Wanderlust

Savanakhet, Laos.

We plan on leaving Laos for Vietnam in the morning. It feels strange to be leaving Laos so soon. We’ve been here almost a month, but we’ve spent so much time in the other countries we’ve visited (except Mongolia, which wasn’t planned so was just a bonus all around) that a month just doesn’t seem long enough. But I think we’re both ready to move on to Vietnam and a little more chaos and excitement. Laos has been wonderfully relaxing–especially today since we’ve just relaxed all day–including a massage for $4 each! How amazing! It was nice and very different from both our massage in Ecuador and in China. The Laos massage was a lot more stretching and more focused on our legs and feet which was nice after being on them so much. Christmas in ‘Nam should be interesting and hopefully we’ll be able to stumble upon some sort of Christmas celebration. I would love some caroling.

We had a good time in Tha Kaek. We stayed in the Tha Kaek Travelodge which is apparently the place to stay for backpackers and they have all the information about the motorbike loop which is the main attraction of the town. It was a nice little place that was a little ways outside of the town (which we didn’t even end up seeing really). We had a nice room for a little over $5 and other than all of the mosquitos it was really pleasant (which if we hadn’t had a mosquito net with us would have ruined the whole place). Even the mosquitos added their own entertainment, though, since they had this crazy bug zapper tennis racket thing that if you held down a button and whacked a mosquito with it, they would fry and make a cool sound! It was really fun! The hostel also had good food at a reasonable price, so we just laid around and read and relaxed.

We ended up not doing the motorbike thing, or the whole loop for that matter. In the end it just didn’t sound worth it–driving on two motorbikes for 4-5 days on dusty, pot-holed roads where we’d have to figure out where to go and where to stay and where to eat. We’ve discovered that while we love to see new places and do new things we don’t like figuring out the logistics all of the time. It just gets exhausting. So we decided instead to hire a tuk tuk (a little motorbike taxi thing) for a day to take us to three caves and a river to swim. It cost the same as renting two motorbikes for the day and we wouldn’t have to deal with any of the details like figuring out where to go or how to ride a motorbike. It was a nice day. There are so many caves in Laos, and all the ones we’ve seen have had their own charm. It’s definitely a good place for cave enthusiasts, especially since most of the caves are just sort of there and open for exploration. It makes me a little sad since a lot of the formations have been damaged and you can see the effects of people in them (some are so full of dust dirt that everything looks red) but they’re just so amazing. It’s been great to walk around in them. A lot of the caves have been used over the years as Buddhist temples. The way I understand it, when some of the caves were “discovered” they were already full of statues of Buddhas. So they’ve become religious places where you have to pay a little fee and there are sometimes people there making the little grass cones that they sell as offerings (I think… I don’t really understand it!). All three caves were really neat. One had a river going through it so we had to wade a little bit and clamber around on rocks. My favorite was the last one we went to which had so many stalactites and a little Buddhist shrine in it as well that was built up on a platform inside the cave and even had a brick wall around it. It was a nice place. The river was beautiful and a good place to swim and wash off some of the dirt and dust from the road. The water was a beautiful blue, which was surprisingly clear and cool.

We considered taking one of the public buses to another cave that was about a six hour ride away, but we decided that we were a little caved out and that since we’d have to spend the night in the town by the cave and travel for two days it wasn’t worth it. We were both getting a little nervous about how long it would take to get our Vietnamese visa, and we didn’t want to wait through the weekend before we could go to the embassy. So we came down to Savanakhet on Friday afternoon and made it to the Embassy about an half hour before they closed. They told us about the bus that will take us all the way to Hue in Vietnam, our next stop and where we plan to spend Christmas. The bus leaves on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings so the plan is to go to the Embassy at 8 am to pick up our visas (they told us they’d be ready then) and then go straight to the bus station and buy our tickets for the 10 am bus. We thought about buying our tickets early, but if for some reason our visas aren’t ready, we don’t want to be out the bus ticket money, so we’ll just risk it. So hopefully we’ll be on our way in the morning, but if not we’ll go Wednesday even though it is Christmas eve.

Hue is just south of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) in Vietnam. It sounds like a gorgeous city along a river and is a popular place for tourists. We want to take a day trip to the DMZ to see the underground villages the Vietcong and villagers built during the Vietnam War. I’m a little disappointed that we weren’t able to learn more about the all of the bombs the US dropped on Laos during the Vietnam War. Apparently Laos is the most bombed nation in the world and there are still a lot of unexploded bombs that kill and maim people each year here. We were originally planning on going to Phonsavan where there are still a lot of bombs and they have a organization based there that tries to remove them, but we ended up not going that way since we spent so much time in the North of Laos. There’s so much terrible history in this part of the world, and I think we’re going to try to learn more about it while we’re in Vietnam and in Cambodia. But we’ll see.

Savanakhet has been a bit of a surprise. It’s a very small, rundown place. We’ve seen more homeless people here than anywhere else in Laos. Before Savanakhet, I think we saw one or two men in Vientiane, but they didn’t beg for anything. Here the people beg and we felt so uncomfortable at one restaurant that we had to move our seat. We were sitting sort of outside on a patio and a man just came right up to our table and wouldn’t go away. My food came and I couldn’t bear to eat it in front of him, so we just moved inside. I’ve heard that there are a lot of homeless children begging in Cambodia. I think I’m going to have a really hard time with that. It’s hard to know what to do. Especially with children. The general wisdom is not to give the children anything since they’re generally working for their parents who take whatever you give them and keep them out of school so that they can beg to the tourists. In Luang Prabang there were a lot of kids selling little bracelets and dolls and things. They weren’t so bad, though, as far as pulling on the heartstrings go because they were very clean and they usually all spoke English and some also French. So they were obviously educated, and usually you only saw them in the evenings and weekends. We still didn’t buy anything from them, but they were nice to chat with a little and they weren’t too pushy. In the end, I’d rather give money to an organization who is doing something to help these people rather than give money to the people themselves.

There are a lot of stray dogs here, too. It reminds us in some ways of South America. I think probably just because it’s hot, there are a lot of stray dogs, and the towns are slowly falling apart. The buildings here are more intersting, though. The French influence has created colonial style concrete houses that have balconies and nice details. It’s interesting to walk around the town at night because the people’s living rooms are generally just the bottom floor of a big building that looks more like it should be a store than a home. They usually have their main doors open with a gate closed for security. The rooms are windowless with giant doors that are more like the opening of a garage. The family will be lying around the tv on couches and chairs. There’s generally a shrine somewhere in the house with incense and fruit on plates, lots of family photos around the walls, and a line of solid wood chairs that look very expensive and very uncomfortable lined up along a wall. People here seem to really like WWE style wrestling and soap operas. I feel sort of like a spy walking around at night looking in people’s homes, but they obviously don’t mind or they wouldn’t have the door/wall open that way.

I think so far on our trip, people in Laos have been the friendliest and by far the most fluent in English. People in South America didn’t speak English at all really, which wasn’t a big deal since we picked up a little Spanish, in China people maybe spoke a little bit but we could get by with pointing and acting things out even though sometimes some people just couldn’t be bothered with us. But in Laos, people speak English very well. Little kids are always saying hello and how are you to us and even people working in little restaurants understand enough for you to order and pay them, which is all you really need. It’s impressive. I don’t know if it’s just really stressed in the schools here or if it’s part of the Buddhist influence. Boys here generally all spend about 3 years or more as a Buddhist monk. The monks are very highly educated and like to practice their English with the foreigners. I’m still a little unclear on whether or not I’m allowed to talk to the monks. We read that they’re not allowed to talk to women, so I’ve been sort of awkwardly avoiding them, but then the other day a woman in a store was chatting with one and we saw a monk in a computer lab talking to a girl on Skype. So who knows. Maybe it’s just foreign women, or maybe the monks were cheating! I would like to know, since the next two months of our travels will most likely have lots of monks around. But I’ll just keep on smiling at them then looking away awkwardly.

Hopefully I’ll be able to upload all of the pictures I’ve taken over the past few weeks once we’re in Vietnam. The computers here are generally too old and the internet connections too slow. So I’ve given up on it for Laos. I’m excited about Vietnam and some good food. The food in Laos is tasty, but it gets a little boring after a while. I’ve overloaded on crepes and noodle dishes with vegetables. But I don’t think I could ever get tired of the fruit shakes. They’re so delicious and refreshing! Watermelon and lime have become my two favorites. Steve’s sticking to mango and pineapple, but he also leans towards the watermelon from time to time. Everyone back home should grab some watermelon this summer, put it in a blender (seeds and all!) and blend the crap out of it with a bunch of ice. It’s glorious!

It’s strange that Christmas is only a few days away. It’s so hot here that we have to take an afternoon siesta to avoid heat stroke! It doesn’t feel at all like Christmas, even though I keep listening to Christmas songs online to get myself in the spirit. Maybe talking to our families on Christmas will make things feel a little more Christmasy for me. It’ll be nice to be back by the ocean again. We’ve been away from it for four months now, and I think this is the longest Steve’s ever gone away from it. I think he misses it. 🙂

Tags: Laos, Savanakhet, Tha Kaek

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 3:28 am and is filed under Laos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.