confused for the same but has a different method of harvesting and preparation!

Leaf tea and ‘tea cakes’ (compressed tea leaves) are much more popular than tea bags here in China (especially as most Western tea bags are bleached before being filled with tea!), and most of the teapots we saw for sale at the museum had built-in filters to catch the tea leaves and stop the larger ones from escaping into your teapot.

The last part of the museum focuses on traditional methods of tea preparation and serving across different regions in China. There was some time spent on the Gongfu tea preparation method that we came across in Hong Kong, and also some rooms decorated in traditional styles for serving tea (my favourite was the butter tea commonly served in Tibet).

Despite the wealth of information and the natural beauty of the surrounding fields there wasn’t much actual picking going on and we couldn’t find any tea to buy apart from the overpriced, nicely packaged boxes in the museum (which we had a feeling were all from last year’s crop). The sun was beginning to set so we decided to continue our journey up to the hills again the following day, staying on the bus about ten or fifteen minutes longer in an attempt to track down some of the real ‘first flush’.

In contrast to the day before it was a very wet morning but that didn’t dampen our excitement at finally finding what we thought was Lonjing itself and its fields and fields of tea bushes, each being carefully pruned by about twenty or thirty pickers in straw hats. We walked through the beautiful plantations where swifts were darting in and around the bemused pickers, until we found a nearby village (which we found out was not Lonjing but somewhere in between). This actually worked in our favour as there were no tourists here and at one of the local tea houses, with the aid of phrasebooks and hand gestures, we therefore managed to procure a small tin of the ‘first flush’ tea (at a negotiable price) which would keep us going through the rest of the journey. We also found a small heat-resistant water bottle with a tea filter built in, which allowed us to make leaf tea from our supply on the move for the rest of the long journey home.

We spent the rest of the day walking amongst fields of tea leaves as the rain cleared, which is a surreal experience for those unaccustomed to the sight. The organised rows of trimmed tea bushes (which would grow into entire trees if left on their own) have an effect on the landscape unlike any other, allowing you to see across the undulating hills for miles around, each one lined with little rows of different shades of green.

Pickers from the local villages (each village collective manages a plot of tea bushes and collects the harvest) walk between the rows and hand-pick the fully-grown leaves. All the picking is done by hand rather than machine as this preserves the tea’s flavour and makes sure that all the juices stay inside the leaves until the moment they are pressed (mechanical pickers, while allowing cheaper production, tend to damage the leaves and impair the taste and quality of the resulting tea).

At dusk, we returned to the West Lake in preparation for our onwards journey North the next day. The boatmen who ferry people around the lake all day were making their way back home to their various docks. Seeing the sun set behind the silhouette of the nearby mountains and watching the tiniest ripples float across the lake was a beautiful way to end our time here. We made the most of the peace and tranquility because our next stop would be Beijing, the starting point of our long journey home through Russia…

The railway was constructed in the thirties by French colonists, split in 1954 following the Geneva accords and remained as two separate rail systems until the end of the Vietnam war. In 1975 the two lines reunited and within a year the old route was put back into operation.

In order to book your tickets for this train you have to physically go to the station as there is no online ticket ordering service in operation yet. As the sleeper compartments usually get booked up a couple of days in advance, it can be a bit difficult to spontaneously travel onward (though there is usually room in the hard sleeper section which has as many as four bunks to a wall)! A slightly easier but more expensive way of going about booking is to go through an agency such as the efficient but expensive Vietnam Impressive (there are however many hotels and guesthouses that now offer train booking services and we found them to be cheaper). After our visa debacle at the Chinese embassy, we managed to find ourselves sleeper train tickets on the evening train out of Ho Chi Minh the next day. It was strange to think of this as the first train link in a continuous chain of connecting tracks that would eventually take us all the way back to London.

We were shown to our carriage by the attendant (each carriage has one) and after we tried to thank him in our broken Vietnamese he smiled before rushing back to his post at the carriage door. The interior of the cabins is basic but comfortable (and unlike the ‘plusher’ Chinese trains there were no television screens and sound systems so books and packs of cards came in very useful). The bottom bunks nearly always get booked up first as they are the most convenient during the day time, doubling up as basic sofas, having access to the table in the centre and enjoying the best views.

As we had booked fairly late in the game for all of our train rides through Vietnam, we were on the top bunks both times but as the train from Ho Chi Minh to Danang and from Hue to Hanoi are both basically night trains, this wasn’t a problem. This was our first introduction to the standard 4-berth sleeper carriage (most of them built by German companies) which are used on many routes through Vietnam, China, Mongolia and Eastern Europe. Each one may have differing degrees of comfort but the layout is always the same and was to become very familiar over the coming months.

The train is a really fantastic way to travel as it offers a chance to bond with both locals and fellow travellers. Our first cabin companions were a brother and sister from Australia who had come to Vietnam on a spontaneous holiday with a view to getting some wardrobe items made up in Hoi An. We spent the evening playing cards and swapping travel stories before trying some local beer to help us get to bed. It was hot inside the cabin with our air vent missing a few nuts and bolts but the night passed quickly and as morning broke we were able to see beautiful pastures and rolling hills through the scratched window pane. Our second lot of fellow cabin occupants were a Vietnamese couple who were travelling with a large number of other family members, all dotted amongst the other carriages. There was a celebratory atmosphere as they began to unpack steaming flasks of tea and pots of noodles to share amongst themselves. The women started to gather in one carriage while the men congregated on chairs by the sink area, both parties soon deep in conversation and laughter. One of the women helped us map out the exact train route on a Palin-esque blow-up globe that we a had brought along as an illustrative tool to help explain our journey. Although there was a language barrier between us, we really appreciated being privy to what was essentially a family gathering taking place on a train and they were very generous with their delicious home made dishes, which made a diverting alternative from our own carry-on dinner of crackers and peanut butter.

The train journey through Vietnam is particularly beautiful and we could see why people found it so difficult when the line was deliberately attacked and blown up during the war and resulting unrest. It has slowly but surely been patched up, mended and ‘reunified’ so travellers and locals are once more able to wind their way through the communities and endless fields of egrets and scarecrows which snake all the way along the coast from Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi.

The ‘new’ border crossing (newly open to tourists that is) at Ha Tien is basically not much more than a dirt track with a tiny passport control shack and a giant casino (aka the ‘Ha Tien Vegas’) on the Cambodian side. These gambling establishments can be found in the no-man’s-land between most of Cambodia’s border crossings, and are a favourite weekend haunt for many Thais, Vietnamese and expats working in places where gambling is illegal. It was soon time to get out of the minivan which had taken us through the scenic drive from Kep to the border. Passing palm frond and mud hut structures alongside salt marshes and rice fields, we got the feeling that this was one of the increasingly rare areas of Cambodia to be remain untouched thus far by the tourism trade. It was soon time to walk our last Cambodian dirt track and make our way to the short queue of backpackers which was assembling at the checkpoint. The border passage was pretty uneventful, except for an outburst from an American who pulled up in a motorbike and began to row with immigration officials because he hadn’t got his Cambodian visa in advance – apparently the rules on this have tightened in recent years, much to the annoyance of the weekend gamblers.

After being stamped out of Cambodia, we made the final approach to the Vietnamese border post which marked the last part of our journey down shaky, dusty roads and our first steps back into pavements, tarmac and air-conditioning (which oddly made us feel somewhat nostalgic for what we had left behind). Even the passport control office on the Vietnamese side was markedly different from the Cambodian one, with a fanned waiting room and a bulk passport stamping operation in place. It wasn’t long before we were back on the road, this time in a slightly larger coach which would slowly make its way from the Vietnamese coast towards the urban sprawl of Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon via the Mekong Delta.

For the next four or five hours, we traced the banks of the Mekong, watching various scenes of river life unfold along the way. We began to realise that the Mekong highway is perhaps the longest high street in the world with its almost unbroken stream of small shops and family businesses, parted only by small bridges, water gardens or fisheries. The river is the lifeblood of most of these businesses and settlements, providing either the source of their trade or a means to transport it by. Large barges carrying gravel and construction materials and smaller boats ferrying everything from food to furniture between jetties were seen at regular intervals from our bus window. Punctuating the route every few metres were small cà phê joints, selling the ubiquitous cà phê sữa đá (strong Vietnamese iced coffee), Com (Steamed or fried rice with vegetables) and Phở dishes which are staples of the local cuisine. As was to be expected on such a long journey, there were regular stops, or more appropriately pauses, which gave us the opportunity to sample some of the local delicacies such as the roasted sweet potato and dried bananas. We had to be careful to keep up with the bus however, as it often didn’t actually stop but continued to move slowly along a line of traffic, for example when we were heading for the chain-ferry across the Mekong itself. Shortly after we jumped back on, a number of street sellers followed suit, boarding the bus with packages of rice, hot corn-on-the-cobs and Bánh mì, leaving only moments before we made it onto the chain ferry. By this point, the sun was setting and we were greeted on the other side of the river’s bank by the sight of colourful kites floating in the wispy sky. Kite flying is something we very much came to associate with Vietnam and China – which we romantically interpreted as the display of irrepressible freedom in the face of control.

It was late by the time we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon as the centre is still referred to by most locals) and after surviving the now customary haggling for a taxi we found ourselves in a sweet little guest-house (the Diep Anh) right in the heart of the less-sweet backpacker district. The following day, we dodged the prostitutes and motorbike touts down our guesthouse’s alley to make our way to the Chinese Consulate. Due to border disputes in the South China sea, relations between China and Vietnam are by all accounts slightly strained, which meant that acquiring our Chinese visa was sadly not as straightforward as we had hoped. In a strange piece of circular logic, in order to get a Chinese visa in HCMC/Saigon you must already have a ticket from there to Mainland China, but in order to get a train ticket, you need a valid Chinese visa… We were nearly thrown out of the Chinese embassy after growing increasingly frustrated at this intractable consular blockade. We were told we would have to book a direct flight, which we thought ridiculous and thinking there must be a way round we decided to accelerate our journey north to Hanoi to try our luck with an agent there.

The train is an increasingly popular way of exploring Vietnam as a tourist and there are now many agencies which can help you book the tickets and have them delivered to your hotel if you can’t get to the station yourself or if your Vietnamese language skills are lacking (you cannot currently book train tickets online unfortunately and must usually book in advance at the ticket counter). Vietnam Impressive is a well regarded agency (though they do add on a fairly large agency fee) but many hotels now offer a booking service too so it’s worth asking around. We managed to get ours through a guest house and so prepared to leave a very hot and busy Ho Chi Minh City the next evening. The American legacy of the Vietnam War is still alive and well in HCMC/Saigon, leaving it a polluted, maddeningly busy pit of expensive designer marketing and exploitation on a mass scale. After a day of wandering the streets and marvelling at the hypocrisy of the designer outfits setting up shop in the very countries where the extortionately priced goods are being made for a fraction of the price, I was only too glad to see the back of it. It was with great relief that we boarded a sleeper train that evening, bound for Danang (the nearest station to Hoi An). The next morning, we woke up to the beautiful sight of paddy fields, rivers and lush greenery, a welcome exchange from pollution clouds and dust…