Plain of Jars

Of all the travelling we've done, I do prefer when we drive ourselves.  The independence of movement is a blessed relief -  not having to describe, via the medium of not-speaking-your-fucking-lingo, the hotel we wish to be taken to while the driver of a contraption not on speaking terms with physics squints long-sightedly (absolutely without exception, and they also never have their reading glasses) at a proffered phone or reservation slip showing the address in multiple languages.   

Anyway, driving in Laos is a blast.  The traffic is pretty light and the local car drivers drive in a fashion which I would describe as "pragmatic".  They all want to get somewhere and will drive on whichever the side of the road or gap in traffic suits their aims. But they're not twattishly reckless about it and one gets to grips with their particular idiosyncrasies quite quickly. The most common mode of transport is -like everywhere else in this part of the world- the moped.  Moped and tuk-tuk traffic is the most alien thing a western driver has to get to cope with here.  That and water buffalo. Non-car traffic will pass on either side at any time and you really need to be on your toes. Fortunately, driving the Ford Ranger has height advantages and it's really up to others to not argue with two tonnes of America's finest as you career across a junction after giving up on establishing who has right-of-way.

How dearly I had missed an engine larger than 1300cc

We drove to Phonsavan in two stages because the mountain roads are a rocky, winding mess (although still arguably better than Patagonian Argentina) and it's an 8-12 hour drive, depending on vehicle choice, obstacles, and livestock participation.

The first leg terminated in Vang Vieng, a town that is/was big on the backpacker circuit, primarily for the drink, drug and tubing opportunities down by the river. The authorities have cracked down on the revelry recently though (not least because drunk tourists kept offing themselves on the rocks), so I hear the bacchanal is much diminished.  We did think about popping down to the bars to see what was going on, but then we figured we'd probably hate it and everyone there, so we sacked it off.
The middle of the town is a massive open gravel-topped area which used to be a CIA runway (designation Sigma 6) for Air America during the Vietnam war years.  Not everywhere can say that.

Huh.

The following day we drove the other half of the way to Phonsavan.  The roads are mostly paved but change to moonscape with no warning, which combined with the road's serpentine nature goes some way to explaining why it takes so damn long to get anywhere.

Passing through the various villages along the way, the houses and community buildings ran the spectrum from rattan walls and rusty corrugated-iron roofs to elaborate and vividly-painted multi-floor houses.  I don't know if we were witnessing several stages in the gradual improvement of the villagers lot or just a wild disparity in the distribution of wealth.

Plainly we were a curiosity, as non-bike or moped traffic was light and I am very not-local. If I got out of the car to take a picture of something I got a chorus of "Hello!" from schoolkids walking home. At home the families here either farm or practice a trade out of their front room. People we passed were working looms for clothing or were thatching roofs using the local bamboo and palm leaves. It was also obviously bath time as we drove through as families were gathered around communal water spigots, resulting in platoons of naked tots running dementedly about by the sides of the road.

Other towns were less fortunate with geography, as they were sending mopeds laden with jerrycans up or down the hill to the nearest tap to bring back for everyone else's use.

One thing that was consistent between the various villages were the flags.  All the villages we have driven through were flying the Laos flag and the Hammer and Sickle - the sincerity of which I could not fathom.  Laos is a notionally communist country but I think the manner of administration in central government makes little difference to most rural dwellers.

In between villages there was just rolling hills and farmland - this latter noted mainly by scorch marks on the hillside.  The local Hmong people are big on slash-and-burn agriculture.

It's definitely one of the more picturesque landscapes we've had the good fortune to travel through, when it wasn't being obscured by the local farmers burning everything.  It is also a bit of a shame you can't look at it too far from the road without getting blown up. The tourist board have their work cut out for them on that front.

The whole route is spent dodging goats, cows, water buffalo and pigs.

Concentrating on the big docile quadrupeds, I almost ran this chap over:

On to Phonsavan, which became the provincial capital when Muong Khoun was literally bombed out of existence during the war. Its a frontier town, but feels a lot like civilisation compared to the villages on the way here.  It's not pretty by any stretch of the definition, but it's nice enough. The American-educated Lao lady who runs the Cranky-T cafe in town (recommended, by the way) thought that we must be ex-pats because we were driving ourselves, rather than taking the bus.  We're just so goddamn cool.

Back to being serious for a bit.  This area, indeed much of the north-east and the majority of the south, is ridiculously contaminated with unexploded ordnance (UXO) from the "Secret War" in Laos conducted by the USA in parallel to the war in Vietnam.

From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. flew 500,000 missions and dropped two million tons of bombs on Laos, two tons for every man woman and child in the country - making it the most heavily bombed country in history.  A million tons of that was in the form of cluster munitions, mainly the BLU-26 -canisters filled with 600 tennis ball-shaped bomblets containing a core of explosive and a shell of ball-bearings.  Each bomblet (called " bombies" in the Lao vernacular) has an effective range of 500 metres. Of the 270 million cluster munitions deployed in Laos, 30% would fail to detonate for a variety of reasons. This means that by the end of 1973 there were somewhere in the region of 80 million unexploded bombs spread all over the countryside.  They are durable and they are by their nature unstable.

They do look rather unfortunately like toys or fruit

Since 1974 over 20,000 people have been killed or maimed by UXO, 40% of whom are kids.

Neither the American people nor Congress were told about the campaign, which really kicked off in 1968, following President Johnson’s announcement that all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of Vietnam would cease. Missions were focused on two areas of Laos: in the north they were directed against the North Vietnamese-sponsored Pathet Lao communists who were fighting the CIA-armed Royalist forces; while bombings in the south targeted the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an ultimately futile attempt to cut off supplies being delivered to North Vietnam.

Mostly, during our travels, when we're perusing the museums of local history, the interfering foreign antagonist is the UK.  I'm glad it wasn't us this time, because this whole country is hamstrung.  Laos is one of the poorest and hungriest countries in the world, racked by corruption at every level of government.  If his lot were not bad enough, your average Laotian bloke in a field can't hoe his rice paddy without losing a limb.  The kicker is that the land is incredibly fertile here, producing twice the yield of neighbouring countries' fields. But the farmers can't exploit this because they: a) daren't dig deep enough for maximum effectiveness and b) they have to stick to land cleared of ordnance by NGOs like MAG.

Let's talk about them.  A British (hurrah!) organisation who employ ex-military engineers and the like to both clear UXOs and train locals to do likewise.  Go here and give them all your money.  Check out their documentary if you have a moment:

The other problem is that bomb metal is valuable. Getting local buy-in on reporting found ordnance is tricky when the metal salvaged from a bomb can feed a family for three months.  As we saw in Vientiane, the locals are pragmatic and re-purpose all manner of bomb parts and ancillaries for day-today items like lamps and tools.  Evidently a BLU-26 cannister makes a for a pair of half-decent canoes.

Like the phrase goes: When life gives you lemons, make boats out of a fucking bomb.

OK, back to being a tourist.  The eponymous jars in the Plain of Jars are stone vessels spread in clusters all over the plains and lowlands of Xieng Khouang.  They are stone age/bronze age, so 2000-2500 years old and we know next to bugger-all about them.  The responsible civilisation weren't big on documentation apparently, so we don't know much about them either.  The most ascribed to hypothesis has them being involved in funereal rights, with the dead buried in a jar until they nowt but bones, before being taken out and buried elsewhere.  There is another story about them being utilised in the fermentation of vast amounts of alcohol -in the cause of what must have been an epoch-making bender- to celebrate some king or other.   There are also several lid-like discs, which aren't lids (which were possibly made from wood) but are probably grave markers.

When walking in the area, you will see markers put there by MAG, indicating that the path has been cleared to a reasonable depth. That's on the white side; the coloured side means that they've only cleared the surface in that direction. So put the shovel away.

There are many sites in the area, but the main archaeological sites are sites 1, 2 and 3, which we drove between.   The plain was the site of several pitched battles in the war and are still marked by trenches and bomb craters.  The area was heavily bombed and several jars are smashed or cleft cleanly in twain.  Several have been vandalised by locals, who have broken them for whet stones and the like.

Roll the photos:

Several trees had grown either around or directly through several of the jars, which was a tad stubborn of them, I thought.

We did try and see the Tad Lang waterfall, as it was signposted up by site 3, but I have just now learned that a new dam has diverted the river away, leaving the falls somewhat badly-named.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Laos ist schlecht mit Blindgängern aus dem Vietnam-Krieg verunreinigt. Die Einheimischen sind sehr arm, und dies macht die Dinge nur noch schlimmer für sie.  Wir fuhren auf der Ebene der Tonkrüge in einem Mietwagen, die offenbar sehr ungewöhnlich ist.  

Vientiane

Laos is the poorer, ill-fated and largely forgotten neighbour of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. It has had a hard time of it: after 200 hundred years of being battered by the Siamese (modern Thailand) it was occupied by the French as a 'buffer' region for Vietnam. Occupation by the Japanese in 1945 pre-empted 30 years of fighting with the French in the Indochinese war. Independence in 1953 sparked a civil war between forces loyal to the (French-influenced) Royal Family and the (Chinese and North Vietnamese-influenced) communist Pathet Lao.  As all that was happening, between 1964 and 1973 the Americans were fighting the Vietnam war.

Patuxai - the local Arc de Triomphe

The Yanks took it upon themselves to secretly (and very illegally) drop 1.9 million tonnes of bombs on Laos -a country with which it was not fighting, and over which it had just signed a treaty recognising its neutrality- in order to disrupt the North Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh trail in southern Laos,  and to damage the Pathet Lao in the North.  We'll come back to that. 

We flew to the capital, Vientiane, for our first stop.  The comparison to Phnom Penh is stark: where the Cambodian capital is a buzz of vehicles and activity, here it was slow and sedate.  Like Phnom Penh, it is tricky to figure out how to cross the road, as the zebra crossings serve principally as decoration, but then you realise that they drive so languidly here that you just stroll between vehicles - the cars'll slow down and the mopeds will dodge you.

The state museum is idiosyncratically interesting. The ground floor starts off with pre-history and exhibitions of archaeology and geology, including a stone jar from the Plain of Jars in Phonsavan (more on these after we go there).  

As you move upstairs, the museum gradually takes on a more revolutionary tone.  The French do not come out of it looking good:

A literal yoke of oppression

The Americans have had better press days too:

Halfway though, the translations switch from English to French and, post-revolution, the exhibits focus in glorious communist bureaucratic detail on the workings of the modern Laos government. Apparently it's pretty much as corrupt as its counterpart in Cambodia and dealing with all the bribes and nepotism is a daily feature of the Laotian life.  That last part wasn't in the museum, by the way.

We visited the visitor centre and museum of COPE (http://www.copelaos.org/ - give them all your money), an NGO based in Laos which provides medical services, rehabilitation and support for Laotians with physical disabilities, very often caused by UXO (Unexploded ordnance) accidents. 

Most of the incidents with UXOs are related to unexploded cluster munitions - what the locals call "bombies".  Cluster munitions are normally tennis ball-shaped bombs, filled with ball-bearings, which are dropped in canisters and spread over an area in order to thoroughly ruin any people in that area. Thing is, a good 30% of them didn't detonate and are by their nature rather small and unstable. 50,000 people have been killed or maimed by cluster munitions in Laos - 20,000 after all hostilities were notionally over.

The Laotians have shown great inventiveness in re-purposing these and other bombs and their related parts:

A lamp made from a "pineapple"-type cluster munition

Machete sheath made from bomb metal

We all need more cow bell

Mr Singin, in the picture below, lost a leg to a BLU24 cluster bomb.  He then made a prosthetic out of wood and some scavenged metal...from a BLU24 canister casing. He donated his leg to COPE after they fitted him with a polypropylene leg.

And that, Alanis Morissette, is fucking ironic.

Like I said, we'll write more about America's gift-that-keeps-on-giving when we cover Phonsavan. Needless to say though, the US objectively murdered and continues to murder people who're just trying to get though their already pretty difficult day.  I don't need to see too many pictures of disemboweled children to colour my opinion on the matter.  Good job they succeeded in that lofty goal of stopping communism though, eh? Oh. 

On to lighter subject fare: We went for a 'traditional Lao' meal at the Kualao restaurant, where we were presented with a platter of all manner of stuff.  The food in Laos is broadly similar to that of Northern Thailand - spicy and somewhat bitter rather than sweet.  A couple of notable specifically local dishes are Laab Phet- Minced duck salad with spices and lime juice, and Kang Som Pa - a sour fish soup with chunks of lemongrass bobbing about in it.  

They did have steamed wasps on the menu, but I was actually hungry so I wasn't going to drop fifteen quid on bugs for your entertainment.  There were Laos musicians playing the whole time, with occasional bouts of traditional dancing.  Here's who I took to be the frontman shredding a solo on a weird local pan-pipe looking thing:

We picked up a hire car on our last day in the form of a Ford Ranger-  which has the road clearance and grunt that I have been craving for the last three cars or so.   It turned out that this would be very necessary for the roads through the Laos mountains. 

On the way out of town we made sure to stop at Pha That Luang, the building which is the national symbol of Laos.  It's a golden three-layered stupa that dates from the 16th century, despite numerous sackings by whomever was rampaging by.

The Laotian-style reclining Buddha nearby, shows that the local representations have been skipping a few meals compared to the Thai equivalents.

Further out of town is the Buddha park. The park is the work of Luang Pu Bunleua Sulilat, a mystic/artist/visionary/fruitloop who filled the park with a plethora of Buddhist and Hindu statues or deities, demons and miscellaneous oddness.  When the communists took over, he legged it to Thailand and created an apparently more impressive park on the Thai side of the nearby Friendship Bridge.

It is not somewhere one would walk in a fragile state of mind.

Kurzfassng auf Deutsch: Wir besuchten Vientiane, der Hauptstadt von Laos. Dinge hier sind ganz langsam aber das ist sehr angenehm im Vergleich zu Kambodscha.