Wednesday: Phonsavanh and The Plain of Jars
We enjoy a reasonable sleep in cool sufficient to call for the supplied quilt. Drizzle continues, but there is enough light to see what might do as a re-enactment of Laredo, enough so to have me whistling the tune as I walked out on the streets for a look around.
The town has a frontier feel. No old buildings, wide muddy streets between wooden shacks no higher than two storeys, straggling traffic, mud, but no boardwalks. Breakfast however is not on beans and bacon, but bread from a nearby bakery and thick rice soup with chicken bits. This is the Wild East.
We return to the hotel to enquire about this province’s passport control procedure. The office is at the airport where normal people arrive and depart but it seems that there is no urgency; tomorrow will be fine. Meanwhile, there is a group of people set to go to the Plain of Jars (site 1), a village, and the old capital. They will leave at 9:30 and we can join them. There are two other approved sites, but they’re further away, more difficult to reach, and not as popular. Because of unexploded bombs, still, you are discouraged from wandering about on your own.
So all that remains is to arrange a flight to Vientiane for tomorrow. Yes, we could have departed by road, but the short route is still not declared useable, and the prospect of going back the way we came had fallen before the simplicity of a forty-minute flight. Also, we would like to see the scene from the air, as the innumerable bomb craters are still easily visible.
The airline office proves to be another wooden house, the last before plain countryside a short way along a side road. The usual low doors cause amusement to the staff, then for $37 each we have tickets. The clerk shows me how to write some Lao letters; as suspected, the direction of the strokes is not always as I had guessed and he squeaks “No! No!” as I try, no doubt recalling the rather more direct methods his teachers had used to instill orthodoxy into willfully obstinate pupils.
Back at the hotel at 9:30 we meet again the Dutchwoman who’d enquired about buses back to Vientiane from Louang Phabang. She is at this hotel also, and going on the tour, but is complaining of not having found any fresh bread so I show her the bakery while we are waiting for the remaining couple to have breakfast. They prove to be an English pair whom we’d also met before. There are not many visitors in Laos!
Around ten we set off, bouncing over potholes as yesterday, but in a Land Rover on padded seats and only for a short journey. We’re soon at Site 1, where all six entrance fees of K1,000 each are written on the same ticket, so I rather suspect that the state’s department of antiquities will not see much of that. We wait for the shower to ease then go up a small hill, and there they are!
The hill is an undistinguished lump on a wide open rolling plateau of grassland dotted with stands of trees. All around us in the long grass are giant stone jars, some upright, some tumbled over, a few part broken. The largest are about eight feet tall, and obviously weigh tons; there are no portable-sized jars to be seen although our guide said that there were once.
Rain resumes, so I scuttle back to the shelter as I have no raincoat; I’m well wetted anyway. In a pause, back to the hill. A toppled jar is clearly carved from rock, as strata can be seen. As for the contents of a standing jar, I heave myself up to the rim for a peek inside: rainwater.
At a second shelter, the others are hiding from the rain. Nearby are smaller jars, so we poke around. One has a lid, with its underside in the form of concentric rings so that it would fit snugly over different sizes; another jar has a relief carving of a figure. Below it were found some bones, some other jars had contained bones, “Perhaps of the people who fell in while drinking” said our guide. It is an obvious joke; another suggestion as to the purpose has been for fermentation. No one has any idea as to their use, as the folk that carved them are long gone.
Rain resumes, so back to the shelter where I wring out my shirt and singlet, to the amusement of some villagers there doing likewise. Also nearby is a small cave, with a high-up vent at the rear that has prompted suggestions that it was used as a giant kiln, but I’m sure that the jars I’ve seen are stone.
Now my feet are soaked as well, thanks to a swiftly deepening pond at the entrance. My boots and some hops got me in dryshod, but not back out. Back to the Land Rover, to wring out my socks. I’m not the wettest as shower coats have proved inadequate, and everyone else had to wade to get out of the cave, the pond forming after they had entered.
On to a village, at times ploughing through mud churned up by previous traffic. The village is still taking advantage of old aid projects: we see a store house whose support stilts are old fragmentation bomb casings. Other bomb casings are used to make a footbridge across streams.
At a second village we visit a backyard forge, where some fellows are cutting a strip from a bomb case by heating it then using a cold chisel, then re-heating while the chisel is cooled in water. It is good steel, about half an inch thick. Only the best will do for war. The bomb shard was violently twisted by the explosion, reminding me of a ploughshare, but on asking I’m told that they will form the cut-off strip into a machete.
Next to the old provincial capital, so thoroughly bombed that it was abandoned for the new site, Phonsavanh. Now just a village remains amongst green-shrouded mounds of rubble. We have lunch on the inevitable noodle soup then go for a brief tour, scaring some village kids. There is a Buddha statue, and a stupa, all that remains of Xieng Khuang. Many people used to live on the Plain of Jars, but they have mostly left to Canada, and even the USA. So much for the results of a crazy war.
We head back to Phonsavanh; more mud and potholes. Yet a tuk-tuk has ventured along the road! I had been wondering why there had been a wheelmark along the central mound of mud, and here is the proof that the three-wheelers get around. We get back at 5:30, so when I find the Post Office, it is closed, not that I’d seen any postcards for sale.
So, the remaining order of business is to go looking for some dinner in between rainfalls, and we encounter a German pair going the other way on the same errand: we end up at the hotel adjacent to ours, which has a restaurant. Mixed fried veggies for me, and then the same again, thanks, a request that often causes confusion.
Read Part 6
