Woah - place is crazy, if we're not being ripped off by touts, there are motorcyclist to run you down if you're not killed by the pollution, holes in the road or other hazards! Although we appear to be the tourist attraction around here with LM as the star. Everywhere we go, people point at us and say hello - try to touch him or make him smile

And its not cheap either - we haven't got the hang of the money and appear to be handling over literally 1,000,000's of dong.

Children have been coping very well with 2 very long days. A fruitless search for a photocopy shop yesterday evening, pointless trip to the chinese embassy today, and rooting around for a trip to Sa'pa today, and they have not really moaned. I think they are shell shocked!

We aborted the attempt to get the chinese visa and went to the womens museum to find out about Mrs So & So's rice bowl, or Mrs Ho & Ho's shirt that she hid letters in. No really it was quite interesting, and told us about the lives of the street traders, which apparently have been banned since July 07 - you wouldn't know,,... they can earn as much in 1 month as living 6 months in the rural areas. (that's unless they meet us in which case it takes a day). Next we went to Hanoi Holiday Inn ( or is it Hilton) the prisoner of war camp, where the vietnamese were treated terribly by the french and yet the US POW (including John McCain) were treated impecciably - picture of Christmas trees, basket ball games etc etc. It was a very grim place. Finally we managed to get front seat tickets at the water puppet theatre for the show which lasted about 1 hour and was fascinating.

Off to Sapa on the overnight train tomorrow for a 8 million dong trip - it better be worth it.