What's that Smell??

Train travel was second nature to us now and we were pretty sure of what to expect on this third and short 9 hour journey from Nha Trang to Saigon. We had not accounted for the fact that there was a 2 day public holiday (backed up to weekend) starting the next day and the train was quite busy. We thought we could not get any worse travelling conditions than the previous 2 trains...Wrong! This was the oldest carriage we had travelled in and it was in a really sorry state after the 20 hours from Hanoi. My request for clean sheets on the bunks was met with a blank look and a shrug by the cabin attendant. Our travelling companion on this leg of the trip was a young man with a number of small bags, including a rather large tied up yellow plastic bag that he put under his berth... we thought we could smell a funny smell then but didn't think too much about it. The young man was not prepared for his trip though as he seemed to have no food with him. Being the seasoned train travellers we had become, we came well stocked with food and he accepted everything we offered him with a smile and a nod of his head. He became curious when he saw me working on a crossword in a puzzle magazine I had brought along. Curious probably because the longest words we saw anywhere in Vietnam seemed to be only five letters long! The crossword puzzle makers would be hard pushed to make a challenging cross word puzzle shape in Vietnamese. I wonder if anyone ever gets a 7 letter word in the local version of Scrabble? Vietnamese, for those curious readers out there, is a tonal language and although the length of words is relatively short, there appears to be a multitude of dots, curly lines, little hats etc...over the vowels that make the About 5 hours into the 9 hour journey, the slight smell we noticed at the beginning of the journey was getting more pervasive and it was obviously coming from the young man's yellow carrier bag under his berth. We then realised he must be taking some of Nha Trang's local speciality', fermented fish(!!), to someone in Saigon - rather them than me I say! Needless to say some deep breaths were inhaled when we got off the train and we waved a thankful goodbye to the young man with the smelly yellow bag