A way to Dong Ha - taking a local train, am I being too brave?

So where do I start with this one hmmm.. With the journey maybe. This time it was a day train with hard seats. As it was not convenient to try and get it organized on my own, I booked it through the hotel service desk. It saves you the journey to the station and back and also it makes a taxi booking to get to the station in the same time. Sometimes you have to be smart with managing your time!
OK all I can say about the train it that the experience was sensational. So far I have experienced the overnight buses and trained but never the day one. With hard seats.

Train ticket - note how smart - some agencies are stapling the bottom part where the real price is. Tourist pay a 'tourist price' if booked through an agent.

Unfortunately I have not taken any photos, but I will try and describe as much in details as I can. So first of all the staff at the station were very friendly though not speaking a word in English. As usual, when the time was coming, someone came specifically to tell that the I can move onto the platform. Making sure it was the right one was easy, enough to take the ticket out and someone would start nodding and pointing that I am OK or I need to change. Platform was slowly getting full and some people were trying to make a conversation, limited to few words like "good", "OK", "hello", "where are you from". Being the only white and European on the platform was definitely dragging their attention. Not many times they can see a tourist hoping on a local train!

Train station - you could not tell if it was Vietnam or Poland... for most of the Polish stations would look even less appealing to this.

The carriages were open space with no compartments, hard wooden seats just like in any other very old train. What was different, it was the crates in the windows. I am not joking! There was a full steel crate in each window.That was new to me, coming from country where using the train services can move you back in time to 60-70 of the last century, I have never seen crates on a train.

People were taking their sites, and taking out their food and entertainment stuff on the little tables. It was normal to take the shoes off and start preparing their food. They would have boxes with rice or noodles with some meet and vegetables. I guess you never think of how other nationalities are travelling and in a country like Vietnam, a train journey is no different, but instead of having sandwiches and snack they would bring their own rice/noodles and mix it before eating.

There was also a train food service. A lady with a little trolley where she kept cooked rice with some toppings, drinks and local snacks. Not wanting to take my chances this time I skipped it, grateful for a bottle of water and some nuts I carried with me.
People around me were smiling and offering to share their lunches with him. People rarely smile to each other in Poland and seldom offer to share their food on a journey. How different was to join the Vietnamese train and see how people are happily travelling squeezed in uncomfortable seats, but yet smiling.

The journey wasn't too long, few hours altogether. In Dong Ha I hopped out just to realize that I am in the middle of nowhere. Literally, there was only a small train station and nothing else. One biker was waiting to offer his taxi services but I refused.

After all I knew where I wanted to go, and asking for a general direction was not sounding too difficult.
Coming out from the station I met a man and asked him for directions. Luckily he was one of the hotel owners and he had also DMZ guided tours to offer - ones recommended by Lonely Planet as the best ones.

So he pointed me in the direction of his hotel promising to join me in a short while to see if we can make a deal for DMZ tour.

Window View - DMZ Hotel

Window View DMZ Hotel

And so you see, once again everything was working like I would have never better planned myself.