I left Vang Vieng on Thursday morning for the highland town of Phonsavanh. The bus ride was yet another nightmare. I hate winding roads at the best of times, but crammed into a crappy bus on those roads for over 6 hours really sucked! But in the end it was worth it. I found a very cool guesthouse, very run down, but hosted by the hilarious Mr Kong, and I joined the guesthouse tour of the Plain of Jars sites on Friday. No-one knows why these massive jars were built, and there are hundreds of them scattered around the Phonsavan area. Only a few sites are open to the public as there is a lot of UXO (unexploded ordinance) about in that part of Laos, but I'll get to that in a moment.
Some of the bigger jars at Site 1. Some say these were made as funeral urns, others think they were big vats for making Laos whisky (Lao Lao) to celebrate a great victory.
Some more jars at Site 3. To get to these sites one has to religiously follow the paths staked out by the mine sweeping teams.
Mr Kong demonstrates how to drink Laos wine through a bamboo straw. I won a nights' drinking from him in a game of golf around the guesthouse grounds. I should have thrown the game - my head still hurts!Seeing the jars was very interesting, but as always I found the contemporary history more interesting. The eastern highlands of Laos were bombed on a massive scale in the 70s by the Americans in what was termed the "Secret War", as no-one knew it was going on. A lot of the bombing was validated as attempts to halt the flow of Vietcong arms from northern Vietnam into the south on the infamous Ho Chi Minh trail. But that trail only entered Laos much further south. The Phonsavan area was bombed as part of a campaign against the Laos communists, or Pathet Laos, in contravention of the Geneva accord which banned intervention in Laos. Apparently US bombers were told they were bombing sites in Vietnam.
During this campaign a massive 2 million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos. That's more than the US dropped in all spheres of WW2 put together! That's also 2 tons of bombs for every person living in that part of Laos! The most used type of ordinance was the infamous cluster bomb. This bomb contains hundreds of smaller bombs that each contain thousands of ball bearings, thus designed to kill people not tanks etc. The problem today is that millions of these small bombs, called "Bombies" by the locals, are still scattered throughout the area. They're about the size of a tennis ball and kill hundreds of people every year when they're hit by people working in the fields or when children find them and play with them, unwittingly arming them.
Some old bombs I saw lying around in a scrapyard in Phonsavanh town.It was thus mildly amusing to hear some American tourists in a coffee shop a while ago complaining that people here are so unfriendly to them when they find out they're Americans...
I plan to stay in LP for a couple of days to explore all the temples, surrounding waterfalls, and wonderful old French restaurants. I'll then head even further north to see some more remote places, then across towards Myanmar for some trekking, then I've booked 2 days on the Gibbon Experience (treehouses in the jungles to live with the gibbons) before crossing to Thailand.
Some friendly Loas ladies convince me to buy the local version of litchis in the Phonsavanh town market.
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