HO CHI MINH-HOI AN: Train Ride from *&##

So when were planning our trip, we knew that with a 9 day trip anywhere we were going to need some serious down/play time.  We had heard wonderful things about Hoi An…cute town with great beach resorts near by.  Sounded good to me.  The only thing left to figure out was how we were going to get there.  The choice was train or plane.  It was about an hour plane ride but a 13 hour overnight train ride.  We decided that we would go by train to Hoi An but fly back to Ho Chi Minh.  We were also told we could book our sleeper car the day of since they rarely sell out.   However, when we had our hotel call for tickets to be delivered, they told us there were no sleepers available that night.  We were super frustrated because now we really had no choice but to go by train, but we would have to sit in the regular seats all night long.  It was worse than we even imagined.  The train was disgusting, and the seats were super uncomfortable.  Not only that, they didn’t even turn off the lights in the car in the middle of the night, so we were trying to sleep with the lights on.  As a bonus, they played the cheesiest Vietnamese music videos and sitcoms on the train car T.V. until midnight.  I would have gladly been on an airplane for 13 hours compared to that.  Thinking back on it, the kids were actually really good.  Audrey would wake up and cry some in the middle of the night, but it could have been a lot worse as far as that goes.  Just as we were about to get off the train, I looked around and couldn’t find one of my flip flops.  It was NO WHERE to be found.  Some of the people around us started to help us look, and when I stopped at one point to think, some lady thought I was staring at her bag and she thought that I was thinking she had stolen my flip flop and put it in her bag.  I thought no such thing, but she stood up and grabbed my arm and started sternly talking and pointing me to her bag.  Then she opened her bag and pointed for me to look in her bag.  She was really mad, and I was shaking my head and hands at her that I didn’t want or need to look in her bag.  It was pretty much the straw that broke the camels back for me and I just grabbed my bag, search for my tennis shoes and put them on quickly before the train stopped and we had to get off.  I was fuming, and Tanner and I had barely had any sleep or anything to eat for that matter.  Not a good combination.  We got off the train and I grabbed our luggage cart and Tanner was walking behind me with the kids.  As we walked out of the train station, there was a huge group of taxi drivers waiting.  They all started shouting at us, asking where we wanted to go.  I was waving them off and just wanted to get to the curb, and I didn’t realize Tanner had dropped a little ways behind me.  All of the sudden these two taxi drivers started yelling at each other, and the next thing I know, they have both taken 1 piece of our luggage each and started walking towards their own cars.  All the other taxi drivers were laughing at these two guys arguing over who was going to take us to our hotel.  I was so ticked and I couldn’t communicate with them.  I started yelling to them to bring me back my luggage!  I hadn’t told either one of them that we would be going with them.  I was wondering why Tanner hadn’t already stepped in and said something and when I turned around, I saw that he was only just coming out of the train terminal.  I screamed for him to come and get our bags back from these guys.  It was an ugly scene, but eventually we were in a car and made it to our hotel.  We were both so irritated with each other by that point, we hurried and ate some lunch at the hotel, and we all crashed the rest of the afternoon.  When we woke up, we were excited to maybe go into the town, and when we opened the door, it was pouring rain outside.  It was just that kind of day. 

But in the end 1 bad day out of 9 really isn’t so bad, and staying in Hoi An over the next couple of days was exactly what we needed.  After we had arrived at the hotel, I realized we hadn’t taken any pictures on the train…I was actually kind of sad because it is fun after the fact to look at pictures and say “look what we survived!!!”  In the moment though…not so fun.  It was downright miserable.