News Extra: October 2024

The Future Southeast Asia Newsletter features transport and urban development news in Southeast Asia, edited by James Clark.

Welcome to the October edition of News Extra, featuring site news, travel updates, and news editorials for paying subscribers of Future Southeast Asia.

My time in Chiang Mai is coming to a close for 2024, and I have made an outline for research trips for the rest of the year. I will be in Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia, so if you are in any of the following places and would like to meet up, let me know (reply to this post by email or contact me on the website).

This travel outline is a sneak preview of what content to expect at Future Southeast Asia over the next few months.

Travel plans for Q4 2024

My travels for the rest of 2024 begin in Hanoi, mainly because that is the only direct flight to Vietnam from Chiang Mai. There used to be a Danang and HCMC flight, but they are not running at the moment. 

October is one of the best months to visit Hanoi, so I'm happy to return to the city as it recovers from Typhoon Yagi. 

In Hanoi, I will ride the second metro line that opened recently, and visit one of the new urban areas of the city.

Hanoi is locked in, but the rest is pencilled in. I will explain why after.

November

I will be in Vietnam for most of November. I'm keeping this open for now, but I will make my way down to Ho Chi Minh City by the end of the month.

December

Bangkok

I plan to be in Bangkok at the start of December where I will compile the annual construction and rail transit reports. I will be there for the Rail Asia Expo, so let me know if you are going to that.

Train from Bangkok to Phnom Penh

Royal Railway of Cambodia has resumed passenger services to Poipet on the Cambodia-Thailand border. However, the service isn't timed with the Bangkok-Aranyaprathet service, so it's not possible to go from Bangkok to Phnom Penh in one day.

This is bad news for normal people, but this is just the excuse I need to be stuck in Poipet and have a look around for a Future Southeast Asia report. Rail reviews will be posted on Nomadic Notes (subscribe to the newsletter for updates).

Phnom Penh-Kampot-Sihanoukville

After seeing what is happening in Phnom Penh I will get the train to Sihanoukville. The Royal Railway are about to launch services with the refurbished carriages from Japan. The seats on these carriages look much more comfortable than the carriages with the bench seats. This is a sensible solution to make the trip as comfortable as possible until the line is rebuilt (if/when that ever happens).

This train trip then gives me a good excuse to visit Sihanoukville. I was last there about 3 years ago, just after the country had reopened to international tourism. The city was littered with unfinished apartment towers, so I will see what projects have restarted

After Sihanoukville, I will go to Kampot to check in on the big tower they are building and the new city in Bokor. There is also the land reclamation project in Kep.

Mekong Delta

From Kampot, it's relatively easy to get to Ha Tien in the bottom corner of the Mekong Delta region. I've been to Ha Tien before and I like the laid-back provincial vibe there.

Ha Tien is the sort of place I write about for Nomadic Notes, but Ha Tien has an unusual amount of projects that put it in the Future Southeast Asia wheelhouse. There are new urban areas in Ha Tien, such as Ha Tien Centroria, Ha Tien Venice Villas, and ...New Vegas.

From Ha Tien there are ferries to Phu Quoc, but I won't visit this time. I'm still recovering from my visit in 2021, and I said I would come back in 5 years, so I will stick to that plan.

After Ha Tien I will pick out somewhere in the Mekong Delta that I haven't been to. There are other cities that have these improbable new urban areas like Ha Tien, so I will decide later. I should check in on Can Tho as well, and then return to Ho Chi Minh City.

As I mentioned earlier, all of these plans as pencilled in, so I could end up abandoning this trip midway through. I am waiting on confirmation of the opening of the HCMC Metro.

The HCMC Metro

The first line of the Ho Chi Minh City Metro is close to opening, with daily test runs to begin this month. If you have been following this project for long enough you would have every reason to be sceptical. I have kept an archive of news reports, and the first delay was in 2014 when the opening date moved from 2018 to 2020.

The most recent update said that Line 1 will open by the end of Q4, so sometime around the end of December. To add to the uncertainty, the PM asked for the line to be opened by November. 

A more likely scenario would be like the recently opened Line 3 in Hanoi. This line was continually delayed, and then it was set to open in July 2024. It was still planned to be opened in July when July came around, but then it was pushed back to August. I could see the HCMC Metro being set to open by the end of December, but then being pushed back to opening before the Tet holiday (29 January). 

Whatever the date is, once it is announced I will be able to lock in my travel plans or abandon my schedule to return to see the opening.

There will be more news about the metro over the next few months, and one thing I am waiting for is the release of the official website. At the moment there is only the railway management website.

Some good news was the announcement of the payment system. I was nervous that the ticket system would be some archaic token system, but the system is built so that passengers can use credit cards as a ticket.

If you are interested in getting news updates for the HCMC Metro, I have set up a Facebook page where I post news links.

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