New country today! We have a 6.30pm flight to Luang Prabang in Laos. And that's it for tour groups until February next year.

We had chance for a bit of a lie in again today until 9.30am. Typical that we both woke up around 7am!! Managed to get back to sleep though.
Said our goodbyes to Dan and Sue who go home to Ireland this morning - they'll be having a nice Sunday dinner tomorrow...

Had a couple of jobs to do on the Internet and booked our accommodation for Vang Vieng in Laos. Whilst looking into that we realised that we needed some US Dollars for our Laos Visa. $30 each actually and we didn't have any left!

So we got our backpacks packed and checked out at 11.30am, then set off to get some lunch and get some dollars exchanged. We found a bank and walked in but the women started waving her hands at us saying "no close, close". Tried to ask her where we could get dollars but she didn't have any interest in helping us and just kept saying the saying thing over and over or ignoring us - proper rude. Then we realised that it was Saturday and just gone 12pm - closes at 12pm!
Then we found another bank but they said they couldn't exchange Dong to Dollars. She tried to help by showing us somewhere on the map to go but it was too far out of our way.
We were passing this other bank and just looked at it and this guy straight away started saying "no, close"! I tried to ask him where a money exchange place was but again this guy just kept saying "close". We found a lot of people are really unhelpful in Vietnam, and very rude about it. They have this really annoyed look on their face when you try to get help. Younger people are much better to approach. Suppose it's the language barrier, but I think even if I spoke Vietnamese they wouldn't want to help. There's definitely more nice people than rude though.

We decided to get our lunch and went to Le Pub again! Had pizza this time...we will definitely not be eating all this junk food when we get back to Thailand...not sure about Laos.

Got some help from the waitress for the money exchange, but when we got to the place, it was a bank and closed. Then we asked a guy in a tour company and he said he could exchange it...he looked dodgy though so we didn't bother.
We gave in and decided to just get it sorted at the airport because all airports have money exchange places....

We'd booked a taxi through the hotel to the airport as public transport is not very good in Hanoi (or anywhere else in Vietnam). First thing we did when we got there was try find a money exchange. There were none on the departures level so we went down to arrivals - loads of them! But not a single one would exchange Dong to Dollars!!!! We were so annoyed...actually, that's not strong enough...we were proper pissed off by this time!!! Absolutely ridiculous - it's like being at home and not ring able to change Pounds to Euros. The only thing we could do was buy another currency like Pounds or Euro with Dong and then buy Dollars, and get ripped off on the exchange rates. There was one guy who said he'd exchange $100. I went back a few minutes later and asked what the rate was for $150 and he then basically said he wouldn't exchange to dollars!! Joke. Fortunately, I had £60 cash on me, so we had to get that changed - not the best rate either. Got some dollars in the end!
The next challenge is finding a cash machine in Luang Prabang - there's not that many in the whole country so we've read!!

Next hurdle was check-in. We didn't have a major problem, it was just they were asking for Therese's airline ticket but we didn't have them. All we had was a print out of a confirmation email, but it's actually got a ticket number on there. Who knows why she couldn't just use the passports like everywhere else does. Really was expecting them to say you should have tickets so can't fly...

Then we went to immigration. Immigration never seems to be a straightforward experience for us. Me and Therese were at separate counters with a walkway between. The male officer must have looked up at her 10 times. Then he started shouting across to where I was a few times, in a bit of an irate way, and the officer with me kept looking at me. Then she was looking at my passport photo a few times....jeez, thought they were going to take us in for questioning or something!!

Then Therese went to the toilet. She came out and said the toilets were scruffy and had no toilet roll, yet they had one of those fancy hand driers that you put your hands in and slowly pull out! She pulled a bog roll out of her rucksack, wrapped it around her hand a few times and stormed back into the toilet.
We've got 5 weeks left of these toilets, haha!

Frustrating day. Need somewhere a bit less hectic now.

Not to worry, we now board our propellor plane (!) to Laos...