Hanoi to Hue - A bumpy train ride

Our next destination on Vietnam's Map was Hue, ancient capital of Vietnam's Imperial times. We booked ourselves a sleeping berth on the Reunification Express Train, which does Hanoi to Saigon following most of Vietnam's Coast. Now they call it Express, but there’s as much speed in these trains as a sloth on a very hot day. It takes no less than 36 hours to do the journey in one go... And that's for the faster "modern" trains... Our journey to from Hanoi to Hue was going to take the best part of 12 hours, so a sleeper it had to be. We shared the 4 bedded compartment with a friendly French couple who had left France 3 months earlier and travelled to Vietnam by train only, through Europe, Russia, Mongolia and China. Now that's some journey! They were obviously veterans when it came to using sleepers. They kindly offered us some Da Lat wine, which is the wine producing region of southern Vietnam. I was very curious to what the wine would taste like. Vietnamese cuisine is rather good so I hoped I'd be in a treat for the, hopefully, sleep inducing beverage... Being in the presence of a French couple, I thought I'd show off my French heritage and proceeding into doing some proper wine tasting. A swirl in a plastic glass to release the aromas, a sniff to detect fruits or other wine related smells, a sip, a swig around the mouth and finally breathing in air through my pursed lips... Jesus! The drink was an abomination. It smelled of grape juice mixed with sewer water and cheap alcohol. And it taste sour and quite simply revolting. And to that the French couple added: "This is much nicer than the one we had yesterday!" Yuk! So no wine for me, therefore no sleep aid for the noisy train... Then came the dreaded visit to the loo... The smell emanating from the toilet was similar to the Da Lat wine, only ten times worse in strength! But one's nature call was too strong and soon all smells hellish mingled together causing a saturation effect that eventually made me immune to it all. Poor Kiri was waiting for her turn outside and by judging the expression on her face, she wasn't looking forward to the experience either! Eventually we settled in our berths, inserted ear plugs, and drifter off to a peaceful and restful sleep... If only! I was woken up God knows haw many times by these rather scary jolts that the Train produced when slowing down. It seemed that at every station stop, these jolts would manifest themselves like the right hook given by Mohamed Ali! So needless to say that I didn't sleep to well and was a rather grumpy man when getting out of "bed" at 5.30am! But for the rest of the journey we were treated to some very scenic coastal and mountain landscapes which made up for the lack of sleep. It was very tired though that we arrived at 11am in Hue greeted by torrential rainy... JM