Best French Restaurant in Indochina

Well, it sounds like a big claim, but if there is a better French restaurant in Indochina we want to find it.  What better way to bookend a food poisoning story with a fabulous meal story.

Our day culminated in a dinner date at La Badiane Restaurant at 10 Pho Nam Ngu just west of the Old Quarter in Hanoi and a good stone's throw from Hanoi Railway Station (more of that later).

For entree we had foie gras with splendid baguette and elegant spring rolls.  For mains it was beef fillet and ducked cooked two ways.  While dessert was grand marnier chocolat pudding and ice cream.  Wine was a delightful Chilean Syrah/Malbec.  Fabulous, all round and all set in a French provincial residence with a thoroughly modern decor and inspired Vietnamese artwork.

To start our day though, a driver met us at our hotel in Cat Ba and drove us the 45min to Cai Veng Harbour.  There we joined a hoard of travellers for a one hour speedboat trip across from Cai Vieng to Haiphong; and met up with our usual driver for the journey back to Hanoi.  Haiphong, it has to be said, is an industrial and port centre which features miles of harbour with setbacks of recovered mangrove swamps and factories - lots of pollution and pretty ugly.  Every country has its industrial wasteland - this is Vietnam's.  Parts of this side of Cat Ba/Haiphong reminded me of Pol Pot's killing fields in the Day Zero film.

Once we were back in Hanoi around mid afternoon, we felt like old hands again walking around the Old Quarter and knowing where the better shops were for jewellry shopping amongst other things.
It has to be said though, you put your life out there everytime you cross the street in Vietnam.  No-one stops, still less obeys road rules.  They just adjust their line and speed to go round you. The skill as a pedestrian is to keep shuffling at a constant, but slow and predictable speed and not to wobble your head around in every direction or lose your nerve.  Lisa spent so much time directing us not to get run over crossing the street, that she nearly got run over herself by a bus which cut the corner.  She was standing on the road 'daydreaming' and didn't hear me yell out twice to watch out!  Lucky she's still here and not a Vietnamese pagoda spirit.

After dinner, we drove to the train station for our 10.05pm night train.  We thanked our driver for all his good work and followed his flaying arms towards the station 'over there'.  Hmm...  We had an hour and a half, so we couldn't mess it up from here.  'Over there' was the ticket office and a bit futher over in another direction was the 'waiting room'.  In between and all around was chaos...street vendors, stalls, touts, tourist groups, taxi drivers, backpackers, Vietnamese families, luggage...but no station.  So we occupied the last 3 seats in the waiting room and Phil went exploring.

Phil eventually returned to find Harper cuddled up close to Lisa and three Vietnamese women hanging on to Harper, periodically stroking his arm and poking him to see if he is real.  Hilarious, if you're not Harper!  This went on for over half an hour until he pretended to fall asleep.  At least he's learnt one good male trick!

As for the station, all I could get from a lady punching tickets at a gateway that led into the dark was that the station was 'over there' and another flurry of hands. So with 40 mins to go, we headed out, through the gate dragging our cases across 7 train lines of broken concrete and rubble, very poor lighting and hacking off the touts who were trying to grap our bags.  Of course we were in Car 12 - the long, long end of the platforn, past even more chaos.  Anybody could bypass the ticket officers by coming in through the opposite unguarded end of the platform it seemed.

Anyway, we found our 4 berth cabin, made ourselves as comfy as we could and Harper fell asleep before we even left the station.  Lisa's eyes rolled several times over when she heard the racket the train made as it click-clacked and screeched its way out of the station.  Phil climbed in the top bunk and it was try and have sweet dreams for the next 9+ hours.