Night Train to Saigon (Reprise)

music: Elfpower

Came back on the night train to Saigon, five hours from Phan Thiet and the beach. Sluggish and daylight at first as it passed through red sand dunes and into the countryside with its rasta Dragon Fruit trees, a crowd of nodding dreads with pink heads and green gills hanging limply in the air. A strange fruit. Then it sped up as it closed on Bien Hoa as though rushing to dismiss a city which had led a small-scale resistance against the northern communists even after the fall of Saigon. Inside the train, the Vietnamese are beginning to wake up from slumber or recover from being slumped on the floor, crippled with motion-sickness and soon it is our night train cutting through streets where a hand reached out could be touched and where we groan not quite arrived into a station dimly lit and we walk the last three hundred metres down the rusty track.