T H I S+W E E K

Banks of forgiveness
By Felicia Clark
A pilgrimage to India's holy city

Adventures in Pakistan
By Don George, Editor
Avalanches and encounters along the Karakoram Highway

D E P A R T M E N T S

The Surreal Gourmet
By Bob Blumer
Crustacean celebration

Postmark | London
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
Erotic design exhibits and a cappuccino craze signify the new face of old London

Passages
"Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road"
By Anthony Weller

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Great Railway Journeys

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LA S T+W E E K

Tuesday, July 29

Crime takes a holiday
By David Corn
Cavorting with mystery writers at a conference-cum-carnival in northern Spain

A full list of all
Wanderlust articles

Andrew J Bower | Great Railway Journeys
06:19am Jul 30, 1997 PST (#3 of 5)

in June I spent two weeks travelling through Vietnam with a small group. We started in Hanoi and ended up in Ho Chi Minh City, covering most of the long distances on the Reunification Express. The gauge is narrow, so "Express" may be an overstatement, but the train travel was a fascinating part of my Vietnam experience.

Just catching the train in the first place is an adventure, especially in the larger centres. Hanoi is a riot of motorcycles, bicycles and people, and this is concentrated around the railway station.

We travelled soft sleeper, but it wasn't exactly luxurious. I'm 6"1', so I had trouble finding a comfortable sleeping position, and the noise went beyond a gentle clickety-clack to a deafening roar in places. I didn't get much sleep on the overnight sections, but then I never sleep well anywhere.

The scenery was spectacular and the people were friendly (except for a minor rock-throwing incident - the wire mesh in the window is there for a reason). The food included with the ticket is fairly uninspiring, but you can buy excellent soup from vendors who roam the corridors, and the beer cart passes by fairly regularly.

One memorable incident occurred when a child fell onto the tracks and was run over by the train we were travelling on. It took us a while to realise what had happened, we weren't sure until the conductor managed to explain it to us with some fairly graphic sign language. He was collecting 2000 dong (about US$0.20) from each passenger for the victim's family, which seemed to be a well-established custom. This probably says something about the frequency of such accidents.

This was a severe intrusion of the real world into our exotic travel fantasies, and was just one of the many incidents that made Vietnam such an intense experience for me.

Lisa Sopher | Great old rides (cars, motorcycles, bicycles, whatever)
11:52am Jul 27, 1997 PST (#18 of 20)

the year I turned 29, the book "Women Who Run With the Wolves" was published. Before I read the book, I drove a nice, reliable, practical, economical Honda. After reading the book, I impulsively traded my Honda in on a Jeep Wrangler and decided to drive from Maryland to Yellowstone in it! I had visions of driving through mountain ranges with the top down, viewing waterfalls from a high vantage point, driving offroad where we would encounter wolves, bears, coyote. I bought an outback hat with lanyards and was ready to go. Well, the weather was so unpredictable that we had to keep the top up the whole time. We could not hear the radio because of the popping and flapping of the rag top in the wind. We spent more on gasoline than we spent on food and lodging. The damn thing had no pickup on the open road. The steel-and-canvas windows would blow away from the vehicle during thunderstorms. And, in West Virginia, on our way home, the rag top detached itself from the frame of the car (the whole apparatus came apart), and we had to find a jeep dealer before we could continue. Yellowstone was magnificent, but I'd have liked it better from the perspective of my quiet, smooth, reliable Honda. So much for running with wolves!!

MaryEllen K. Schoeman | Weirdest thing you ever saw or heard of in your travels
12:28pm Jul 25, 1997 PST (#3 of 4)

while visiting London in the midst of the last rash of IRA bombings, my husband and I took one of the pre-recorded bus tours of the city. The bus was forced to detour due to a bomb threat about halfway through the tour, but there was no announcement (presumably to not scare us) and the pre-recorded tour kept playing, even though we were now well off the route and the recording had nothing to do with what we were seeing. Nonetheless, the busload of mostly Japanese and American tourists continued busily and obliviously taking photographs and videotapes, convinced that the two-story brownstone we were passing was St. Pauls, because the tape said so! When we finally got back to the terminal, as we got off there was a woman handing out refunds, and apologizing for the problems, but the majority of the people on the tour had no idea why they were getting refunds...

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