Dilapidated Southern Charm

Another day, another town. I have moved on South. The 7-hour bus ride from Vientiane to iSavannakhet turned out to be an 11-hour bus ride. However Savannakhet luckily had enough old dilapidated French colonial charm to make up for the inconvenience.

My favourite being this closed down cinema, that still had original hand painted advertisements for ”recent features” like Star Wars (the original) on its walls.

Savannakhet also offered a new twist and yet more flavour to the Lao sauna experience!

What the local sauna space lacked this time in old worldly charm was made up by the lively regular clientele who took me under their wings. There were separate ladies and gentlemen’s sides. On the ladies sides there was a happy gaggle of ladies seated around a couple of stone tables wrapped in sarongs and coated in different coloured goo. Indeed, exfoliating with a variety of efficacious and unbecoming pastes seemed to be this place’s speciality. I was also offered the possibility to get my own plate of goo - and I never was one to back down from a challenge. I finally chose rice milk and coffee grinds as my secret ingredients. Mixed together, applied lavishly - the result was all one would expect, brown and beautiful. 

I would have loved to take photos of the space and its clientele, but photos of semi-clad local ladies is not an option. So sneakily I asked them to take photos of me! In the first one, you can see the chilling tables behind me and the door to the steam room on the far left. The second photo was the owner’s idea - to take one of me ”emerging” from the steam room. Like a muddy Venus from the sea.

Unlike Vientiane, Savannaketh, the second-biggest city in Laos, turned out to be very pleasant. A good place for lunch was the floating restaurant - Finally I got to go on the river - even if the pontoon was stationary.

Great food on the floating restaurant. I’ve been enjoying a break from Lao street food, which usually is either rice noodle soup or some grilled protein - most commonly chicken, pork or intestines - or sausages, which presumably include all of these.

So it’s been a lot of noodle soup for me! Luckily noodle soup, ubiquitous around South-East Asia, is a nice form of comfort food. In the most common Lao recipe, fresh nice noodles are dipped for just a few seconds into boiling water, broth, spring onions and sprouts are added as is a small bit of either grilled pork or chicken. 

Pleasant and rather bland - unless you hit the condiments.

The first time I ate noodle soup in Lao, I was both mystified and gratified to be brought a big side salad with the soup bowl. Crunchy lettuce leafs, green beans, mint leaves and a nice slice of lime on top. Like a good girl I squeezed the lime on the salad leaves and tucked in. The guys at the table next to me had just finished eating when I came. I noticed condescendingly that they had left their greens.

It wasn’t until the next noodle soup restaurant, where there were other diners eating at the same time that I noticed them taking a single lettuce leaf and ripping it into their soup, adding maybe a few mint leaves and a squeeze of lime. So in fact I had finished off the communal plate of extra greens.

From Savannakeht I continued south - to Pakse, a town you would quite cheerfully avoid if possible, but it’s on the way to greater things.

And now I’ve seen it all: The bus to Pakse was so full, that they didn’t even stop to pick up even more passengers or freight on the way, despite several people trying to flag it down! 

To be fair the roof of then mini bus was already loaded with 7 motorbikes, 10 mattresses and enough bags of rice to feed a medium sized village for a year.

Kudos to the staff for managing to fit as much as they did on the bus. Somewhere there, deep down under six sacks of dried vegetables, is my trusted backpack.

My time in Laos is, alas, coming to an end soon. Before I leave, I shall gently drift along the Mekong to Four Thousand Islands. But that’s a bedtime story for another night.