Savannakhet (14 feb 2011)

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Monday 14th February 2011

We took a quick walk around town and checked out Wat Sainyaphum, the oldest & largest monastery in Southern Laos, followed by the Dinosaur Museum (which was a small room with bones & fossils in drawers) unfortunately all of the narrative was in Laos & French.

The rest of our day included a peek at the old French architecture and lunch by river before taking a Tuk Tuk to the bus station where we were ushered onto a local bus to Pakse.

What a disaster!!! This journey should have taken 4-5 hours tops; but due to a stupid American couple causing massive fuss about not having enough leg room and no-where to stow their bags (what do you expect for a pound?) we ended up pulled over at the side of the road for over an hour. When the bus finally got going the driver insisted on stopping at what appeared to be every passengers individual front door. Before you knew it the journey had taken closer to 8 hours – and it was possibly the most painful 8 hours of our trip.

On arrival we found a hotel for 80,000kip - not bad after 3 quotes of 150,000+. We enjoyed an Indian dinner downstairs and saw Ron & Linda from our Elephant Mahout day in Luang Prabang – small world.

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