I’ve never had a great longing to experience India. Overpopulated, too much poverty, boring topography, guys shitting on the street, etc. But ever since catching Wes Anderson‘s The Darjeeling Limited (’07) I’ve wanted to travel across India on a nice, not-too-swanky, middle-class sleeper train…bunk beds in a cabin, superb Indian food in the dining car, hours of meditation time while staring at the countryside.
My only long-ass, third-world train ride happened 11 years ago in Vietnam, and I don’t mind saying it felt like dreary hell.
[Posted in mid-November 2013] Yesterday was a long one. A road journey from Hoi An to Quang Ngai and the My Lai Massacre Museum, and then a slow, rickety train ride from Quang Ngai to Nha Trang. We left Hoi An at 7:30 am and arrived in Nha Trang at 11 pm last night.
I wanted to visit the My Lai massacre museum near Quang Ngai so we drove down early yesterday morning — a two-hour trek with all the rain and the traffic and road construction. I was told it would take another 11 or 12 hours to drive to Nha Trang so we bought train tickets from Quang Ngai to Nha Trang, which would take about eight hours, I was told. It took ten.
Our down-at-the-heels, less-than-fully-hygienic train left at 1 pm and chugged along at a moderate pace for 400 kilometers, stopping for 10 or 12 minutes at each station. It was hellish, in a sense, but I didn’t want to be encased in a luxurious tourist cocoon. I wanted to feel and smell and taste the real Vietnam like an average local. Well, I got that.