Birthday Girl

Day 54: Hanoi (VN) – Ninh Binh (VN). Even when you're on a tight budget, you need to let your hair down out and give yourself a treat every now and then. And with Karen entering the last year of her thirties – what better excuse did we need? So today we forgot about trying to find a meal for under $5, we put on our glad rags on (jeans and trainers anyway) and went in search of the finest cuisine Hanoi could over. And thanks in part to the Lonely Planet (what else!) we found it, in the shape of the 'Wild Lotus' restaurant

And this wasn't just a good restaurant just by Hanoi standards, this was a fine restaurant even by west-end standards and with a comprehensive wine list including a 1995 Chateau Margeux Grand Cru at £1,000 a bottle (yes, that was British pounds and not Vietnamese dong!), this was the Le Manoir Aux Quat'Saisons of Vietnam. Indeed, such was the exclusivity of this lovely restaurant we were the only diners – but that didn't stop us enjoying our 10 course meal (washed down with bottles of beer because we couldn't afford any of the wine on the menu). The whole affair costing a cool million (this time however, I am talking Vietnamese dong rather than British pounds!)

Apart from the obvious quality of the food, the other noticeable difference between this and some of the other restaurants we had frequented in the Vietnamese capital was the apparent absence of rats. Vietnam as a whole has a big problem with rodent infestation which Khanh had detailed to us during our motorcycling tour. His view on the problem stemmed from the countries decision to round up all of the cats and sell them to China for food. Huffkin and Chudleigh – aren't you so pleased you live in your nice warm house in the UK and not in South East Asia?