Part XIV: Around the World in 80 Days – On the Train from Hanoi to Beijing

 

 

By Temple Ligon
May 9, 2014

 

On Wednesday night, April 25, I pulled out of former enemy territory, Hanoi, on the train heading to the border with China. The train was a little better than what I rode from Saigon to Hanoi, but not much. Still, I paid about $400 for the 2,000-mile ride from Hanoi to Beijing, and at $0.20/mile I got my money’s worth.

In the early 1970s I read the book on Asian train travel by Paul Theroux, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and he had little to say in favor of the passenger trains in Vietnam. Of course, the Vietnamese had been at war with the Japanese, the French and us Americans for the past few decades up till that time. He described the trains in Afghanistan in lower language, but Vietnam for Theroux won the next-to-the-worst title. Well, I haven’t cared to travel in Afghanistan then or now, but the passenger trains in Vietnam must be what they have been all that while. And for my retrace of the footsteps of Phileas Fogg, or close to them, Vietnam’s trains came away with the lowest ranking. In all fairness, I missed out on Afghanistan. Then again, so did Fogg.

Like the train I took across India from Mumbai to Kolkata, my compartment beginning in Hanoi was a sleeper for four. And like in India, there was no bar car. I did, though, get a kick out of meeting my three compartment buddies. We knew we would change trains late that night at the border with China, so we stayed up to read and talk. Problem was, no one among us four was a linguist, not even bi-lingual. The North Korean was a kid, maybe 25, and the two Chinese were 40-something railroad executives, by all appearances sophisticated, who had taken a little English in high school, probably. The North Korean had none, I had to assume. The American, me, had a perfectly workable command of the Queen’s English, but my foreign language skills were always at a loss once I took my eyes off the menu. I can get around in France, but that didn’t help in our compartment of four.

The Chinese have been doing extraordinarily well on the improvement curve since Mao died, and the North Koreans have not. In fact, the North Koreans have held so tight to their family regime with a lock on information control for so long they really don’t know how bad they have it. The Chinese, however, do know how bad the North Koreans have it.

If there is a foreseeable foul-up in the future of the economic growth of all East Asia, North Korea can be expected to act as trigger mechanism for the foul-up. All of East Asia, maybe even the whole world, is afraid of what could happen in North Korea.

My two Chinese railroad executives would not give our North Korean roomie the time of day. I have never seen such a snub. They had nothing, not a thing, to do with the North Korean.

Next door in our rail car was another foursome – generals or executives or some such high-placed types – all North Korean. The rest of the train, at least until we changed trains at the border with China, was a herd of women tourists apparently all together in a travel group. The women, by the way, didn’t hesitate to bang on the Turkish toilet’s door. Then men politely waited, but the women yelled and banged away.

In the wee hours of the morning the train stopped in Dong Dang at the border, and we were asked to get off to wait inside the station for all the border crossing routines. While our 2,000-mile run shifted from the Vietnamese meter gauge to the Chinese standard gauge, it was also a customs check and all that, and all that included keeping me behind for further questioning. My passport and visa were good, had to be after my two weeks at the Indian consulate in Rome, but somehow my profile was a little too interesting. I guess it had to do with my military past, all three years of which by then was more than 40 years earlier. Or maybe the Chinese were curious what kind of a journalist I had to be to say I wanted to circumnavigate the globe but to go on a straight line from Saigon to Beijing. Didn’t look like Fogg’s round-the-world route, always moving in the same direction.

There were four uniformed Chinese in the customs inspection team, and for reasons I never understood they looked way too serious. I had a 750ml bottle of Absolut, but that was community property to be shared with my compartment buddies, and that was not a problem. I’ll never know what was.

The next day before noon, I guess it was, the train stopped in a downtown station, Nanning, and we were told we had an hour if we wanted to walk around. The two Chinese railroad executives and I stuck together while we left the North Korean behind to run errands for his four superiors.

We went through downtown like we had been there many times before, which I gathered was the case with my two tour guides. About 10 city blocks from the station, a mile away, we walked into what I would call a noodles deli and every traveler’s supplies convenience store. My friends showed me how to order noodles and lace them will all kinds of pieces of unrecognizable species and slices of unpronounceable body parts. Since I didn’t know much of what I was eating, it was totally tasty. The rich flavors came from I don’t know where, but they were rich all the same.

My leadership team wouldn’t let me pay for brunch, so I grabbed two rolls of toilet paper off the shelf and pointed to a few other items and offered my credit card. My buddies were impressed with my awareness of the notorious toilet paper shortage on the train, which I wasn’t, and they saluted me for buying the pickled chicken feet tightly wrapped in plastic.

Back on the train, we – I – nodded recognition to our fourth, the North Korean, and showed him our adequate stock of toilet paper. Before the train began its movement out of the Nanning station, the North Korean’s four superiors were yelling orders of some sort, and we didn’t see him for the better part of the next hour.

I was spending my time looking out the window. My only China experience up until then was a week in Hong Kong in late winter 1971, where there were only two things I wanted to do; and I had followed the career track of my former Rice professor Peter Rowe, who became head of the urban design program at Harvard and finally the dean at the GSD (graduate school of design, but no one ever says that). As such he was in high demand in China, so much so he dropped Harvard for the East Asia trade in urban design services.

Point being, I had seen illustrations Peter’s work, but I couldn’t remember the names of the cities, so I was always looking out the train window waiting for the sign that said Peter Was Here.

Around lunchtime near the end of our 2,000 miles from Hanoi, we were getting into the greater Beijing metropolitan area, and my two tour guides got off about an hour out of town while our North Korean stayed onboard with me and his superiors until we pulled into the main station in downtown Beijing. For that hour, the whole way between the departure of the two Chinese railroad executives and the remaining two of us in the compartment getting off the train in Beijing, the North Korean had nothing to say to the American. And when I offered to shake his hand, the North Korean looked like he wondered what, exactly, was the deal.

John Kerry has one tough job.

 

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