Mountains, Gandalf, mountains!

Things were not half as spooky waking up this morning. We, nonetheless, hurried to get everything packed up and on the road again. The main reason was that we were not expecting to get any breakfast in this village  – or better say, the promise of baguette in the next town was much more alluring than the likely rice soup here.  So 20km later, we were at the crossroad town Phou Khoun. No baguette was to be seen, though. Instead, we settled on fried battered banana (cold and eww) from the market plus coffee and cookies in one of the guesthouses.

Although we had “only” 160 km to go today, it soon was clear that this is a whole different kettle of fish from zipping up the Mekong lowlands. I will not complain, though. Thousands of turns on a scenic mountain road made the whole thing quite enjoyable. Once the morning fog lifted, the views only got better. Before lunch, we hit our destination, the provincial capital Phonsavan. This is a good place to find a bed and use it as the base to explore the Plain of Jars.

Ambient lights made from artillery shell cartridges … charming.

We did just that, booked into a decent guesthouse and went out in search for lunch before heading out again, this time without luggage, to check out the namesake Jars on said plain. The lunch was terrible but at least we were good to go.

The Jars in question are monolithic stone … well, jars… between one and two meters high. They come in clusters of tens to hundreds scattered all around this region. Three sites are easily accessible, aptly named Plain of Jars Site 1 to 3. We hit the major one, site 1, first. Once again we were pleasantly surprised to see the silver fern logo of NZAID (no, it would make a terrible flag) on the Visitor Center.

Before I I get into the site itself, let me back up a bit. Because, after all, for us to be able to enjoy this fascinating historical site, something needed to happen first. The site had to be cleared of UXO – unexploded ordnance. A disgusting technocrat newspeak phrase for petty tools of murder employed by western militaries. The Plain of Jars happens to be the front line between royalist and communist Laotian forces. During what has been dubbed the “Secret War” the US dropped more bombs on Laos than were used in the entire Second World War. Among these were 250 million cluster bombs, of which 80 million did not explode and pose a threat to this day. Cluster bombs are as revolting as landmines and have been banned in an international convention – of course not signed by the US, China or Russia. Bombs, shells and used bullet casings are omnipresent in and around town to this day.

Beware of what lurks …

Since the site was recently (2008) cleared of 160 unexploded bombs and shells, we were free to roam between the jars – the first generation in three decades to be able to do so. The site is pretty cool, especially considering there is still no final consensus on what these things were made for. They are between 1500 to 2500 years old and may likely have been used for some kind of burial ritual. Archaeologists have only now been able to really get into it after the war junk was cleared.

We felt we got a good enough dose with one site and called it a day after that, opting instead on catching up on some blogging back in the guesthouse. We closed the day off with a very nice dinner of western style salads at a new place in town, before chilling at the fire (of course lit in a pyre made of a halved old bomb).