Vietnam north to south, by train and scooter
If you've read me before, you know I have a problem: I keep ending up on trains. Japan, then a Thai night train, and now this — the Reunification Express, the long iron spine that runs the whole length of Vietnam, from Hanoi in the north to Saigon in the south. About 1,700 kilometres and a day and a half if you do it in one go. I didn't do it in one go. The trick, I've learned, is to break the big line into chapters.
So I rode it in pieces, with a scooter filling the gaps the rails don't reach. Train for the long hauls and the coast; two wheels for the mountains and the villages. It's the most Vietnamese way to travel I could find: everything here moves, constantly, on something with an engine, and the country is generous enough to let you join in.
The coast by rail
The stretch everyone tells you about is the one between Huế and Đà Nẵng, where the track clings to the Hải Vân Pass and the South China Sea opens up below the window, impossibly blue, while the train leans into the cliffs. I'd booked that segment online from a café the night before, egg coffee going cold beside my phone — Vietnam is wired, cheap data and 4G almost everywhere along the coast, and booking train legs as you go is half the freedom of the trip. I spent the whole pass with my face at the glass and my phone face-down. Some windows you don't photograph. You just sit in them.
« The train carries you down the coast. The scooter takes you off the map. You want both. »
The scooter chapters were the opposite kind of connected. Up in the far north, on the mountain loops near Hà Giang, the signal thins out the way it should in a place that remote — strong in the towns, gone on the high passes between them. That's exactly where I leaned on an offline map and a route saved in advance, and exactly where I was glad I'd installed my eSIM before landing rather than hoping for a kiosk in a village market. Down in the cities it was the other extreme: Grab for everything, a bike summoned in two taps, dinner ordered to a guesthouse I couldn't have named in Vietnamese.
A country that doesn't sit still
Between the rails and the road, Vietnam unspooled in textures: the old quarter of Hanoi at 6 a.m., already loud with breakfast; a sleeper berth rocking south through the dark; a scooter idling at a mountain viewpoint while a kid sold me the best banana I've ever eaten. The data was never the point. It was the quiet utility underneath — a train ticket here, a Grab there, a video call home from a night market because, as ever, some things have to be shown.
📶 Léa's tip
Book your train legs as you go — sites and apps let you grab seats a day or two ahead, and the coastal Huế–Đà Nẵng stretch is worth planning around. In the cities, Grab replaces taxis and half your dinners. For the northern scooter loops, download an offline map and save your route: the high passes have no signal. Install your eSIM before you land so you're booking and navigating from the first morning. Check your phone in 30 seconds here and find your Vietnam plan on the destinations page.
What I take away
Three modes of transport, one country, north to south. I arrived thinking I'd take the famous train; I left realising the train was only the thread, and the scooter and the cities were the beads on it. Vietnam rewards the traveller who keeps moving and stays just connected enough to improvise — to change a plan at a café, to find the pass before dark, to keep the thread with home between two very different kinds of engine.
— Léa, still, somehow, between two trains.