Savannakhet

After the Indiana Jones-esque experience of Tha Khaek, a couple of days of laidback colonial charm on our way south was just the ticket and Jen and I found it in town of Savannakhet. Savannakhet was once a thriving trade town and major French colonial outpost, which these days has a rather quaint feel of faded grandeur to it.

As always seems to be the case, the bus journey to get there was memorable in itself - not, this time, for being hot pink inside and out, but because just getting to your seat in this one was an adventure.

Once at our destination, we found that Savannakhet was a lovely place to just wander the streets, look at the crumbling mansions and villas, a couple of very petty Wats, drink cheap beer and eat great food.

The three main attractions in the town itself are Wat Sainyaphum, which is large and very pretty with plenty of studious monks to chat to, the Provincial Museum, which is interesting, and the Dinosaur Museum, which is great. It's not especially big, but the staff are tremendously enthusiastic about and proud of the dinosaur skeleton that has been found in the area and have done a great job of recreating it. Sadly, neither museum allowed photography inside so these words (plus a pic of the dinosaur museum entrance) are all you'll have to go on unless you visit them for yourself.

The Wat, however, was fair game.

On one of our evening wanderings in the town we found what is surely one of the coolest new cafe/bars in Southeast Asia. Dave, a Canadian ex-pat, has set up a place called the iLounge - it does great food and cheap beer, has a huge DVD collection available for viewing during any night by customers, an even larger music collection that he offers to customers for download, and other extras like a shower service in case you have a long wait between your guesthouse checkout and your departure. Jen and I thought that was a great idea.

It was also at the iLounge that we met Pete - a thoroughly interesting Zimbabwean-born, English-schooled Aussie who was looking at settling down somewhere in the SE Asian region. Pete's appeal was even more noteworthy when you consider that when in England he'd lived in Liverpool, which is surely enough to scar anyone, though he at least had the good sense to support Everton.

We really enjoyed Savannakhet - it's like a small, rundown version of Vientiane but with a lot more charm in our opinion. A couple of relaxing days have been wiled away here, but now it's time to continue south down Route 13 to Pakse, our next stop, and onward to the Tad Lo waterfalls.

We'll let you know how it all goes. We're generous like that.

Things Jennie will remember:

1) The big round plastic 'baskets' that served as the town's dustbins. They had plenty of civic pride!

2) Being able to look out and see Thailand across the Mekong. (Although it was a bit industrial and not all that pretty still quite cool to be looking at another country)

3) The lovely Natalie's Kitchen - great baguettes at bargain prices!

4) Chatting to the monk so he can practise English in-between his 3 hours exams

5) Thinking how much my nephew Zac would have loved the dinosaur museum - the curator showed us all the locked away bones in the draws under the displays so proud was he of their 'new species' discovery in the area (rightly so!)

Here are the pics:

BT32_Savannakhet 10 Nov 2010