What Vietnam's FIRST CLASS Train Is Really Like)

Over the next 20 hours, Jeff and I are taking a train here in Vietnam. We have a first class ticket, so we'll have a room all to ourselves, and we're traveling from Da Nang all the way to Ho Chi Minh City. And you're coming along for the ride. All right, first step is to print our tickets. Hopefully I got the right code here. Oh, put the end of print boarding pass in. That's one, in. And that's two. All in all, super easy process here. We've made it onto the train. So we are here in a first class cabin, which means there's only two of us. We're going to go through all of that in a little bit. But for right now, we're just going to get settled in a little bit. Alexa and I are now on our way to Saigon. We boarded the train with no hassle, super easy. And we even got to sit in the VIP lounge, which if I'm remembering correctly, only cost about an extra dollar or two to do that. And I thought as we got underway, it would be a good time to talk about how much all of this cost, because we are technically in a first class cabin. There are normal seats on this train, just like any coach train would have. There are also cabins that have four beds in them. Alexa and I did not want to sleep with strangers. We kind of wanted our own space, and we have a lot of luggage. So we opted to get the only two person cabin aboard this train. And all told, it costs about 1.8 million dongs each. That seems like a really large number, but in actuality, it's only about $70, which if we go back to when Alexa and I rode the Amtrak train from Chicago to Portland, having our own cabin cost us about $1,500. So all told, it's about 10 times more expensive than this, though we don't have our own bathroom here. We have just left, so we begin our 20-hour journey. So here we go. All right, I need to go to the bathroom, so I figure we might as well do a little bathroom tour while I'm going. Okay, I made it to the bathroom, and it's quite nice. I mean, all told, you can't really complain. It's got a toilet, got a little sink, got a nice window. It's got toilet paper, for now anyways. What's nice is they have this little side sink here that's completely separate from the bathroom, so if you just need to wash your face or brush your teeth or something, you don't need to go into the bathroom. It's just right here. So you know that scene in Harry Potter? In each movie, when they're on the train on their way to Hogwarts, come down with the little cart with all of the fun stuff that you can buy. Anything off the trolley, dears? No, thanks. That is basically what it's like getting snacks on the train in Vietnam. So our first experience so far, we got some hard-boiled eggs. Jeff got a Coca-Cola, and I am going to try some lemon green tea because I really need some caffeine. I'm excited to try some of the other snacks. It's a little early for us. It's still about 8 30 a.m. breakfast time, but it'll be fun to try some of the other things as the cart passes by later on in the day. Well, I figure we have a bunch of time to kill, so I'm going to try and get some work done, and I hope you guys appreciate this little camera that I set up here in the corner to give us a really nice view of our entire cabin. And this is the part where we go to a time-lapse. Jeff and I have had some time to get comfortable and get acquainted with our room, so I thought I'd give you a tour before we completely make it a mess. Okay, well, it's not that much space, but it's comfortable. So we have our two beds right here, which are also couches, and then we have this, which is like a nice cushion spot, so when we're sitting down enjoying the view or eating or whatever we're doing, we have some support for our backs. In the room, there is a surprising amount of storage, so we have storage above the door right here and then also down here. We were both pretty surprised to find out that my huge pink suitcase actually fits underneath this bed. On our beds, we do each have a pillow and a blanket, clean, which is nice to know just because it is covered in plastic, and I love that it's a cute yellow print, very adorable. This is our dining room and our desk and our hangout space. It's actually pretty sturdy, unlike the Amtrak one that I ended up breaking accidentally. All good. And I think the best part of the room is obviously the view. We've only been on the train for an hour or two, and it's been really beautiful just to see the countryside. And before I go, one last thing, there is power in the room. Obviously, we have our lights right here, we have our USB plug, and then we do have some normal plugs down here. Honestly, this is all we need for 20 hours on a train. We do have air conditioning, which, let me tell you, is very important because if you're unaware of the climate of Vietnam, it is largely a tropical area. But there's a very sharp dividing line between basically where we are, Da Nang, and where we're going, Saigon. In Da Nang over the weekend, it was a little rainy, cloudy, and overall, probably around the mid-70s. In Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City, it is well into the 90s, and it's going to be hot and very humid. And as we get closer to Saigon, it's going to get hotter. All right, now it's time for us to get comfy. We've still got 18 more hours to go. Also, I forgot to mention one thing. We are leaving Da Nang at about 8 in the morning. This is only about a 20-hour train, so it is technically an overnight train. But what that means in actuality is that we're getting into Saigon somewhere around 4 to 5 a.m. So it's going to be a very early morning for us tomorrow. Well, we've been on the train for about 5 hours now, and we are a little exhausted. We woke up about 5 a.m. to get ready to board our train, and we still have a lot of time left on the train. So I think we're going to power down and take a little nap, and we'll see you guys in a few hours. Well, it's about 10 hours into our trip, which means we have 10 hours left to go inside our little cabin. And I figured now might be a good time to talk a little bit about the transportation and train system here in Vietnam because it is a little unique compared to other countries' trains. The first thing to know is that, like with most of Vietnam's modern infrastructure, a lot of the train network actually got built by the French between the late 1800s and early 1900s. The train that we're on, the North-South Railway, was actually completed in 1936, but construction of it started in 1899. That's nearly 40 years of solid construction, and that paints just a little bit of a picture of the very challenging geography here in Vietnam. A lot of dense tropical forests, a lot of mountains, a lot of coastal tidal plains. All of these things make it very hard to build on. And apparently, just to construct this one railroad, about 12,000 laborers died, which is a huge amount just to build a single railroad. Now, that said, once the railroad was complete, it turned a multi-week journey into just a 40 to 60-hour trip between Hanoi in the north and Saigon in the very far south, which is where we're going right now. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't talk a little bit about how most of the railway was destroyed during the Vietnam War, primarily by the Americans, but also by the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese. To the Vietnamese credit, though, after the fall of Saigon in 1975, it only took about a year for them to get the North-South Railroad back up and running, which is really impressive because most of it was destroyed at that point. Now, this is a really long railroad. All told, it's about 1,100 miles from Hanoi all the way down to Saigon. And for that reason, there are plans to, one, connect Vietnam to most of the other countries in Southeast Asia. So you can think of Cambodia, Laos, and of course, Bangkok in Thailand, but also eventually to build a high-speed rail. Right now, we're traveling between 60 and 80 miles per hour, given the location. The goal would be to turn this 20-hour trip from Da Nang to Saigon into something more like eight hours, which, let me tell you, would be a lot better than what we're doing right now. That's probably enough geography train stuff for you guys. Time to get back to whatever it is I'm doing on this train. I don't know if it's because I'm a little bored, but I'm really hungry. So I thought, let's go over all of the snacks that we brought. Now, we weren't sure how much food was gonna be available on the train. I decided that we needed to bring some things for our train ride. Okay, let's go for it. Starting off strong with some hot Cheeto fries. These are some of my favorite types of chips. I love hot Cheetos. We've already broken into these. Let's see. Sour cream and onion-flavored mini rice crackers. This was more of an impulse buy. Chili lime chips. Chocolate chip cream sandwiches. More of a Jeff. Choco pie. Definitely a Jeff purchase. Grape candy. Jeff loves grape candy and has turned me onto it in Japan, and now we've been trying all the different types of grape candies that we can get while we've been traveling. Here's our pineapple. It's kind of leaking, but looks good. Dark chocolate with whole almonds. Also, I've already started in on these. A cream custard pie. Vegetarian noodles, just in case. One eternity later. Oh, there's more. We have these weird waffles that we got, and we've just been trying to get through so we don't waste food. Kombucha. As I'm starting to see all of this on here, I'm realizing we might've went a little overboard. And by we, I mean me. Ah, crackers. Some cinnamon cookies that I've kept with me from Japan. Some nice, healthy mixed nuts. Two cuties. And last but not least, dried mango. I hope we have enough food for our 20-hour train ride. If you can believe it, in the lead up to us getting on the train, Alexa was constantly like, do we have enough food? Do we have enough food? Are we gonna be able to last the full night? Yeah, we're gonna last. Okay, but how great would it have been to have a bahn mi for the train? Good pineapple. This view. This is why you take the train. That is stunning. That is so beautiful. We're about to pull up to a train stop and all of a sudden the train smelled like smoke. It kind of smells like somebody's smoking a cigarette in here. Hopefully the smell goes away. Good news. Much to Alexa's delight, there actually is food being served on this train. Which means all the snacks that we brought are basically worthless. Just joking. But it is nice that we got a full meal here, which includes some rice, some chicken, some veggies, a little bit of seaweed sauce, and it looks like maybe some soy sauce. Perfect. There's chicken. Meanwhile... This is what happens when you're in a small little room for 20 hours. So this train is nothing if not a constantly moving snack train because all day, up and down, a lady's been coming by with, you can order this, you can order that, you can get snacks here, you can do this. In this case, a lady walked by and was selling what looked like little baguettes. What I didn't realize, however, is that on the inside is a sort of meat paste of some sort. In fact, it's kind of flossy. It tastes like hot dogs, so it's some sort of ham. It's very interesting, but very good. Very flaky. I will say this, the Vietnamese, they know their bread just about as well as the French do. All right, we've done just about everything we can do for 12 hours on a train. We've read, we've worked, we've had food, we've seen some pretty epic views, but now it's time to go to sleep. Having been on this mattress for about 12 hours, I can confirm it's a little on the harder side, so we'll see how good sleep is tonight. But with that, I think it's time to say good night and we'll see you bright and early around 4 a.m. Good morning. It is very early in the morning. You can tell because it's still very much dark out. We are rapidly approaching Saigon. Says we're supposed to get there at 4.20, but it looks like we're much closer than that, so we need to get our room in order, get all our stuff packed up, and get prepared to leave the train. You know, all in all, not a bad night's sleep. I think had I not had to wake up so early, I would have been able to sleep better, but I always do one of those things where if I know I have to wake up early, it's just going to be a really bad night of sleep. So I was sort of tossing and turning, waking up every couple hours, but I will say it was quite comfortable in here. The air conditioner was running all night, so we never got too hot, and the beds were, well, comfy. We are all packed up and ready to go. I still think we're about 30 minutes outside of Saigon, but we're worry travelers, so I just wanted to add one more thing before we actually get to Saigon. A few weeks ago, Alexa and I did a similar trip on Amtrak from Chicago all the way to Portland, and in that video, one of the things that I did was a good, bad, and ugly, almost a sort of a review of the experience, and I did think about doing that for this trip as well, but at the end of the day, I actually didn't want to do that because it kind of felt a little unfair. For one, like I mentioned earlier in the video, each of our tickets for this whole cabin was like $70 versus the $1,500 it costs for Amtrak, so there's a huge price discrepancy there, but also the train we're on is actually for transportation. There are people who are around who are just families trying to get from place to place, and Amtrak does have a transportation portion to it, but it was really more of a luxury travel trip, and it's priced as such, and I guess that's the reason why this video is a little bit different from that one. Just a few more minutes, and we'll be in Saigon. In the way we do by Little Room. We made it in Saigon. It's a little warm and humid for sure, even though it's four in the morning. Yes, it is 80 degrees. I am going to melt over the next week. Well, it was a lot of fun taking the train from Da Nang all the way down to Saigon, even though it's so early in the morning. I was really impressed with just how efficient and quick and easy this whole thing was. I think that might surprise a lot of people because Vietnam isn't necessarily known for their rail infrastructure, but we were supposed to get here at 4.20 in the morning, and we got here at 4.20 in the morning. Yeah, and I would say the experience overall was really pleasant. Having our own room was really nice. I think I was surprised at how many opportunities there were to buy food throughout our 20-hour train ride journey. The beds were actually really comfortable. I think I slept better on this bed than I did on Amtrak. There were a few little hiccups. Some funny ones were, I think somebody was smoking on our train car. And then the numbers on the rooms were not really clear, so people kept trying to come into our room because they thought it was theirs. We just had to lock our door, and then that just gave us the privacy that we wanted. But overall, it was a really pleasant and fun experience. I think my favorite part were the views that we saw. We saw the ocean, and it was so beautiful. And I will say this, because we had read some horror stories about the bathrooms before boarding, and it was A-OK. Always clean, always toilet paper, very easy. If you're ever thinking about doing this, I strongly recommend it. Again, cheap, easy, and relatively comfortable. This week, we are obviously here in Saigon, and so we are pulling together a whole episode about, well, this city and its unique place in Southern Vietnam. So come back next week for another adventure. See you then. This view. How do my hands do that? I forgot the date!