Jars on a plain...(he he he)

So a couple of days ago Luang Prabang was hit by a 48 hour power cut due to what the Communist Party claimed was for "maintenance work" to the national electrical grid...Of course what really happened is anyones guess. Too much Lao-Lao maybe?

Anyway, so with no electricity we decided we may as well go and make the 8 hour bus journey to Phonsavan to see the mysterious plain of jars.

The plain of jars are basically jars...On a plain! Really (REALLY) big stone jars that you can climb in, scattered on a plain. That in itself makes them amazing.

But the mystery lies in there origin. That is, no one has any idea why people built them over a thousand years ago and to what purpose. Archaeologists have been no closer to providing the answer after decades of excavating and study..."Can somebody get these motherfucking jars off this motherfucking plain!" he he he...(i'll get my coat ;))

Some theories have been thrown up; Some say they were for storing the ashes of the cremated dead and acted as giant urns. Others say they were just for storing water (a boring unimaginative theory) whilst the locals think they were just used for stashing large amounts of rice whisky and wine and don't really seem to see what all the fuss is about!

But actually we both loved the jars! A lot of people seem to give it bad press, hence why I chose to skip it on my previous trips to Lao, but for us it was well worth the long bus journey.

Phonsavan, the provincial capital and closest settlement to the jar sites sucks, but the surrounding landscape is so totally unlike the rest of Lao. Yellow grass plains with hills in the background, at times it felt more like the national park near my home in England than South-East Asia! Except for the huge bomb craters that dot the landscape left over from America's bombing rampage during the Indo-China war, and all the war junk used as flower vases scattered across Phonsavan's few resturants, a constant reminder that this region in Lao was one of the most heavily bombed regions, in the most heavily bombed country in the world...ever.
More bombs were dropped on Lao than in both World war one and world war two combined...And considering Lao only has a population of just over 6 million, that's well over a tonne of explosives per person. And consider further that over a third of these bombs (mainly cluster bombs) didn't detonate on impact, this gives you some idea of how all the unexploded ordanance scattered around the country is causing dozens of fatalities and serious injuries every year by farmers and kids stepping on or playing with these bombs. It's a huge huge problem. Villagers being subsistence farmers cannot expand there plots of land in fear of being blown to pieces by UXO. So this keeps hundreds of thousands of people in poverty.

Anyway, we were going to visit the second and third sites but on the way I managed to crash the motorbike after not seeing a big patch of sand in front on the road...Oops! So had to trudge back to Phonsavan and pay a nice 20$ fine in damages to the bike and now i'm hobbling around back here in Luang Prabang like an old man feeling very bruised and like someone who's just been run over by a steam roller! Luckily though we survived without serious injury, which is of course the main thing.

So so far we've survived a recession, three robberies, a motorbike crash and so feel pretty confident we can survive pretty much anything now! What will be next I wonder? Only God knows!

But for now it's back to the life of chicken sandwhiches, 5,000 kip buffets and the easy life...I do love it.

Peter