To leave the deep north and proceed to the south we chose the means you least expect: the berths. We boarded a night train at Hanoi station and after only 13 hours we arrived in Central Vietnam, on the side of that 17 parallel which divided the North for so long from the South, in the city of hué, ancient capital of Vietnam where the emperors of the Nguyen dynasty ruled for 143 years (thirteen emperors) in their splendid Imperial City. Train travel should not be included in the category of memorable experiences.
But I got away with sleeping and limiting my outings to the bare minimum. As did the other three females of the expedition. But the train was one of those who do not make silence their main characteristic. If you think of the verb rattling, you know, you understand the situation. Vibrations and decibels in freedom are the words that best identify that convoy. We got away playing two games of burraco but in the end we went to the cot, practically clothes and with wide use of earplugs and Tavor. I dreamed all night long of my unique experience of Asian trains, the incredibly fast and silent Japanese shinkansen. But you can’t have everything in life. Annalia says she hasn’t slept a minute, but then she has to tell us that she snored in her lower-left bunk. He also snored the top right bunk, the one occupied by Barbara. The only one who seems not to have snored is me who normally snores. But the noise of the rattling serpent that ran without haste the only track between the Vietnamese rice fields covered everything.
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