Reunification Express

(a country is adjoined by one ribbon)

I haven't really mentioned how much I loved Vietnam, so I'm going to spend my last three weeks in Thailand talking about it.

Con and I took the train through Vietnam. I love trains. There's ample video of me singing songs about trains as a kid. Trains trains trains.

Con hates trains.

Because monsoon flooding had taken out a bunch of track in Central Vietnam, our train crawled down the coast for most of the night. We arrived in Da Nang five hours behind schedule. The delay made Con and just about everyone else thoroughly grumpy by the time we limped into town. I was exhilarated.

Our cabin had power outlets and leg room and beer (all I want in life are power outlets and leg room.  And beer.). I watched Apocalypse Now while rolling through a full-moon DMZ at midnight (too obvious?), and chugged down Vietnamese Big Sur with my head out the window.

It's hard for me to travel like we do without feeling like I should be working all the time—on a beach, atop a boat, in the most beautiful places in the world, etc. But, with no WiFi, there was nothing much to do but watch a country that we once invaded slip by—a country whose history makes my work seem so small—nothing to do but journey, and read books about power and war, and stare at the ocean, and try to begin sorting out what two years worth of these aching, elusive travel experiences have meant on this—likely the last—grasping, hopeful one of them.

I could've ridden for days. Trains trains trains.