After a few days of chilling out and drinking a little too much we decided to head south within Laos. We caught a 5 hour bus and arrived 9 hours later (the usual now!) in Savanaketh. This is the second largest city/town in Laos and it was absolutely deserted. The restaurants closed at 10 and there were no bars at all. We decided that we would go trekking for a few days to get back to some sort of culture after our excesses in Vang Vieng! However before we could go trekking we had to spend a whole day in the town. To fill the time we visited the worlds smallest dinosaur museum (which was all documented in French, GREAT!) and a very large Buddhist temple on the outskirts of town, very cultural!
We started the trek the next day and guess what we visited first, the same temple that we had been to the day before. It just goes to show that there really was nothing going on in this small place. Trekking however, was amazing! We were with 3 girls, 2 from Ireland and 1 from America, the Irish girls were great but the American was really annoying!
Our guide was full of information and knew everything about the jungle. He found nests of spiders that housed thousands of spiders that were the size of your hand. We couldn't see them very well so he poked them to get them to come out of their tree! He was very caring like that. As the morning went on we started to get a little hungry so he found us leaves and berries that we could eat. They didn't taste great but they we good when you need something to eat. The best part however was looking for water. The guide hacked some vines down and when they were tipped upside down water came out. It was kind of like a jungle tap!
After we had walked 18km, been chased by spiders, eaten leaves and drunk water from plants we arrived in the village that we would spend the night. A local family were to feed us and give us a place to sleep. While waiting for dinner to be prepared (which we knew was chicken as we had seen them “preparing” them, in fact they were still twitching!) we all went for a walk in the village and to have a drink, as per usual I found a group of children that wanted to play football and had a great kick about with most of the village watching and laughing. (Not sure why they were laughing though I was turning on the magic!)
Anyway, when we returned for dinner we found that all of the heads of the village were at the house and a ceremony had been prepared to welcome us and to give us luck on our travels. The ceremony involved all of the heads of the village and the family members putting white pieces of string around our wrists to bring the bad spirits out and the push the good spirits in. It is bad luck to remove the string, it has to fall off, as a result we still have 10 pieces of slightly dirty string still attached to our wrist!
The ceremony was actually really cool and ended with bottles of beer lao, a huge feast that included whole fish that had to be eaten in one and lao lao (local spirit that I think can send you blind, I also don't think that it's the good spirit that they were trying to push in during the ceremony!)
The next morning I discovered that everyone in the village owns a cockerel and they had tied them up next to my head, well, that's what it felt like when they started crowing at 4:00, it wasn't even bloody light! Apparently everything in the village starts very early so we got up and visited the local Buddhist temple. We went to see the monks and give them food (for those interested in religion its called giving them Alms). We got blessed by the monks and set off on our last day of trekking. The temperature on both days got up into the thirties and walking was really hard going. By the time we got picked up and taken back to the town we were shattered (and didn't smell the best!) So we got on a bus for 7 hours to get to Pakse, just the calming evening you need after a couple of days trekking through a forest!
After a particularly unpleasant bus ride (7 hours sitting on a broken seat that shot me forwards everytime we went round a bend, next to a man who spent the entire journey either spitting out of the window or yelling into his mobile phone [not Adam!] while the teenagers on the other side of the aisle kept swapping places so that they could each ask me the same set of questions where are you from? what's your name? etc) we decided to revert back to our favourite mode of transport so far and hired a couple of motorbikes to explore the Bolivean Plateau (an area famous for lush coffee plantations and beautiful waterfalls). I didn't even take convincing that it would be fun this time, although that's not much of an endorsement for how much fun biking over here is as anything would have seemed better than public transport!
