Vietnam's Heritage Express

Connecting north with south, the Reunification Express is also perhaps the best way to visit Vietnam's UNESCO-listed sites and depth of culture

- By Alex Robinson. Photographs by Alex Robinson and Alamy

A typhoon was coming. Duy was waiting, my guide’s engine running in the dark. The wind was already picking-up, sending leaves whirling in the air. I wolfed down my eggs and swigged more coffee, standing up as I did so. The situation seemed so fired up that I couldn’t help thinking back to that sunny, serene summer’s day in London when I’d decided to take the Reunification Express. But would I rather be back there now? No…

“We must go, Mr Alex,” Duy shouted through the open car window. He hooted the horn. I wiped my mouth, grabbed my bags and we sped away. Within moments we were on the edge of Phong Nha village, Vietnamese rock playing on the stereo, Duy focused on the road.

“If we drive straight south to Hue we will just miss the typhoon,’ he said over the music, “but it will be close.”

The car shuddered in the gusts.

The Reunification Express. Sedate train. A film-reel window of pagodas and paddyfields, wheels clunking over the Red River bridge. That’s how I’d imagined it. And how it pretty much is. Built after the Vietnam War, the North-South Railway is still seen as a shining symbol of a progressive, unified country; one with the energy to build and grow that’s seen it catching up with Korea and even China. Pieced together in a blinding two years, the railway line links northerly Hanoi with Ho Chi Minh City, more than 1,700km, 1,300 bridges and 27 tunnels away in the south. Rumbling through rural fields and glistening new glass cities, past pearl-white beaches and bays of islands, the railway line joins the dots between almost all of Vietnam’s UNESCO World Heritage Listed sites – from Halong Bay in the north down to Imperial Hue in the country’s thin middle. My plan was to visit as many of them as possible.