Day 4: Savannakhet

So I realize I have been very slow at updating the blog, but here we continue with the adventure in Savannakhet. After our wonderful bus journey (I use the term wonderful loosely here) we arrived in town at 5 am. Here's an excellent fact, nothing is open at 5 am, or 6, or 7, even at 8 am is a bit of a stretch. 

So we took a tuk-tuk to the downtown area, were luckily because of the festival there was chairs set up along the water left over from a concert the night before. So we hung out there until 7, when logic dictated that there must be some breakfast places opened now, so we went to find one. Which is when we discovered nothing was open, and instead of breakfast we were followed around by a pack of street dog for a while. Which incited many jokes about us having to call our school principal to inform him that we wouldn't be able to make it to school the following Monday because we contracted rabies. This was made funnier by our lack of sleep and the fact that he distinctly told us not to get sick or injured as he dropped us off at the airport on Friday. 

At 8 am we went to one of the two tourist centers located in the downtown of Savannakhet, both were supposed to open at 8, after 15 minutes we realized that it was not opening. Tired, hungry  with all our bags and in need of a shower we walked the 5 blocks to the other one. We got there just as a worker road up to building on a bike to open the doors. 8 am start here is more like a guideline. The man was useless but we grabbed some brochures, a map of the city that outline where the hotels were located. After checking out 3 places using broken grade 9 French (Laos used to be a french colony, in many smaller areas people are more French than English) we found a place with hot water and AC, the beds were hard and you could feel all the springs but it looked clean and it was cheap. 

We headed back to the first tourist center which still was closed, it never did open. So we went back to the one with the useless guy, where we told about various tourist trips we could do, and had hoped to, rafting, jungle hikes, and temples. After they outlined what would happen, we were then informed none of these things were available during the festival. Awesome... 

So this is then what we did with our day:

We found breakfast! The eggs were oddly very orange, but the bread was good and fresh!

We went to a monk school that the Lonely Planet highly recommended. It said that monks would teach you meditations and about Buddhist and love to practice their English with you.

Unfortunatly like the rest of the town it was closed for the festival. The monks were somewhere else, in fact there was no one throughout the entire complex. 

So then we checked out a church, it was hot  outside and they had fans.

We then walked the several blocks to the dinosaur museum, just outside the city a team of French archaeologists discovered dinosaur bones. They are now housed in a museum, and the town is decorated with images of dinosaurs. This is the one room school house we discovered on our way there. The school was a converted store, they were having snack, and they were very excited to us.

The dinosaur museum was open. But after reading the visitor logs we discovered that usually you get a tour that allows you touch the various dinosaur bones and explains more about the history which people has raved about. Because of the festival, this did not happen. On the plus side there was air conditioning. 

Here we went to one of the various temples

We then returned to our hotel and napped.

We found a restaurant that hadn't posted a sign that said "Closed for Festival" and it had a view!

We then had a wonderful meal, meet some random guys from the UK and Finland who had cross the Thai-Laos boarder there so that they could then extend their visas. They were a little weird, but they were the ones who finally explained to us that the festival that was going on that disrupted our travel plans was the end of Buddhist Lent, that correlated with the full moon (which we had already figured out) and would last a week.