Phonsavanh & the Plain of Jars

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We arrived in Phonsavanh on Wednesday at about 4pm, the public bus wasn't as bad as I had expected although there was a man with a rooster & several sacks of rice down the aisle. We got a lift to a guest house with a local man called Mr. Kong, (the guesthouse owner), along with several other people from the bus. We met Giles who is originally from Birmingham but now lives in South Wales, his accent drifted between Brummie & Welsh; it was quite funny as I could mimic both.


Mr. Kong swore like a trooper in English, although it was funny & he was a very intelligent man. In the evening we sat around a fire in a six foot long bomb shell & he told us about the secret war against Laos by the US between 1964 & 1974. He then put on a documentary for us to watch & I learnt a lot about how Laos is the most heavily bombed country & had more bombs dropped on it than Japan, Vietnam & Germany put together! The craters & many unexploded bombs still remain to this day destroying lives as we saw on Thursday.


I was shocked & saddened to see how many unexploded cluster bombs still lie 'Live' around the Province of Xieng Khouang where Phonsavanh is, we saw two & many bomb craters, including a one ton bomb crater which I had my photo taken in. We visited some illegal opium fields, well technically they are poppy fields but they are still used in Laos to produce & sell Opium illegally. We then visited a village where they have used metal from tanks, bomb shells & bullets to build houses, make knifes, fences, grow plants in & numerous other things. They were growing onions in bomb shells & used parts of tanks to make the knives & bullets as the handles. The people in this village were so poor our guide told us that us coming here is like a movie star coming to their village; all the children would run & shout “Sabadee”, the Lao word for “Hello”.


We had lunch back at the guesthouse & then went to Hai Hin Phu Salatao, 'Salato Hill Stone Jars site'; otherwise known as site two. The jars were fascinating & the weather had started to brighten up. The Plain of Jars are another UNESCO World Heritage site & between 2000 & 3000 years old; some weigh over six tons with the largest being over two metres tall. They are not made from local stone & their origin & purpose remain a mystery; some suggested uses of the jars are that they were sarcophagus' for wealthy people; others say they were used as rice stores or wine fermenting for local farmers or local warlords may have built a jar after each battle won to hold the wine drunk at the victory party.


We walked up a big hill & down the other side, about 5km's to Hai Hin Laat Khai, (site three). We walked through cemeteries & rice paddy fields to get to the site on another hill to see more jars in a great setting. We got some really good photos, which probably look really boring to everyone else but Claire & I entertained ourselves by taking silly pictures.


The minibus took us to a local H'Mong Village where we had a sample of Laos Laos Whiskey, a lot stronger than the stuff I had tried in Luang Prabang, before continuing to site one, Thong Hai Hin where the biggest jar was. There was also a cave at this site which had been used to burn bodies of the dead, you could see inside the cave where it was black from the smoke.


Some of the jars at site one had faces on & there were lots of bomb craters surrounding this site. We would have watched the sunset although it was a bit cloudy by this point so we returned to Phonsavanh & went for an Indian which was very good.


I really like Laos, it's such a beautiful country & the people are so friendly, I didn't realise it was such a mountainous country until we arrived & every bus journey we take has great scenery & lovely villages. Learning about the amount of unexploded bombs & the poverty in Laos only makes me want to come back again & do some kind of work here; I was even talking to a guy last night about someone who was doing similar paid work in Cambodia, so we'll see what happens when I get home but I really would like to do something like that.

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Photos

A little girl in the Poppy Fields
(Where they get the Opium from)