Sleeper Train to Mui Ne



Another rather sleepless sleeper train from the picturesque town of Hoi An ended with a fun morning rolling through the beautiful countryside and getting to know our fellow passengers.  At 9am we were being fed traditional Vietnamese snacks along with very potent, very homemade, very alcoholic, Vietnamese rice wine...a small party therefore ensued in our carriage before we all crashed out in a drunken sleepy slumber.

The purveyors of the rice wine!  A lovely family on their way back home to Saigon.  Mum picked rice to turn it into wine, Son sold the rice wine and Dad was a train driver.  Despite the language barrier, we quickly ascertained that he was a train driver, and not the train driver, as he was knocking back the rice wine as if it were water!

Humidty problems caused my camera to fill with condensation briefly!

And at around midday, we rolled into a tiny train station a few kilometres from the town of Phan Thiet and took a long taxi ride through the countryside to our hotel on the giant crescent beach running between Phan Thiet and Mui Ne.  After crashing out in our room and sleeping until the sun had set, we took a stroll along the beach, indulged in some comfort food (amazing burgers) and fell asleep again in our stylish room on the 1st floor of the Mui Ne Backpackers Hotel to the sound of the waves crashing onto the beach directly below our balcony.

On a Monday morning in the middle of October, we pulled back the curtains to see this:

We're heading down there, with nothing but books and sun cream and a a few hundred thousand Dong for an ice cream and a beer later.  Monday mornings will never be the same again.