Did you know that Lao had dinosaurs? Neither did I until I visited the dinosaur museum in Savannaket. Savannaket is a town South of Vientiane separated from Thailand by a thin stretch of the Mekong river. It is a town past it’s prime, with old colonial buildings falling into disrepair but it’s quaint and friendly. And none is friendlier than the curator of this one room museum that has actual dinosaur bones in it. Of course I started having doubts when the curator started opening drawers showing me fossils and inviting me to touch them. Surely something that is a few million years old deserves more deference. Savannakhet also has a main square that is absolutely deserted, a beautiful hospital and post office with wide open doors and no staff until a lady with a baby walked in and took 15 minutes to stamp a letter for Greece and a fancy Thai consulate. It also has makeshift little restaurants along the river bank where you can eat grilled chicken or fish, green papaya salad and sticky rice. I have to say something about the green papaya salad and the sticky rice. First, the bad news. The green papaya salad, one of my most favourite Thai dishes is inedible in Laos. This is because although both use fish sauce in the seasoning the Lao version smells of corpses. It is pungent, smelly and frankly can’t go anywhere near it – worse than durian. The good news is that sticky rice is a delightful surprise. First of all the lumpy rice you sometimes get in Asia bears no relation. This is a different grain, one that you could probably plaster walls with. It’s delicious. You work it into a little ball between your fingers and flatten it to use almost like you would bread to sauce a dish. It comes in a very cute little basket that hangs like a cylindrical shoulder bag and they use it both in desserts and as a main staple. The other great dish is noodle soup. Light, delicious, full of herbs and very fresh. Similar to Vietnamese Pho Ga. This is the thing with this country that I do not get. It’s neither one thing nor the other. The food is a mix and borrowing of Thai and Vietnamese but the watered down version. The language is similar to Thai. The faces are neither as delicate as in Vietnam nor as distinctive as in Thailand. The people are extremely friendly and very pleasant yet I would not describe them as warm. At least I cannot really warm to them. The towns are sleepy but full of past glory. Everyone smiles and goes about their business but in a subdued, quiet kind of way.
Maybe it’s because it feels like time has stopped here. Maybe it’s because life is quiet and well regulated. Maybe it’s because their history has been so cruel or that our worlds are so far apart that there is nothing to say. I can’t put my finger on it.
The countryside however is glorious. The earth is a bright, fertile, luxurious looking red. Water is everywhere and waterfalls abound. In Tadlo, where I stayed these past 2 nights, I trekked across minority villages, swam in waterfalls, walked through rice, green tea, tobacco and coffee plantations and survived two nights of the village’s wake for a recently deceased monk. When one such an important person dies, the village has to mourn for a hundred days, which nowadays has been curtailed to a “convenient” twenty-one days. Basically they have to stay awake at nights. To do that disco and Lao music is blasted throughout the night followed by a very loud feature film. Blasted is not the word. The noise is absolutely insane. Quite ironic actually, in the cities life stops at 22.30 when ghost town time starts. You could hear a pin drop. Here, in the middle of absolutely nowhere it feels like I am sleeping inside a nightclub, on the speakers.
