Most appeared to be sleeping but through a half-open carriage door I glimpsed a band of ancient men

Most appeared to be sleeping, but through a half-open carriage door I glimpsed a band of ancient men in silken pyjamas squatting around a candlelit Mah Jong board, swigging rice wine from doll-sized tumblers and toking on a long bamboo pipe. This one began in the early evening with violent thunder snapping at the heels of bolts of lightning which fizzed across the sky like topaz comet tails. Then came gyrating gales and an avalanche of oversized raindrops. Like extras in a disaster movie, we were plunged into darkness and left to marinade in our own sweat by a power failure I was terrified – everybody else seemed unmoved. There was a minor ripple of concern when Tien’s family woke to find their luggage submerged in flood water which had seeped into the carriage, but they just piled the sodden packages on to the bed and slept upright around them, heads resting on each other’s shoulders.At one point, I paddled down the train to see how other passengers were faring.

Scarlet banners above ticket offices extol employees to “work with care and devotion”; on the platforms there are hoardings advertising soft drinks, fax machines, Baskin Robbins ice-cream and Apple Macs. But, like the care-worn railway officials who are unable to prevent hawkers invading the train, communism seems powerless to resist the energetic capitalism which is engulfing the country. There are thousands of new businessmen like Quan shuttling back and forth on the Reunification Express between meetings and new enterprises, clutching shiny new briefcases and plotting to catapult Vietnam into the 21st century.Typhoons gatecrash northern Vietnam during the summer, unpredictable but not unexpected. You don’t have to look further than the railway station to see evidence of this unlikely alliance.

“No one takes much notice of the rules these days,” Quan, an affluent-looking young businessman from Saigon told me. As it got dark the conductors tired of the chase, and the hawkers ventured inside the train, moving between carriages with their cargoes of sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves or imported beer. This home-delivery, fast food was infinitely more popular than the tasteless food, queues and laconic service of the train’s dining car. Quan proudly pronounced this “a victory for free enterprise”.For 10 years, since do moi – the Vietnamese government’s policy of relaxing the trade rules and legalising private enterprise – communism and capitalism have co-existed. All afternoon, like an endless Tom and Jerry cartoon, I watched them scramble back into the train when given the all-clear by an accomplice inside, before being chased back up to the roof again.Hawking is illegal on the Reunification Express, as is erecting hammocks and travelling without a ticket, but the litany of regulations announced through the train’s antiquated loudspeaker system between slices of propaganda, was ignored by the passengers. Pursued by an iron-faced conductor clutching a bamboo club, he dived through an open window further down the carriage, and climbed on to the train’s roof, where a dozen other resourceful entrepreneurs already lurked.

We never saw any.More numerous were the hawkers who sprung from nowhere to ambush the train each time it stopped, brandishing baskets of French loaves, juicy mangoes or chewing gum. “Lucky Strike, Lucky Strike!” one insistent 10- year-old cried, thrusting a packet of fake American cigarettes underneath my nose. Conical hatted workers plucked the paddies underneath an afternoon sky smudged with clouds like wisps of Ho Chi Minh’s beard. There were clumps of bamboo shacks flocked with brightly painted pagodas whose roofs housed marauding serpents and dragons.