Train street is one of the top tourist things to do in Hanoi and, therefore, I was a bit cynical about how much I would enjoy it. We ended up going one night after a food tour to check it out.

The idea is that you sit and have a drink on this narrow street that the train drives down the middle of every hour or two, literally about a metre from where you are sitting. (OH&S be damned!) I was glad to note that they did seem to have a few people in charge of yelling at tourists to move off of the track when a train was coming.

We’d heard beforehand that you should put a bottle cap on the track and then collect it after as a souvenir. (Kinda like we used to do with coins as kids on the train line near our house.) On the walk there I found a more unusual bottle cap, thinking that it would be easier to find afterwards.

We grab a drink and settle in for the show. One person put their phone in between the two tracks to get a video of the train going over – brave or stupid, you decide. He did collect his phone, unharmed, at the end but I didn’t see the video so will withhold judgement.

The excitement builds as the tracks are cleared and the cafe/bar staff move the chairs back a foot: the train is coming!

Oh yeah, that’s pretty close – we can clearly see the passengers who are also enjoying the spectacle 🙃

It was a pretty long train, so a fair time to take pictures and be amazed at how close this huge, fast-moving hunk of metal is to you.

And then it was gone, and time to locate our bottle tops…

As I now recall from my coin-on-the-track days as a kid, finding anything after it’s been run over it actually quite tricky. It turned out between the four of us we couldn’t locate any of our lids – but we found a spare one from someone else so we did get our souvenir.

It was actually quite fun and I can see why people come to see it. Certainly not something you’d be allowed to do in many places!