Babies on a Train

By Kathleen

The baby across the street has finally stopped bawling, just
in time for me to be fully awake about a half an hour before I wanted to be.

But motivation strikes me early in the morning so, dear
readers I will update you on our travels. Not having reliable fast internet
means that often you are a couple of days behind us, which I apologize for but
can really do nothing about. Also, believe it or not, we are supposed to be on
vacation so the waking time is often spend trying to do just that, with obvious
mixed success.

Last we left you I believe, we were in Hoi An, a beautiful
historic city in central Vietnam. Its custard yellow lined streets and red
hanging lanterns created a scene of beauty in the day and a magical romantic
wonderland at night. I personally thought they should make all the visitors
wear historic costumes ( yeah I know I’m weird) because it would have been
really awesome then.

The food in Hoi An was, oh so good. With French fusion and
really spectacular Vietnamese we were in foodie heaven for four days. Our
favorite place Cargo Café was a café and bar on the bottom and a lovely
restaurant on the top. The whole place was decorated in white and the food was…
full of cheese. But really Lonely Planet totally overlooked this one, all they
said about it was that it was a decent bar, clearly they never even went upstairs.

We left Hoi An two days ago and headed to Saigon. Remember
when we said that if you were traveling long distances in Vietnam it was better
to take the train not the bus? Yeah, well we were lying. Forget any long
distance land travel. It’s defiantly better to fly.

Our train arrived on time, which is more than I can say for
the bus and it did have bathrooms, they weren’t really usable and I think a
graveyard was defiantly a step up from one of them but at least they were there
right?

We had purchased a class of ticket called “ soft sleeper” by
which we were told would mean soft flat bunks, one on top of another in a
compartment. Sounded nice, sounded romantic, sounded like we would be able to
sleep.

“Soft sleeper” class apparently means no such thing, instead
we boarded our compartment only to find dirty reclining seats, like you would
find on an airplane. The tickets assured us of AC but really it was more like
sporadic wind and only worked as long as the train was moving quickly. In the
dark, because they didn’t turn the lights on for new passengers, we had to find
our seats, which was tricky because they were already taken. So we popped
ourselves into some empty ones and hoped for the best.

I noticed a strange sweet smell, like warm popcorn coming
from under my chair and looked to discover a bag of trash the last passenger
had left behind. “Great, so they don’t ever clean this place.” I thought to
myself.

The bathrooms were so revolting that Fiz almost threw up and
I almost considered documenting them but decided that I would spare myself the
memory.

About halfway to Saigon from Da Nang we were joined by the
mommy squad. Three women with five babies, around the compartment eyes rolled.
Soon all five were crying.

 Mom number one managed
to subdue her two toddlers and then quite ingeniously with the help of some
other ladies on board, hung a hammock from the overhead luggage rack. Once
secured she placed her squalling little girl into it and swung her into sleep, which
was great for everyone except the guy who was sitting directly behind her and
so got his head knocked with each swing, bless him for not complaining.

The other mother got a family member to take her toddler and
so turned her full attention on the baby boy in her lap who was crying hysterically.  He went on and on and finally I looked
back to see her slapping him.

I don’t know what this was supposed to achieve
but every time he let out another wail she would slap him vigorously across his
legs, face, back, head, really any exposed part. This went on for a good long
while, until, probably somebody leaded over and said “ um excuse me but have
you thought to check his diaper” which she did only to revealed a huge mess,
poor baby.

I don’t know if she changed it, I never saw her do so and
they crying and slapping continued sporadically for the rest of the ride.
Finally the baby must have realized the futility of his communication and it mellowed
out to whimpers and an occasional sob.

Needless to say, it was interesting to watch the two
different parenting styles at work. I think in the US we tend to admire
different “ cultural” or “traditional” (meaning  not our tradition) parenting techniques, and there are many
advocates for taking hints from peoples far far away.

But as this little example demonstrates, even far far away
there a big differences between how individuals handle the same challenges and
many “traditions” aren’t so great. I would hope that this shows that within
cultures there is much variety and people from one place cannot be said to do
everything the same. Looking inward to ourselves for answers is often a better gauge
of how things should be done.

Our train finally arrived in Saigon a full 17 hours after it
had left. “ Oh it’s 12 hours,” our guesthouse manager had told us. Right.

It’s worth the extra ten bucks to fly. To be fair this time
we weren’t being cheap we had wanted to see some of the countryside. Well, we
did, we say a lot of it. It was interesting and beautiful when we weren’t
trying to sleep away the misery of the train.

I got to see a dragon fruit farm, strange cactus like plants
growing on big pillars producing spiky magenta fruit. So, there is some upshot,
but if you travel by train, go prepared, with lots of hand sanitizer, the light
of the day confirmed my suspicious that no, it really hadn’t ever been cleaned.