The Plain of Jars and UXO

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To get from Luang Prabang to Phonsavan we needed to back on the nerve-shredding route 13 and head north. Fortunately, our driver this time seemed slightly more sane and the journey wasn't quite as frightening as before although this might have been because he was wary of the heavy mist that settled over the area for most of the journey, obscuring the distant hills but making the nearer ones look even more spectacular. I did manage to take some photos but it was a case of sticking my hand out of the tiny window while the bus was bumping along and trying to snap the scenery as we zipped past. Following the Laos tradition of bringing odd objects onto public transport, a teenage Lao couple boarded with two pet birds on strings that sat on the headrests and chirped all the way to Phonsavan although they were often drowned out by the ear-bleedingly loud Thai pop that was on the bus speakers. Thai pop, incidentally, is now my least favourite genre of music.

When we got to Phonsavan we checked into a Lonely Planet recommended place, Kong Keo Guest House, just off the one main road in town. The room was a bit rough around the edges and I had to go on a mosquito massacre before we could sleep that night but the tours were reputedly better than anywhere else in town and so we booked on one for the next morning.

Phonsavan is not a particularly interesting town in itself (in fact it is rather ugly and not particularly friendly) but it is near one of the more bizarre archaeological sites in the world, The Plain of Jars, and serves as a good base for day trips to the jars and other sights around the area. Phonsavan is also the state capital of Xiangkhouang Province, one of the most UXO contaminated regions of Laos. UXO stands for Unexploded Ordanance and, in the case of Laos, this consists mostly of unexploded bombs dropped by the US in The Secret War. Between 1964 and 1973 the US covertly dropped over two million tons of explosives on Laos to try and stop the flow of North Vietnamese troops through the country, despite the fact that Laos was officially considered neutral. American planes delivered the equivalent of a B-52 planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. More bombs were dropped on Laos in these years that on the whole of Europe during World War II and gave the country the unenviable distinction of being the most heavily bombed nation on earth per head.

A large proportion of the munitions dropped were cluster bombs, huge shells around 5 feet long that contain around 300 smaller bomblets or "bombies", each the size of a tennis ball and packed with ball bearings to cause maximum damage. The large capsules are designed to split open in mid-air and spread the bombies over a large area. Altoghether there were more than 250 million individual bombies dropped on Laos and an estimated 30% failed to detonate, leaving the countryside of Laos littered with literally millions of explosives.

We met our tour guide in the guesthouse the next morning and watched the multi-award winning documentary "Bombies". It gave us a frightening insight into the way the enormous amount of UXOs affect the daily life of the Lao people who work in the contaminated countryside every day and if you can find a copy on the internet it is well worth buying. After watching the documentary we got into a minivan
and drove to the local market to have some breakfast and buy our lunch for the day. The only other person on the tour with us was a lovely American lady called Jessie who lived in Vientiane and we all walked around the market buying a variety of local fruits (including some delicious rambutans, bizarre looking hairy fruits that I've been meaning to try for ages) and tasty fried goods to keep in the van for lunch, making good use of Jessie's rather excellent Lao language skills to get some good prices.

After a breakfast of pork dumplings at one of the market stalls we were driven across some of the beautiful countryside surrounding Phonsavan to see an area that had been badly hit by large bombs in the war. After a while we pulled over and followed the guide across a field to see some of the enormous craters that dotted the hills. Rather frighteningly it was only once we were halfway across the field that our guide told us it hadn't been entirely cleared of UXO. Seeing our terrified faces he quickly added that the area had been scanned and all bombies marked with large stones so that people wouldn't stand on them and pointed some out to us across the grass. While we stood staring at the small rusted devices that were half sticking out of the ground our guide told us how some of the locals try to dig the bombies out and dismantle them to sell the scrap metal and gunpowder. Obviously this often ends in tragedy but the widespread poverty in Laos keeps people trying. The abundance of UXOs in the ground make farming difficult and, as 80% of the Lao people are subsistence farmers, it keeps them poor and in need of the money the scrap metal provides. There are some excellent groups trying to end this cycle by removing the UXOs from the ground but with so many millions of devices across the country it is very slow work. We donated as much as we could to a Manchester based team called MAG later on that evening when we got back to town.

After walking very gingerly back to the minivan we were driven to a local hill tribe of Hmong people. Our guide told us how the metal from the bombs is of a far higher quality than the villagers can get locally and is very useful for the local people. Blacksmiths will melt down the shells and make shovels, knives and other farming equipment with it. Even the whole shell can be useful and we saw some brilliant examples of ingenuity in the village. Many of the houses were raised above the ground on upended bomb casings to protect them during the flood season and one family had a flourishing herb garden protruding from a shell. We left the village and drove to a local waterfall.

We spend around half an hour walking down a steep hill to the base of the waterfall, occasionally seeing glimpses of the water through the undergrowth but always hearing the crash of the water as we climbed down. When we got to the bottom we sat on some rocks, watched the water cascading over the rocks and ate our packed lunch. There had been quite a lot of rain the previous night and rain in rural SE Asia brings leeches. It was only as we were finishing up lunch that we spotted our first one as it was making its way across my foot in search of a tasty looking spot to attach itself onto. After hurridley plucking him off we decided it was time to head back up the hillside to the minivan. On the way down we had followed a nice gently path but on the way back up our guide took us through a far more challenging route that criss-crossed over the waterfall repeatedly as it snaked its way down the steep slope. We felt very Indiana Jones-esque as we edged along tree trunks that had fallen over the water and splashed our way through the slower running parts of the falls, avoiding the dozens of leeches that lunged for us as we went past. Despite having to regularly stop to grab the blood-thirsty little buggers off my feet and legs I didn't actually get bitten by any. Amy wasn't as fortunate and had to remove one from her foot using a method we'd read about online. When we finally got back to the minivan and sat down Amy suddenly felt a sharp pain in the back of her knee and raised her shorts to find a huge bloated leech that was just finishing up his meal. She took vengance by crushing him in a tissue. Yuck.

Finally, we drove to the main reason for our trip to Phonsavan. The Plain of Jars is a collection of over 400 sites around the countryside across which hundreds of huge stone jars of unknown origin are scattered. There are three main sites that tourists are allowed to visit and we went to the largest of the three which has over 250 jars. Most of them are between one and three metres in height and some weigh up to 14 tons. Although there are a number of theories, nobody knows who built the jars, when or why. The most widely accepted theory is that they are funereal and that ancient Lao people were placed in the jars with their possessions when they died. Others suggest that the jars were used to catch rainwater or brew local rice whisky and Lao legend has it that ancient giants roamed the countryside and used the jars as cups. Whatever the reason for the jars they are quite spooky and it was oddly disconcerting to walk among them in the fading light of the afternoon. The sense of unease was heightened by the fact that the surrounding area is still littered with UXOs and we had to walk between painted markers in the ground that indicated the cleared areas. For many years archaeologists worked in the sites without any idea where the UXOs were and as such the plains have sometimes been described as the most dangerous archaeological sites in the world.

Afterwards we drove back to the guesthouse for some food and a shower before turning in. The next morning we were up early to catch a bus back along route 13 to Vientiane.

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