Describe a long journey you went on

The longest journey that really sticks in my memory is a train trip from Ho Chi Minh City up to Da Nang, just after I graduated, which took around seventeen hours on one of the slower overnight services. I went entirely on my own, mostly because none of my friends could get the time off, and I remember being slightly nervous about that beforehand, though it turned out to be one of the better decisions I made that year. I travelled in a shared soft-sleeper cabin with three strangers — an older couple returning from a wedding and a university student going home for the holidays — and we ended up talking for hours, sharing food, playing cards on a folded-up newspaper because there was nowhere flat to put anything. What I remember most, though, isn't really the conversation but the scenery around dawn, somewhere past Nha Trang, when the train ran right along the coast and the sea was doing that thing where it goes almost silver just before sunrise. I'd been half asleep until then, and I just sat by the window for maybe forty minutes without doing anything else. It sounds like a small thing to have taken away from a seventeen-hour trip, but it's the image that comes back to me whenever anyone mentions that journey, more than any of the places I actually visited afterwards.