FOR three weeks last month, Straits Times correspondent Tan Hui Yee, 30, and photojournalist Caroline Chia, 28, followed the route of the Singapore-Kunming Rail Link. In all, they spent 75 hours on the train and more than 35 hours on the road, traversing a total of 5,000km.

Where possible, they took the train, and connected by bus or car where it was not.

The first leg of the trip consisted of a 15-hour, $60 ride from the KTM station in Tanjong Pagar, Singapore, to Butterworth, Malaysia. From there, they took a 20-hour, RM110 (S$46.50) ride on KTM's Ekspres Antarabangsa service to Bangkok.

Next came a six-hour, 48 baht (S$2) ride on the State Railways of Thailand's train 275 to the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet, before they crossed over to the Cambodian town of Poipet by foot.

They then headed 120km eastwards towards Battambang town by car, to catch the weekly, 15-hour passenger train service to Phnom Penh. But it did not turn up that week because it had broken down.

The two chanced upon a freight train that was headed towards the Cambodian capital, and hitched a free ride. About nine hours into the trip, as the carriages started to fill up with even more cargo, they got off at Pursat town.

From Pursat, it took them 31/2 hours to reach Phnom Penh by bus.

The original Singapore-Kunming Rail Link route travels north-east from Phnom Penh to enter Vietnam via its border town at Loc Ninh. But connecting bus services to that region were hard to come by, so they travelled by bus for three hours to Vietnam via its Moc Bai border checkpoint, which lies south-east of Phnom Penh.

From Moc Bai, they took one hour to get to Ho Chi Minh City by bus. Vietnam's comparatively extensive train network connects Ho Chi Minh City to its capital Hanoi, but the summer holiday crush meant that train tickets northwards were sold out.

They used a 28-hour sleeper bus service instead to get to Vietnam's former capital of Hue - which lies midway between Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi - and then got onto the northward-bound TN4 train from there. That 17-hour ride on soft seats in an air-conditioned carriage cost 268,000 dong (S$23.20) per person.

From Hanoi, it was an eight-hour, 300,000 dong overnight ride on the SP3 sleeper train to Lao Cai town, which borders Yunnan, China.

After 21 days on the road, they flew back to Singapore from Hanoi, the clatter of train wheels still ringing in their ears.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on August 23, 2008.