August 2019, our first taste of Vietnam, and it began the traditional way: at the railway station with everything we owned strapped to our backs.
The train street nobody photographs
Everyone knows Hanoi's train street from the cafe strip with the railings and the queue for photos. This isn't that. It's a real residential stretch of track where trains still run straight through a narrow street, inches from front doors and from anyone standing in it. There are no barriers and there's no room to give. You feel the ground go first, then the air, and then the train is simply there. Twenty-eight seconds, and it's the closest we've stood to a moving train anywhere.
From Hanoi the rails run all the way down the country, and a few weeks later we were in Hoi An, several hundred kilometres and one wardrobe change south.