Ch-ch-ch-changes!

So last night, the inevitable happened on a year-long trip around the world: our plans were changed for us by circumstances beyond our control. The best laid plans of mice and men, and all…

We were scheduled to travel in a soft sleeper car on a Vietnam Railways train leaving Hanoi for Huế at 7:20 pm. We’d read that the soft sleeper cabins are the ones you want and, because we had four passengers, we were able to book a whole cabin to ourselves. Perfect! Or so we’d thought.

So we checked out of our hotel at noon yesterday and spent the day hanging around in the old quarter of Hanoi, really just killing time until our train left later in the evening. Because we had checked out of the hotel, we also had to schlep our valuables around with us, which meant that we were lugging some of our baggage around with us all day.

Fast forward to yesterday evening, we showed up at the train station with our two tired kids, completely unaware that the train had been cancelled. Hours, possibly days ago. There had been floods in central Vietnam recently, and apparently no trains had been running there for days.

But despite the fact that the train had been cancelled with ample notice, we hadn’t heard a peep about it from our booking agent, Baolao (a well-known booking company that had been recommended in a blog we’d happened to read). Moreover, despite the train having been completely cancelled, and their failure to inform us of this fact, Baolao insisted that they were keeping “their” booking fee. Now, it was something like 10 USD — nothing in the grand scheme of things — but we were not impressed by their general attitude and complete lack of any real customer service.

Our suggestion is to avoid Baolao and book directly with your rail provider. The Vietnamese rail providers don’t have English-language booking websites, but your hotel should be able to do this for you, or you can do it yourself at the train station. The customer service at the Hanoi train station was downright helpful compared to Baolao, and booking direct will be cheaper (with a better refund policy).

So this is a risk to be aware of with the overnight trains in October, or anytime during the rainy season in central Vietnam. And while we luckily did not have a hard time finding last-minute alternative accommodation for last night or booking a flight to Huế for this morning, it was still a scramble to have to arrange for a hotel and alternate transport late in the evening.