laos was the country of local busses. where they pack on as many people as they possibly can with whatever they want. i'll get to horror stories regarding that in due time. at the moment i'll just bypass the busride from vientianne to savannakhet. as i recall it was uncomfortable but for the most part uneventful.
arriving in savannakhet! if i didn't have a previous knowledge that we were coming here to do a homestay i probably would have left right away. it looked terribly dull... and i was right. we checked into some place, can't recall the name. it was actually a decent guesthouse. after arriving, we dumped our bags and immidiately hunted down the tourist office, where we were going to book our homestay. after a bitchin' time trying to figure out "maps in asia" (which always suck, the directions are wrong, distances are wrong, the street names are wrong etc) we located the place and payed about uhmm.. $40 maybe? decent deal, i think. it was a two day excursion into a 'jungle' and then out into a remote town where we would stay with a local family. they would house us and feed us and entertain, blah blah! anyways,the first here was in our guesthouse. we didn't start the trip until tomorrow so we just ventured out for dinner. all of us are vegetarians except for johan (poor guy) so we managed to locate some strange hole in the wall place that had fake EVERYTHING. i mean it. fake squid, fish, meat, chicken and so on and so on. sadly the food was still sub par, much like savannakhet on the whole. i'll just skip to the next morning, where we left to do the trek. hopped in a tuk tuk quite a ways out of town and the beginning of this trip actually had a trip to a salt factory, where they bagged it up by the shitload. it was actually really interesting, but i'd probably need to look at the pictures to remember the details about it. i'm currently cursing myself for delaying the updates of this blog for so long. after this we met our jungle guide. he was dressed in army fatigues with a canadian flag on and actually had a machete. he spoke to us in lao, thinking we understood him. our other guide, don tried his best to interpret but his english was so-so. don was a funny guy. always with the high pitched giggle and says "just kiiidding" after everything... we started through. our guide was cutting branches in half and showing us that we can drink water out of them, showing us all kinds of neat forest fruits and plants we can eat... they were all actually good. aswell we saw a dead scorpion being consumed by an army of ants, and spider as big as my head... it was a long trek.
we came out into a clearing and our guide left us. we took a short breather and then don led us to the town. we finally got to the home we would be staying at and found that our beds were up in this room with cockroaches and silverfish. basically, landon's nightmare. we went and checked out a stuppa and got some beerlao on our way home and basically drank until dinner time. the family was nice and kept trying to speak french with me. the food was alright and they were all nice. singing and playing instruments came later, and they asked us to sing something, so a very uncomfortable 'o canada' between lando, jess, sean and i and poor johan did his national anthem solo. after it was said and done it was bedtime. we set up the mosquito nets and promptly fell asleep after a long day. a long day but nothing as long as the next.... and the heat... it was unbearable! we woke up early so we could give balls of rice and wafers to the monks. i don't know if they're actually gunna eat those wafers...
yep. a lovely word from our host and we are off! off across some crazy field with farmers, water buffaloes and no shade. we eventually come into another town where don shows us local people making all sorts of neat things. basically all the shit you see in the markets in town. the bags, the clothing, the souveneirs all that! more walking, more walking, went to see the old town or something, whcih was basically a forest. after that we ended up at some lake where we finally got to relax, eat, have a beerlao and watch some underage kids wipe out on a motorcycle. they just laughed of course and got back on. crazy world, i tell you...
finally back into savannakhet on a tuk tuk. we stayed one more night at the same guesthouse as before. our last night before we headed to pakse saw us all getting pizza at some place in town with a new addition to our party. teena, the chinese-australian. our gang just keeps getting bigger! that was it, we all left for pakse the next day for a whole lot of nothing.
