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I wander onto the station platform at Da Nang. The air is steamy despite the early hour. A pair of fighter jets incongruously painted vacation turquoise roar overhead, ripping up the sky with their sonic booms. A vendor calls to me in English, “Chips, cookies, snacks!” I shake my head and cross the tracks as extended families drag wheelie suitcases over the uneven ground. I walk toward the train and feel like a backpacker again, delightfully free.
This North-South railway line courses almost the entire skinny length of Vietnam. In recent decades, it has become an increasingly popular way for tourists to see the country. The line was completed in 1936, under French colonial rule; just 20 years later, when war broke out between North and South Vietnam, it became a key supply route for North Vietnam to receive support from China and the Soviet Union, its allies to the north. For the enemy, the tracks provided an easy target.
When Saigon fell in 1975 and the United States pulled out of Vietnam, the effort to restore this railway was a way of kick-starting the national economy and demonstrating the country's engineering prowess. It was also, crucially, about healing. By the end of 1976, Vietnam had repaired hundreds of bridges, dozens of tunnels, and more than 150 stations. The train—connecting Hanoi in the north with Ho Chi Minh City in the south—was named the Reunification Express. This was victory.
Having worked as a correspondent in the region for years, I've boarded this train many times in both directions—sometimes with a berth, sometimes on a “hard seat” ticket, as the fare that gets you a spot on a wood banquette is called. I loved this journey back in the day when there was no icy air-conditioning, the windows slid open, there were bubbling hot samovars between carriages, and guards decked in finery saluted the trains as they pulled out of the stations.
This time around, I'm riding in The Vietage. The brainchild of the luxury hotel brand Anantara, it's a stylish single carriage that's linked to the end of the train for the 200-mile section between the cities of Da Nang and Quy Nhon. The Vietage connects two of the brand's hotels, the Anantara Hoi An Resort (about 40 minutes south of Da Nang) and Anantara Quy Nhon Villas. It took the company four long years to sort out the necessary permits and realize the initial idea.
Before boarding the train, I spend two days in Hoi An, long one of my favorite retreats in Southeast Asia, getting in touch with old friends and making new ones. It's a pretty, leafy riverside town filled with coffee shops and art galleries, which has attracted an outsize expat community. While there, I connect with the Japanese artist Saeko Ando, whom I met through a mutual acquaintance. She uses natural lacquer in her moody, nature-inspired paintings, borrowing an ancient Vietnamese technique. Ando invites me to have dinner with her and her friend Elka Ray, a Canadian novelist who lives by the beach, down a winding lane not wide enough for even a tuk-tuk to squeeze through. Both women have lived in Vietnam for more than 20 years, seduced by the go-slow tempo of life. “Vietnam is home,” Ray says, “but I won't stay if it becomes too busy, too noisy, too much.”
The next morning, I wander into the gallery of the French fine-art photographer who goes by the single name Réhahn. He has spent the last decade taking photographs of Vietnam's ethnic groups, of which there are more than 50, including the Dao, Nung, Hmong, and La Chi, across the country. Réhahn founded a museum in Hoi An that showcases this project. He's currently busy documenting traditional artisans, whose workmanship and skills he fears will be gone in a generation. The photographer introduces me to the 90-year-old lantern maker Huynh Van Ba, who tells me that he dreams each night of new designs. When I ask him about passing down his skills, he stares at me with milky eyes and says that his children aren't so interested. Réhahn also arranges for me to visit Bui Thi Xong, an octogenarian fisherwoman who takes me for a boat ride on the river, standing on the bow as she paddles upright with one oar. She jokes that while her hearing and eyesight are failing and she has no teeth left, she can still row a boat!
The next morning, I pack my bags and two staff members at the Anantara drive me to the train station in Da Nang, which sits just below the 17th Parallel and once marked the line between North and South Vietnam. From the exterior, the carriage of The Vietage looks like every other, with its red-white-and-blue-striped livery. But when I step inside through the heavy steel doors, I find a half dozen compartments with upholstered banquettes, sunlight filtering through the tiny hexagonal holes of rattan screens. Quang, the train manager, shows me my seat and suggests an iced coffee to go with my warm croissants and pain aux raisins. There's a lunch menu, speedy Wi-Fi, and soft blankets and neck pillows.
As we pull out of the station, a guard waves a flag furiously, and I watch as the vendors move their trolleys out of the way. From my cosseted vantage, we pass rusting train cars, chimney stacks, and the ubiquitous national flag, flapping red with a five-pointed yellow star. As the urban sprawl thins, the landscape morphs into chlorophyll green rice fields, the graphic vertical spears playing tricks on my eyes as we roll by. Farmers with their conical nón lá hats cut a quintessential Vietnamese silhouette, planting shoots by hand—backbreaking stuff. To my right are forested mountains, some sliced in half by mining activity; to my left is the sea.
We are traveling through the region of the Cham Empire. In its heyday, it was the chief rival of the Khmers. There are bas-reliefs at an Angkor temple in Cambodia depicting a 12th-century naval battle between the two sides. The Chams were formidable navigators and commanded a maritime trade network from Indonesia to Japan. Archaeologists have identified citadels and temple sites all along Vietnam's coast and throughout the mountains of Laos and Cambodia.
Over the next few hours, we cross rivers in which rice barges jostle with sampans. I watch fishermen flinging out their nets. There are man-made ponds with flotillas of ducks huddling in the shade of overhanging tree branches and lotus fields, tangled with lily pads, the luminous pink petals rising up from the mud. We also move through towns with concrete shophouses and pyres of household rubbish smoldering in backyards. At railroad crossings, I study the traffic we are holding back: overloaded motorbikes, gigantic trucks hauling shipping containers, double-decker coaches. The train's top speed is about 45 miles per hour. “Reunification, yes. Express, no,” a local says, a twinkle in his eye.
At some point between breakfast and the three-course lunch, Tien, another attendant, asks if I'd like a shoulder massage in the treatment compartment. After the kinks in my neck are worked out, I head to the horseshoe-shaped bar and balance on a high stool while rural life rolls past: fields of feathery maize, some left fallow, others being plowed by buffalo. There are clusters of gravestones, an odd one plonked in the middle of a paddy.
Just after lunch, the train pulls into the port of Quy Nhon. This is as far as The Vietage goes. It's a short drive to Anantara's beachfront Quy Nhon Villas as well as to the Bãi San Hô, a hotel the French hospitality group Zannier opened about two years ago on a scalloped bay with a long sandy beach. Both hotel brands are betting on this emerging region, considered by many locals to be the most serene stretch of their country's coastline.
I split my time in Quy Nhon between the two hotels, and I tap the excellent concierges at both to get the lay of the land. Driving around with an Anantara-arranged guide one day, I visit impressive Cham ruins, including Duong Long, a little-known triptych of east-facing lotus-shaped towers; the central one is nearly 80 feet high. When we arrive, the gate is locked and nobody is around; my guide calls the guard who lives nearby to come to let us in. Once inside, I wander around the empty site, examining the red brickwork furred with moss and gazing up at the trees sprouting from the cracks of the towers. Later, I meet with traditional artisans, including fourth-generation hatmakers and a family who weave rattan fish traps. Another day, I take the houseboat at the Bãi San Hô hotel down the coast, anchoring to snorkel among coral reefs, before motoring into protected lagoons where fishermen live on pontoons and raise tiger prawns.
On my last morning, I visit a popular fortune teller. She tells me I'm her 10th client already. She sits cross-legged beside an altar packed with kitschy statuettes, two television sets, a Heineken festive candle, and an offering of Oreo cookies. I take my place opposite her on the plastic mat. She deals a deck of cards and interprets my selections before reading my palm: I should expect a long life, but I've had a bad year. (“It might get better,” she quickly adds). She warns me not to make any weighty life-changing decisions. “Keep traveling,” she says, as I turn to leave. “You'll always be safe traveling.”
All aboard
Anantara's The Vietage makes two trips daily. It departs from Da Nang Railway Station, about 20 miles north of the riverside town of Hoi An, every morning at 8 a.m. and arrives at Dieu Tri Station, right outside the port town Quy Nhon, around 2:30 p.m. In the evening, the train leaves Dieu Tri at 6:30 p.m. and pulls into Da Nang just after midnight. The car, beautifully kitted out with lots of rattan, light wood, and a sleek marble bar, has seating for a maximum of 12 passengers across six private rooms, each with two spacious seats. On the evening journey, the rooms can be converted into sleeper booths. The six-hour trip starts at $400 per person, one-way; this includes a three-course meal, drinks, and a head-and-shoulder massage. The Vietage is a lovely way to move between Anantara's Hoi An and Quy Nhon properties, but non–hotel guests can purchase tickets as well.
Where to stay
Overlooking the Thu Bon River, the Anantara Hoi An Resort is a 94-key hotel that has lush landscaped grounds, a nice pool, daily morning yoga, and river cruises that depart from its private dock. The hotel's streetside café and art gallery are abuzz with locals, and it's a quick walk along the riverfront promenade to reach Hoi An's pretty town center, where the narrow alleyways are lined with shops, restaurants, and teahouses.
Anantara Quy Nhon Villas is a beachfront retreat and nice home base to explore the surrounding Cham-era temples. Ask the concierge to book you a guide who can show you around these historic sites, introduce you to artisans, and point you toward the best local seafood spots. Back at the hotel, visit the spa on the hill or take a martial-arts class on the lawn with the hotel's head of security.
With 73 villas cascading down a hillside to a sweeping arc of beach, the Zannier Hotels Bãi San Hô might just be the most beautiful property in Vietnam. The interiors are meticulous, and there is an excellent kitchen supporting three restaurants—one in a vaulted thatched space, another on the beach, and the third by the pool. There's good snorkeling in the neighboring bay and sundowner boat trips.
Abercrombie & Kent offers a 10-night Vietnam trip that includes flights, transfers, and accommodation at the hotels featured in this piece. From$6,025.
This article appeared in the March 2023 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
