Sabaidee, Sok Di Pii Mai (Hello & Happy New Year)

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I took the SinhTourist bus to Savannakhet from Hue. Crossing into Laos from Vietnam at the Lao Bao crossing was reasonably quick given the need to get stamped out, sort out a visa on arrival to Laos and then go through passport control on the Laos side. It was the last of these that took the longest. I've seldom seen such a disorderly queue as the one at the window to get stamped into Laos, a whole lot of people pushing and slipping their passports through the gap! But, the bus waited for us all to get stamped in and we were back on our way. Shortly after going through the border, we stopped at a roadside restaurant which, as well as all the usual things that these places sell, had shelves of big glass jars containing all kinds of creatures - snakes, reptiles, some that were unidentifiable - in liquor. I didn't see anyone buy any while I was there, but I guess they must sell!

The bus parked up outside a large guesthouse in Savannakhet, the Savanbanhao (review here) and it was central and a good price so I checked in there. I say central, but that's not all that meaningful here as the city (more like a town really) has a rather strange layout in which the main commercial street is nearly half a kilometre from the riverside, with a few parallel streets with little other than residences and temples in between. In the day time that's not so bad but in the evening the dogs come out onto the street. Most places in south east Asia have a lot of dogs about, but Savannakhet has the most unfriendly dogs anywhere I've been; they all guard their patch and bark and growl at anyone who comes past. I commented on this to the Canadian guy who lives here and runs the iLounge cafe close to where I stayed. He said it took a bit of getting used to but they're all noise if you just keep walking past and ignore them.

At the riverside I went to a floating restaurant that had a good recommendation in one of my guidebooks as well as the scenic location, There a table of visitors from Vietnam recognised me from the guesthouse and invited me to join them. The food was spicy - similar levels of chilli to Thailand which took me by surprise a bit. I wasn't the only one; food is much milder in Vietnam, so the Vietnamese people I was with had streaming noses too!

Another thing that was quite different between Savannakhet and most places in Vietnam was the lack of touts and 'sales calls'. It was definitely refreshing to be able to walk down the street without the soundtrack of "tuk-tuk?" "motorbike?" etc that was ever-present in Hue. Trouble was, Savannakhet went too far the other way, particularly in the evening. Before I left the guesthouse to go to the bus station to catch the night bus to Vientiane I asked if the reception could call me a taxi, but they weren't able to do that and said I should just go out to the main street and flag one down. After about 10 minutes on the main street I still hadn't seen a tuk-tuk or taxi, and as the bus station was about 3km away I was beginning to wonder if I was going to make it - I'd left myself some time, but not enough to walk that far with my 50 litre pack on! Fortunately, an empty tuk-tuk came along and I flagged it down rather urgently to make sure the driver saw me, and got to the bus station in good time.

When I was booking the ticket for the night bus, I thought I'd chosen the seat that was at the front - but behind the driver. The seating plan made it look like a single decker, but actually it was a double decker and my 'seat' was on the upper deck right behind the front window. It was also a flat board rather than a seat, next to an unusually large Lao person (why is it that I keep getting seated next to locals that are somewhat bigger than the average for this part of the world?) and with a gap on the other side where the staircase was. Still, after a while I dropped off to sleep, stayed on the deck and was awoken when the bus arrived at the bus station in Vientiane. I took a tuk-tuk, which circled around the bus station until it was full, into the centre then stopped for something to eat at the Swedish bakehouse cafe before making my way to the Benacam Guesthouse (review here).

I reached Vientiane two days before the start of the biggest holiday in the Lao calendar, Pii Mai Lao or Lao New Year. (anyone who's been to Thailand at this time of year will know it as 'Songkran'😉. The Pii Mai celebrations in modern-day Vientiane involve a lot of beer - mostly the ubiquitous Beer Lao; a lot of dance music - mostly the same few songs* that played from every bar and will surely remind me of this week; a lot of wishes of ''sok di pii mai'' (Happy New Year) as well as the melodic and memorable all-purpose Lao greeting ''sabaidee'' (hello, goodbye, good day etc!); and most of all a lot of water. April is the hottest month of the year in Laos, but during Pii Mai all are kept cool by being covered in water from head to toe; from buckets, water pistols, hoses, sprays mounted on trucks and more. Locals and falangs (foreigners) took part in water fights, people stopped motorbikes to dowse their drivers, and trucks drove along the road with a dozen people and a great tank of water in the back. At two places on the riverside there were great big marquees set up with stages, live music and DJs, bars and big barrels full of water. Away from the riverside, early on one of the afternoons of Pii Mai I happened upon a street party outside what was presumably a civil service building, appropriately given the nature of the celebrations signposted 'Departmente De L'irrigation'. The revellers invited me to join them. I guess even nowadays few foreigners pass this way as several of them got their cameras out to take my picture! We shared a few Beer Laos and I joined the karaoke fun with a (mumbled) rendition of 'Trouble Is A Friend', a song that appears to have taken Vietnam and Laos by storm going by the number of times I've heard it in the past month*.

The festivities on the streets take place alongside religious observance. At Wat Ong Teu, Buddha icons were ceremonially washed with perfumed water and decorating with flowers. Many of the people themselves wore clothing with floral patterns. The present-day celebrations developed from from this cleansing ceremony.

I stayed on in Vientiane for a week and a half after Pii Mai. In part I was ready to have a break from being on the move. I hadn't stayed in one place for more than 5 nights since Bangkok right at the start of March, and Vientiane - while neither strong on 'attractions' nor quite as laid-back as Savannakhet - is a pleasant place to do so. I also had decisions to make as to where I was going to go with the money I had left, and my thoughts were beginning to turn to when and how to travel back to England. Finally, my five year old Sony Ericsson mobile phone, with which all of the pictures on this blog until this post were taken and which started turning itself off randomly back when I was in Hoi An, failed completely here such that when I pressed the keypad it switched off. I took the phone to a street with several small phone shops on and demonstrated the problem to the (non-English speaking) assistants, but each time they handed it back to me with a shake of the head. It was time for a new one. I tried out a couple of the knock-off phones those small shops sold, but while they were cheap and probably fine for calls and texts the quality of the pictures produced by the cameras was far too poor so I went to the Nokia shop and bought the lowest-priced one I could find with a decent quality camera, the Nokia X2. Pleased with having a working camera again I took it to That Luang, the 'golden stupa' and nearby night market and was impressed with the quality of twilight and night photos relative to my old phone.

I decided to continue with my intended plan, booking a short flight from Luang Prabang to Chiang Mai so omitting the otherwise 2 day boat ride to the Thai border and Chiang Rai, or the alternative of the speedboat which is not recommended especially at this time of year when the river is low. Next stop, Vang Vieng...

*Lao New Year 2554 soundtrack:
'Trouble Is A Friend'
'Too Much So Much Very Much'
'I Love My People'
'กินตับ-จีวรบิน'

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Comments

[Ian8311]

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[Anne]

catchy tune
Loved the blog - great photos. I just had to listen to 'Trouble is my Friend' (thanks for the link). Unfortunately, this wasn't a sensible thing to do in an open-plan office I soon discovered my headphones weren't plugged into my PC - the song has now been introduced to the good people of the north-east!