Wednesday 6th November
My chest infection having finally started to respond to the combination of amoxycillin and paracetemol, I am now coughing like the chorus of a nineteenth-century workhouse. This should make the plane trip fun!

As we prepared to pack, I remembered I needed to get some dollars to pay for my Lao visa. Surprise, surprise - the banks don't sell dollars! But when I explained my predicament, the hotel manager said to follow him and we scooted off down alleyways and into what looked like a little shop but turned out to be a huge, marble-clad all-purpose money shop, where people were coming in with bags of notes to have them counted and sorted or changed into higher or lower denominations. Then the manager asked me for my euros and I handed him two fifty-euro notes. The expression on his face changed somewhat but I couldn't interpret it! Anyway, after five minutes he came back with $134 and 10,000 dong, the exact rate quoted on www.xe.com half an hour previously.  On the way back to the hotel he apologised (Alfred: HE apologised!)  saying he thought I was going to change a serious amount of money and he could have changed the 100 euro in the hotel!!

Anyway, time to say a temporary goodbye to Ha Noi. One last nice breakfast, one last smiling conversation with the staff. And one last interesting thing to learn. Having agreed the final bill (an extra $273 for room upgrade, two tours, two taxis, laundry and minibar) I said I was going upstairs to write a review on TripAdvisor. 'Oh no' said the manager immediately. What? I thought to myself, why not? He explained:  because of recent allegations that hotels were planting reviews, TripAdvisor will normally not allow a review to be posted if it has been received from the hotel's own IP address, especially if it is a very positive review! So, if it was OK with me, maybe I could wait until I was in Vientiane!

So, next stop Vientiane!!