March 25th 7:30pm Nha Trang. Neil and I caught the 6am train from HCMC to Nha Trang this morning. Arrived around 1:20pm. Soft seats. Passenger car #7 with 64 in our car and working aircon. Assigned seats but we moved around as space opened up. Two other 60ish western traveling couples. Only 4 or 5 station stops in route. It is the dry season! Hot sunny.
Highly enjoyable day of picturesque travel through a mixture of settlement/developmment-urban sprawl, brown barren leafless treed landscapes, colorful burial shrine/cemetery patches and colorful metal roofed concrete dwellings, extensively cultivated lands, rice fields, small, medium and large sized in various stages of growth from wet green and being flooded to brown harvested stubbles with cattle and buffalo grazing, a few herded domestic flocks of ducks searching for rice grains; some fields were actively being harvested with workers bagging rice. Small towns/villages, granite like boulder hills, flowering lily ponds, few ocean views, numerous small agroforestry-wood lots, some appear to be sandalwood and eucalyptus, locally numerous fields of tapioca, sugar cane and Aloe(?) a few avocado and mango orchards, sheep, taro patches, bananas especially on recently deforested hill slopes. Lots of egrets. Some small scale intensive garden patches of an unknown green, passion fruit. Ongoing construction projects for roads, bridges, buildings, quarries and canals. Most river crossings were areas heavily impacted-disturbed and manipulated. A busy heavily utilized landscape with pervasive evidence of occupancy.
Highly enjoyable day of picturesque travel through a mixture of settlement/developmment-urban sprawl, brown barren leafless treed landscapes, colorful burial shrine/cemetery patches and colorful metal roofed concrete dwellings, extensively cultivated lands, rice fields, small, medium and large sized in various stages of growth from wet green and being flooded to brown harvested stubbles with cattle and buffalo grazing, a few herded domestic flocks of ducks searching for rice grains; some fields were actively being harvested with workers bagging rice. Small towns/villages, granite like boulder hills, flowering lily ponds, few ocean views, numerous small agroforestry-wood lots, some appear to be sandalwood and eucalyptus, locally numerous fields of tapioca, sugar cane and Aloe(?) a few avocado and mango orchards, sheep, taro patches, bananas especially on recently deforested hill slopes. Lots of egrets. Some small scale intensive garden patches of an unknown green, passion fruit. Ongoing construction projects for roads, bridges, buildings, quarries and canals. Most river crossings were areas heavily impacted-disturbed and manipulated. A busy heavily utilized landscape with pervasive evidence of occupancy.
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