Reflecting our remoteness, there are few stops today – Amazar at 05.55 for 18 minutes, Magdagachi at 14.53 for just 15 minutes, and Belogorsk at 21.37 for 30 minutes. Time to read a book and watch the world go by.
But then it starts to come back to me. Last night, after a few glasses of quite reasonable red wine from Azerbaijan I had made a communication breakthrough with the woman who runs the restaurant. After several days living on fried eggs and stale bread rolls, I discover that caviar and salmon might be on offer for breakfast. Or was this all actually just a twisted dream sent to my brain by my digestive system?

I shuffle purposefully down the train towards the restaurant carriage, hoping that I have worked out the right time zone for breakfast. I calculate that local time is six hours ahead of Moscow time. I’m greeted by a tired looking chef, hopefully a sign of overnight fish trading on icy station platforms. The deal has apparently taken place at a place called Skovorodin. The curtains are drawn, almost like this is a well-guarded secret. Two police officers hang around for some time talking to passing passengers, but I have no idea what is being said. Are they guarding the fish?

The woman who takes my order is heavily made up and wearing a dress that might have been used in a mid 1970’s James Bond film. Apparently the caviar comes with pancakes and garlic butter, but the salmon has already gone. The pancakes taste simply heavenly, and cost me just 290 Rubles, or about £3. As I’m finishing breakfast the lady selling ice cream passes through the carriage. In her time zone it might be the perfect time for such a treat, but it’s not on my breakfast agenda.

When get back to my compartment I notice that Larissa, the carriage “provodnitsa”, has put all her gear on – a sure sign that we will shortly be stopping. She always dresses like we will be walking on the surface of the moon before leaving the train, and today the temperature on the platform doesn’t disappoint. I gingerly walk down the platform taking short snorts of frozen air whilst thinking about where else in the world you could experience such great food in an otherwise cold and inhospitable place.

The purpose of my visit is to seek out another personal recommendation from Neville of a great place to eat – his restaurant tips are sometimes not easy to spot or discriminate from the other places around them. On this occasion its a place called “Tuyet” which is a shack set back from the beach. He tells me to go to the where the road meets the beach and it’s the third place on the right hand side..it’s almost like I should have a code word or a secret sign!

I don’t need to work hard on my navigation skills though, as as soon as I get out of the taxi a girl recognises me from Hoi An and sits down with me for a chat. She helps with Neville’s food tour in the morning then sells jewellery on An Bang beach in the afternoon. There are a number of locals (some with disabilities) selling things and I immediately take a decision that it doesn’t matter that I don’t need what they are selling, but it want to help – so I buy everything offered, nuts, eggs, coffee, newspaper, and bangles. Maybe I will sell them on the next train journey!

The beach is unspoiled, the locals don’t hassle anyone, the food is amazing, and it’s populated by tourists who seek a beach which is hidden from the the other lovely (but more commercialised) Cua Dai beach down the road.

No sooner that I have I asked for the “Neville menu” I recognise an Australian family from the other day and we have lunch together over a couple of Saigon Beers. They are also heading over to Cambodia later this week – funny the way you keep bumping into people in this kind of caper – it’s the very definition of “small world”.

Lunch consists of clams, shrimp, local fish, calamari and a very special spring rolls with a kind of silken coating. Neville says this place is the world’s benchmark for this kind of spring roll.. In total I spend 260000 Dong, including beers – £7.44.

I sit on the beach for the afternoon content to read my book and watch the world go by. All too soon the sun starts to set and I realise I need to get back to my hotel and get my gear together for some train travel the next day. But I’m happy that I have spent a few hours in such a lovely place.

So I spent the morning meeting interesting locals and sampling dishes – 44 in all. I will just share a few discoveries here.. (and this isn’t the order I ate them in). Pictured here is one of the locals – “Jimmy” who is an ARVN veteran. He lost his left foot in the American War, so he walks around on a wooden stump. He is a man of few words, but as part of his unofficial diplomatic duties, he escorts us around the “Tiger market” like a sort of proud Vietnamese Uncle, if you can imagine that you had one.. (NB I didn’t actually see any tigers though).

“Pho Bo” – the famous breakfast dish of beef and noodles – “self assembly”, and I also added lime juice, chilli sauce, fish sauce and soy sauce.. Get the quantities right and its food heaven!

Madam Khanh is famous in Hoi An for her amazing “Banh Mi (Opla)” – a French bread type sandwich with egg. They call her the “Bahn Mi Queen” and she is something of a food celebrity. This is the closest thing you can get to a cooked breakfast in a bun – its a major discovery! Her simple street stall is a top recommendation for Hoi An restaurants on TripAdvisor. She has been in the same place for 40 years.. She planted the huge papaya tree that now provides shade over her stall. The results are utterly delicious and I need to do further research into the humble Bahn Mi!

Some “Bahn Xeo” (I think) in the Tiger Market.. A savoury crepe with pork, shrimp & bean sprouts.

The famous Cao Lau noodles being dried in the sunshine. The flavour comes from the local well water..

“Thit Nuong” is delicious street meat marinaded in lemongrass, turmeric and honey.

Ice cream from a local street vendor – our group got through about 30 of them – coffee, coconut and even Red Bull flavour!

My job now is to spend a few days eating in the very best places for each of the dishes I have discovered. It’s going to be hard work.. A top tip from Neville is that “yummy” (a natural reaction to most of the food) is a vaguely rude word here – “its delicious” is a better alternative and sounds like “nong lamb”..

Neville makes my day with his passion for Vietnamese food. At the same time it’s rewarding to see how the locals warm to him. I was also touched to find out how he raises money for Agent Orange victims, and everyone on the tour helps out a little bit with this.

If you are ever in Hoi An, this is a must do!

So a day munching through the streets of the old quarter with a guide called “Johnny” from a great little company called Vietnam Awesome Travel that I tracked down from TripAdvisor. Lunch started at 11.30 and finished at 16.30! The idea is only one dish at each place, washed down with some Hanoi Beer of course..

There was a mixed international group of about ten of us, and we were asked at the start if we wanted to try specialities like dog and various insects. The consensus was that we didn’t, so the places were chosen on this basis.

The first place was all about duck with duck rice. The secret is in the dipping sauce..

The duck was accompanied by salad, shallots and some aniseed tasting local herb that looked like basil but clearly wasn’t.

Next up was a street snack of rice with pork sausage – the dish was stuffed with “pate” of some sort – I wasn’t sure about that one..

Next up were some (sea) worm fritters. The worms looked disgusting, but once in fritter form they tasted quite good.

Then we moved on to mushroom and shrimp dumpling rolls – very tasty with coriander fried onion and a light dipping sauce.

Seemingly out of sequence we then had a course of banana fritters..

And then some fish. Apparently its unusual to get fish dishes on the street, so we were inside a proper restaurant for this.

Fish dish of the day was catfish, fried and then served in do it yourself rice paper rolls with noodles, peanuts, herbs and cucumber. Again it’s all about the dipping sauce..

The next place was more of a place to drink the local draft home brew beer – “bia-hoi” – incredibly refreshing and cheap at a few thousand Dong a glass.

Some sort of sausage rice paper roll snack to go with the beer..

Finally to a hidden place serving quite a famous local drink to wash it all down – egg coffee. This was served in a bowl of hot water to keep it warm as you slowly drink it.

I possibly regret not trying some insects today, but will make up for this further on my trip I promise!

One of the enduring good things the French did in Vietnam (other than import its taste in baking, brewing and the guillotine) was to popularise coffee and cafe culture, and it thrives today across the country. At the end of a long lunch (about seven courses in five places – more on this to come) I stopped at one of the many coffee roasters. Not to taste any old blends, but to appreciate the role of the weasel in high end Vietnamese coffee production.

Just to help you catch up if you are not familiar with coffee from Vietnam, most of it’s crop is lower grade robusta beans, the stuff they blend into all sorts of freeze dried coffee around the world. This tends to give it an undeserved reputation for cheaper coffee. I actually really like the robusta bean, but in the West its the arabica bean that is King, and Vietnam does grow some arabica in its highlands around Dalat.

Street coffee in Vietnam involves some super freshly ground beans and a simple tin filter that sits on top of your cup – a brilliant solution for good tasting strong French style coffee.

However if you peruse the beans on offer most Hanoi or Saigon roasters they will have an array of more exotic options. You may have heard of Kopi Luwak – the rather expensive Indonesian coffee with a USP that it’s been excreted by a civet cat. Well in Vietnam, the humble weasel plays the same role in the coffee production process. It eats the beans, digests them and excretes them, giving them a unique flavour. Once cleaned up and double roasted you have “Weasel coffee”!

You have to make a few more decisions though – what grade of weasel coffee to have, and do you want your weasel to be organic? Along with Johnny, our brilliant street food guide from “Vietnam Awesome Travel” I sat with a friendly Kiwi family trying some of the coffees on offer. We couldn’t work out if the grade one status is a reflection of the better quality bean or the better quality weasel, but it packed quote a punch and had a distinctive chicory aftertaste – less bitter than the grade two (both use the Vietnamese arabica bean). They even had a special version called “Weasel Legend”!

Grade one weasel coffee here costs about $65 a kilo, considerably cheaper than its famous Indonesian rival. I recommend you try some if you ever get the chance, and I’m going to bring a supply home with me, so do pop by my kitchen if you want to give it a go!

I’m getting used to the way this train works and I really like it. If you want to catch a slice of China on the move, then just leave the door to your compartment open – not only do the locals come to stare, but you get to see all the people selling things “door to door”. These range from food & beverages, magazines, and sets of nail clippers through to iPads (that have probably not been designed in California). In fact its like a sort of Chinese “shopping channel”!
Having recently read “The Boys from Brazil”, I was also surprised to see no less than seven identical female train guards walk past my compartment together holding hands. Were they sisters or do all Chinese women look the same in uniform?

My first purchase on the train was a can of “American” beer (not sure if Anheuser Busch would be happy with the brand) for just 5Y (50p). I later decided that train dining is one of life’s great experiences, so managed to get some intel on its location – just two carriages further back from my home at the end of the train.

I witnessed one of those comedy moments when everybody stopped eating to watch me and discover the purpose of my visit to the restaurant. The crew started shouting things to each other in Manadarin that I can only guess at there meaning – possibly – “we’ve got another one of those white farang types here – he’s sitting down – who is going to have to deal with him?”

Anyway, all worked out rather well – the menu is in Manadarin, but I managed to get away with advanced international sign language, my “Point It” book and my iPhone Chinese translator. My system now is that I have memorised the menu dishes by their price so I can point to them and act like I can read Mandarin.

So my supper consisted of what might have been a breakfast dish – scrambled eggs and ham, followed by a rather good spicy beef and cabbage soup, freshly cooked by a team of two chefs.

My only disappointment was the lack of “Great Wall” red wine on board, a Chinese railway personal favourite, so I tried a bottle of the local spirit instead, and wished I hadn’t.

For the record, if you plan to use the restaurant, the correct ettiquete (as I now know) is to choose your dishes from the menu and pay the person dressed like a policeman as you go in, then sit down. I wasn’t sure what was going on when I ordered the beef last night as the policeman came over to breifly interview me – actually with one word – “beef?”. Maybe he gets to decide if the person ordering it is suitable to have such a dish? I think with hindsight they might just be the revenue part of the railway staff, they just look like police.

In other train news, we seem to be cracking on – hardly any stops, maybe 2 or 3 in the last 15 hours. It’s not classified as a fast (G) or even a slower (D) train, but still making good progress. It’s also far smoother than the Trans-Mong, with much better potential to sleep. I only wish it went all the way to Hanoi, but its a change tonight. Incidentally, in China no one understands where Hanoi is, but they all know a place called “Hennei”.

I woke up this morning seriously smelling of sheep, to be more specific, spit roast lamb. I feel like I ingested a whole one last night with Paul (of carriage 6 fame). He had identified a place buried deep in the hutongs that specialised in this. The only problem was finding it.. In the end we took a strange moped taxi (a sort of “Hong Kong Phooey” mobile) which provided much entertainment weaving through gaps in the traffic and backstreets delivering us to the door of Tan Hua Lamb BBQ. What a meal, and it cost just a couple of hundred Yuan. It helps if you have some butchery skills, but even if you don’t, after a while they take pity on you and take a cleaver to the joint!

I have the tickets for my next leg – Beijing – Hanoi. it’s slightly bizarre in that in line with international train ticket conventions the languages on the ticket are Russian, German and Chinese – so quite hard for an Englishman to get his teeth into. All looks in order, and I even managed to get into Beijing West railway station yesterday for a quick recce – pleased I did as I now understand where I’m going.. Not sure how comfy this leg is going to be as I’m sharing a four berth soft sleeper with any other passengers mad enough to take a slow train across China in three days, when they now have high speed lines that can get you to Hong Kong in just eight hours.

Think that’s all for now – I’m off to have my feet seen to after two weeks pumelling them in my big boots in the snow and ice… Oh, one other thing. I have found two bolts in my luggage from my Trans-Mong window. I feel a bit guilty about that, and hope they will be able to fix it okay. I’m wondering if I might have left it close to actually falling off as I think I unbolted the whole frame by mistake.

The whole thing is over before you know it – closing at 18.30 local time when you start Chinese border formalities. I recommend a blow out lunch then a snack at dinner, as they run out of some things as the day goes on.

If you can’t be bothered to bring any of your own food you can live comfortably in this place. It’s not cheap though, so allow about 2000 Roubles (£40) for a couple of meals and drinks each day.