The Reunification Express leaves Hanoi at 7 PM and arrives in Ho Chi Minh City somewhere around thirty-six hours later, depending on the track conditions, the weather, and what I can only describe as the train’s general disposition.
I booked a soft sleeper — a four-berth cabin with thin mattresses, a small window, and a fan that made a sound like a playing card stuck in bicycle spokes. My cabinmates were a Vietnamese grandmother traveling to visit her daughter, a French backpacker named Thomas who was a few months into a gap year, and a Vietnamese businessman who introduced himself, climbed to the top bunk, and fell asleep immediately.
The grandmother offered me dried mango before the train left the station. Thomas offered me a cigarette. I took the mango.
The First Night
Trains in Vietnam don’t move fast. The Reunification Express averages about thirty miles an hour, which means you have time. Time to watch the outskirts of Hanoi dissolve into rice paddies. Time to listen to the rhythm of the wheels, which sounds nothing like what you’d expect — not a smooth clickety-clack but an uneven, syncopated percussion, as if the track was laid by someone who valued character over consistency.
The grandmother’s name was Mrs. Thanh. She spoke limited English, but she spoke it with conviction, which was more than I could say for my Vietnamese. She told me about her daughter in Saigon — she still called it Saigon — who’d married a man from the south and moved there ten years ago. She made this trip twice a year. Always by train. Never by plane.
“Plane too fast,” she said. “No time to think.”
I wrote that down.
Thomas, the French backpacker, had the oversharing energy of someone who’d been traveling alone for too long. Within an hour, I knew about his breakup, his plan to teach English in Thailand, his opinion on Nietzsche, and his conviction that Vietnamese coffee was the best in the world. On the last point, at least, he wasn’t wrong.
The businessman slept through everything.
The Stops
The train stops frequently. Not at major stations — at small towns along the coast, places that don’t appear in guidebooks, where the platform is a strip of concrete barely wider than the train itself.
At each stop, vendors appear. Women carrying baskets of baguettes — a holdover from French colonialism that Vietnam has made entirely its own. Men with thermoses of coffee. Kids selling cigarettes and snacks. The transactions happen through the windows, hands reaching up from the platform to hands reaching down from the carriage, money and food exchanged in a choreography that must happen a hundred times a day.
I bought a banh mi at a stop somewhere in Quang Binh province. It cost about a dollar. The bread was warm, the pate was fresh, and the chilies were aggressive enough that Mrs. Thanh laughed at the face I made. This sandwich, eaten standing in a train corridor while the countryside blurred past the window, was one of the best things I ate in Vietnam.
The stops also let you off, briefly. Five minutes, sometimes ten. Enough to stand on the platform, stretch your legs, breathe air that isn’t recirculated. Enough to watch the town for a moment — a motorbike carrying an improbable load of boxes, a dog sleeping under a bench, a woman sweeping the steps of a shop that doesn’t seem to be open.
These glimpses don’t tell you anything about a place. But they give you a texture that flying never will. You start to feel the length of the country — how it stretches, narrow and long, from the mountains in the north to the delta in the south. You feel the changes in vegetation, in architecture, in the quality of the light.
Slow Travel and Fast Thinking
I spend most of my professional life moving fast. Client calls back to back. Deliverables on deadline. Strategy documents that need to be done yesterday. Speed is the default mode, and I’m good at it.
The train dismantles that.
You can’t move fast on the Reunification Express. You can’t check your email reliably — the Wi-Fi is theoretical at best. You can’t take a call because the reception drops every few minutes. You can’t do much of anything except sit, watch, think, and talk to the strangers in your cabin.
At first, this felt like lost time. My brain kept generating tasks. I should be writing that proposal. I should be reviewing that campaign. I should be responding to that thread.
By hour eight, the tasks dissolved. Not because they weren’t real, but because the train enforced a different rhythm. A slower rhythm. And in that slowness, something useful happened: I started thinking clearly.
Not productively — clearly. There’s a difference. Productive thinking is about output. Clear thinking is about understanding. On the train, I found myself working through problems I’d been circling for weeks — not solving them, exactly, but seeing them from angles that weren’t available when I was running at full speed.
I think slow travel does this because it removes the illusion of urgency. When you’re on a train for thirty-six hours, nothing is urgent. Your only job is to be present where you are. And presence, it turns out, is where good thinking lives.
The Coast
Somewhere south of Da Nang, the train runs along the coast. The track hugs the shoreline close enough that you can see waves breaking on rocks below. The mountains press in from the other side. It’s one of the most beautiful stretches of railway in the world, and it happens at a pace where you can actually absorb it.
I stood in the corridor with Mrs. Thanh and Thomas, the three of us saying nothing, just watching. The light was late afternoon — golden, diffused — and it turned the South China Sea into something that looked like hammered metal.
Mrs. Thanh pointed at a fishing village below the tracks. A dozen boats. Nets drying on the beach. “My husband’s family,” she said. Then, after a pause: “Before.”
She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to. Vietnam’s history is present in every conversation, every landscape, every “before” that doesn’t require a “after.” The Reunification Express itself is named for the event that reshaped the country — the reunification of north and south in 1975. The train runs the length of that division, crossing the former DMZ without ceremony, just another stretch of track.
The Second Night
By the second night, the cabin had settled into a routine. Mrs. Thanh went to bed early, covering herself with a thin blanket and falling asleep with an ease I envied. Thomas read a paperback by the dim overhead light. The businessman — who’d spent most of the trip sleeping or on his phone — surprised everyone by producing a thermos of tea and small cups, which he distributed without a word.
We drank tea in near silence while the train moved through darkness. Through the window, occasional lights — a town, a highway, a lone house — broke the black.
This is the part of long-distance train travel that changes you, if you let it. The enforced intimacy with strangers. The shared space that isn’t yours and isn’t theirs. The way a cabin full of people who met twenty-four hours ago can sit in comfortable silence and drink tea, united by nothing except the fact that they’re all going the same direction.
I don’t think you get this on a plane. Planes are designed for isolation — headphones, screens, individual air vents. Trains are designed for proximity. You hear the other person turn in their bunk. You share the aisle. You negotiate the bathroom schedule through mutual unspoken agreement.
It’s imperfect and slightly uncomfortable and deeply human.
Arrival
Ho Chi Minh City station is loud. The doors open and you’re hit with heat, motorbike exhaust, and the chaotic energy of a city that never seems to sit still. After thirty-six hours of slow motion, it’s jarring. Like stepping from a quiet room into a concert.
Mrs. Thanh’s daughter was waiting on the platform. They embraced for a long time. Thomas disappeared into the crowd with a wave and a “bon voyage” that was characteristically extra. The businessman shook my hand, said “good trip,” and walked away.
I stood on the platform for a few minutes, letting the city settle around me. I felt something I’d felt before in other places — the pleasant disorientation of arriving somewhere by slow means. When you fly, you leave one place and appear in another. When you take a train for thirty-six hours, you feel every mile between them. You arrive with a sense of distance that a plane can never give you.
I took a taxi to my hotel in District 1. Checked in. Stood in the shower for fifteen minutes. Then I went out for pho at a street stall, sitting on a plastic stool, watching motorbikes negotiate an intersection with the collective intuition of a flock of birds.
The pho was good. The city was alive. I was exactly where the train had been taking me, one slow mile at a time.
And I didn’t check my email until the next morning.