Southern Laos

Mini-Monks in Savannakhet
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We were sorry to leave Vietnam, our month here had been excellent and we'd met a lot of very cool, interesting people. However, lots of cool interesting people had told us that Laos would be excellent so we had high hopes.

On the 21st January we crossed the Vietnamese border in Laos, heading across the country to Savannakhet on the Thai border. The border crossing was pretty easy, and the local cafe was good. And rammed with jars of reptiles in Lao Lao, the national happy water. Mmm, lizard wine.

More Monk
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We rolled into Savannakhet on a Sunday evening, fairly skint and hungry. We'd heard that there weren't many ATM's in Laos so weren't surprised to find ourselves unable to get any cash out. We found ourselves a pokey room backing onto a mosquito farm and got ourselves some cheap & tasty noodles from a street vendor.

Surprisingly, Laos is a little more expensive than Vietnam and there are a lot more cars on the road. For one of the most undeveloped countries in the world there seems to be a lot of new 4x4 SUV's driving around, particularly in this backwater town. There's not a lot to Savannakhet - apart from afore mentioned mosquito farm there's a couple of temples with loads of monks desperate to practice their English, a dinosaur museum (or rather cabinet), a laundry place and an eco tour company. We waited around for a couple of days so we could go on an exciting and expensive trek, but after a last minute hitch we decided to quit this crazy scene and head up to Tha Khaek.

Chesta & Maddy on our pretty painless trek
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Tha Khaek is better. It's another smallish, same same town (Loas' entire population is less than London) but surrounded by limestone karst (look it up) landscape, rice fields and river systems. Lots of people come here to hire a moped and ride a loop that takes in some of the best caves and includes a 7.5 km motor canoe ride right through a mountain (the Konglor caves). Canoe caving underneath a mountain? Get in there.

We booked ourselves into a place called the Travel Lodge, which is a smashing little hostel with loads of information, a good bar and nice food. And a fire pit outside with benches. Unfortunately all these ingredients combined resulted in Chesta giving a late night ad hoc lecture to a number of bewildered guests about British colonialism, rendered even more bewildering by his inability to finish his sentences and their inability to speak English. Good times.

Our lovely but useless guide - Sai
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Still, we did meet two really nice people who'd still speak to us the next day, Becca and Maddy. They're Australian sisters who were on a big trip around SE Asia, heading to India. We all got on well, and so decided to look at getting an eco tour together rather than hiring a moped to break down in the middle of dusty nowhere.

The tour left on the 25th for a three day trip including a homestay, having a look around villages, finding out lots about the environment and local culture, and under mountain river adventure. All for $65 each. Sounds great, and it was. Except our guide didn't really know enough English to explain that much (although he did manage to tell us that he had two sisters whenever he got stuck for a response). Still, we had a really good homestay, where we got blessed, ate buffalo eyeball soup then got invited to a massive village piss up with three types of Lao Lao and some kind of crazy karaoke dance off. And the under mountain river adventure was pretty amazing, although we'd have been well advised to bring torches and not wear flip flops. Bloody good fun though. When we got back to Tha Khaek we all headed off to the local nightclub for quite a bizarre Saturday night out with the guide and his mates (they play WWF on TV screens around the club), then off to a Buddhist festival on Sunday for some totally rubbish fair-ground games and a bit more Lao Lao. Smashing.

Bec - the older, taller, but equally mad Auzzie sister
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After breakfast with the lovely Becca and Maddy we hit the road north to the capital Vientiane. It was a good road and an uneventful journey, and when we arrived it was fairly easy to find a cheap room next to the Mekong. Where they cook all the tasty, tasty fish.

Vientiane is an interesting city to stay in for a couple of days. It's not big, so you can walk around most of the interesting temples in a day. We didn't want to rush anything so we took two days and added beer stops. Actually, we've started to suffer from a bit of temple fatigue. The monks are quite nice (some very cool, some after a buck) but, at the end of the day, it's just religion innit. And we can't help noticing that all the poorest countries we've been to have temples and churches with the most gold. Hmmm.

Boys & Toys. The little one has a 10 inch blade in his hand
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On Thursday 1st Feb we hopped on a bus for Vang Vieng for some more karst landscape, a big river, a great hotel and Chesta's 33rd birthday. Hurrah.