Ho Chi Minh City

I have arrived. The train pulls into the station a little late, at about twenty minutes past six. I have been photographing the sunrise with Misha, a Korean sculptor and poet. It stops, I rush to get my bags off, feeling just as dazed as one does after 36 hours on board. Its almost a cliche to say that I didn't feel any of the cliches when my foot touched the platform. Everyone else was just glad to get to Ho Chi Minh, to go home and see their families, find a taxi, find a place to stay, start working, start selling, just get on with life. I'd just finished three months of travelling, covering over 11,000 miles. I felt as though I should be jumping around, planting a flag, kissing the ground. Instead I took a photo of the train and then followed everyone through the doors into the station, my ticket flashed for inspection.

After that I felt a little drained, as though not jumping up and down was in fact more tiring. I sat down and tried to record some of my thoughts but in my deflated state I was worried they wouldn't be positive enough. I'd started this trip positively, determined to end the same way but right now I couldn't conjure up much in the way of joy. I wasn't disappointed in people though, really I was more disappointed in myself: rueing mistakes made, interviews missed, rip-offs purchased. People had in many cases surpassed expectations considerably and without the many acts of generosity and kindness, on the rails and off them, I might well not be slumped here on my rucksack. Some of these people were suffering as the result of the actions of their fellow man and on a more trivial scale I was still smarting from some of the 'good' deals I still seem to manage to pick up along the way. Also a recurring theme, that cropped up all along the trip, was concern about the harm we're doing to the world around us. Mild winters then spring blizzards in St Petersburg, unseasonal warmth in Krasnoyarsk and at Lake Baikal, dying grasslands in Mongolia, China smothered in smog, the Halong Bay. Everywhere strange weather and pollution were talking points, though in most places Nature is still considered something to survive rather than something to save.

The important thing, away from the bigger issues, which I tried not to dwell on in conversations, is that there were many, many people who were keen to talk to someone else on the train. Some stared at me with stony faces, faces I never thought could crack into smiles and if I hadn't been doing this programme I'm not sure I'd have made eye contact, let alone talked with them. But a few words later and things changed, faces were injected with warmth, stones cracked open into smiles. Obviously I sometimes had to look hard for people to talk to, a problem compounded by a few fairly high language hurdles, but I think on reflection it was surprising how often that wasn't necessary. Frequently I'd start to talking to the person next to me and though they'd initially protest that they had no stories no interest, something fascinating, often something they were passionate about usually came to the fore sooner or later. There's a danger that now I'll just stay quiet on trains now, having shredded me nerves building up the courage to ask the hundredth person whether they speak any English, but I think, whether the program gets made or not, I've gained so much from these stories that it would be silly to stop looking for them now.