Savannakhet, the Buddhist conglomeration and our "jungle" adventure

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There is probably no point repeating how terrible our journey from Don Det to Savannakhet was. Travelling in Laos is simply awful, roads are really bad and maximum speed is 50 and sometimes even 30 km/hour and 100 km take easily 6 hours on a bus. Arriving to Savannakhet in very late evening with several hours delay was more a norm than a surprise to us. As it was shortly after the biggest storm ever with proper rain and crazy lightnings crossing the sky and one of them hitting a close power station, the town was dark and dead. Everyone was hiding at home and there were no tuk-tuks available at the bus station so we had to walk to town in dark and surrounded only by emptiness of the city and by barking of angry dogs. It was actually much more scary than it sounds and we were very glad to eventually find a guesthouse and to have a place to hide as well.

We didn't expect much from the town as we read a few travel guides and blogs and Savannakhet wasn't described as the most exciting place but we were very nicely surprised. We rented bicycles and cycled around for the day and it's definitely place with a good concentration of temples. We visited 3 Buddhist temples and they were amazing. Proper complexes with different buildings and monks and Buddha statues and we saw the Buddha statues being made in one of them which was pretty special. But the reason we decided to come to Savannakhet was to do a real trek in Dong Natad national protected area with an overnight stay in a village which was organized by a local eco-guide office. It sounded amazing with all the money going to conserve the nature and to help to fight the poverty of local people. The problem was when our expectations met with the reality. We imagined a trek in a jungle, wild animals, wilderness all around and completely undeveloped stone age village with no electricity or connection to our modern world. It has to be said that we actually didn't read this anywhere, we just pressumed that it would be like that. And of course it was completely different. A jungle was more of a forest and sometimes dry rice fields and an undeveloped village was a simply big village with electricity, TVs in every house and big road running through. When we got over our initial disappointment, we realized we are still having absolutely amazing 2 days of exploring the Laos nature and having an amazing opportunity to sink into the real Laos culture. We saw some animals in the forest including ants making their homes by gluing leaves together and huge caterpillars munching on leaves, we tasted some of the wild fruits including tamarind or got to see some local people doing traditional handcrafts while walking kilometres and kilometres in the worst heat. The village experience was amazing as well, we got to sleep in a real house and to have a real Laos dinner and breakfast. Most of their meals consist of the same - sticky rice, some kind of green leaf vegetable, meat either chicken or pork and an egg and lots of bananas. I was really sorry I didn't see any kind of dodgy food in Cambodia like crickets or tarantulas and I spent lots of time talking about how much I want to try something like that. So when I was offered, wait for it, bee larvaes during our trek, I simply couldn't say no and I had a few spoonfuls, respectively ricefuls (as they use balls of sticky rice to transfer the food to their mouth). They didn'd have any specific taste but the thought that I had belly full of small larvaes with two small black eyes each wasn't very comforting. Davy made his own sacrifice and ate a few bananas although he would never ever touch them back home simply cos we were starving and we had to eat something. Our guide, Champa, was a really nice and well educated man and as a former teacher, he knew everyone in the village as pretty much everyone used to be his student and he brought us for a visit around the village and introduced us to his family. Every single person in the village and mainly every single child were super excited to see us and everyone was waving and shouting "Sa bai dee", the Laos expression for Hello and it felt great to be in a village where everyone was so welcoming and friendly. (Although I was thinking maybe they just have to be as a part of the trek and village experience. well who knows, it still felt good). The family in out homestay held for us a Baci ceremony, which is an ancient and animist ritual which was held even before Buddhism came to the country. The olders tied white strings around our wrists for a good luck. Then in the morning we took part in a morning monk alm-giving and together with the family, we went to a local Buddhist temple to donate rice and biscuits ad bananas to the monks. At the end of the second day, we made a short trek back and stopped to visit a sacred stupa That Ing Hang. Although Champa's english was pretty good, it was hard to understand sometimes and so I completely missunderstood the story about this stupa. Reading about it after in a brochure, it turned out that Buddha visited this place and sat down under one of the trees and then his bones were brought over from India and burried in the stupa and that's why it became such an important Buddhist place to visit. Unfortunately, women, unlike men, are not allowed to enter the stupa gate which really annoyed me and made me even more sad when I realized how special place we just visited that day.

Back on the road, we took an overnight sleeper bus from Savannakhet to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. It was a proper sleeping bus with beds and when we arrived to Vientiane south bus station at 6 in the morning after 9 hour journey, we didn't want to get up and wished the journey was longer. We spent just a few hours in Vientiane (trying to get money from ATM, then trying to get our cards from the ATM, waiting for someone from the bank to come and get our cards from the ATM just to realize that although we didn't get any money, they were still taken from our accounts, rushing to the bank and luckily getting all our money back!) and then made it to the north bus station. Our plan was to decide there which bus to take and where to go next. It was quite spontaneous and not detailly planned decision and we bought tickets to Sam Neua in east Laos for a bus that was leaving in 15 minutes and for journey that was supposed to take 20 hours.

More stories next time and some pictures to be hopefully uploaded soon. Love from Simona and Davy.

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