Phonsavan

Phonsavan is the capital of the central province of Xieng Kong… I was there for only two days, and was pleased that there were fewer tourists around than anywhere else I’d been… Overall, seems like a pretty standard Laotian city.

Most people come here to see the Plain of Jars, which are ancient stone jars that date back to between 2000BC and 500BC. Noone knows exactly where the jars came from, or what they were used for, but there are hundreds of them just sitting in fields all around the city. Some people believe that they were an ancient crematorium, that bodies were burned inside. But some of the jars were found to contain bones, skulls, human teeth, none of which showed evidence of cremation. Some people think that they were build to house whisky or wine or other foods. Others say that bodies were ‘distilled’ there before cremation. But mostly people don’t know and are purely hypothesizing.

Most people opt to do a day tour around all the sites with a tour company in a minibus, that also goes to some other significant local sites such as…. a Russian Tank… I wasn’t up for a tour, so decided to hire a mountain bike and ride to the first jar site myself. It wasn’t very far, 15 km or so, so I rode it easily in 40 minutes or so, but ended up there right when all the tours were arriving. So I waited until all the tours had gone before I ambled around the jars myself. It was quite amazing to me that these objects were possibly up to 4000 years old, and people could just climb up onto them freely. I imagined people climbing all over Stonehenge and chuckled at the thought.

But I think that I enjoyed the ride to the jars more jars themselves. That’s not to say I didn’t like the jars. I found them mysterious and the field felt a bit eerie, especially once all the people had gone. After sitting on a jar for a while on my own, I chatted with some local people and gave my standard ten phrases of Lao, that never failed to cause admiration and disbelief. Again, I’m a genius for learning my ten words of Lao and pronouncing them rather badly!

Anyway, they were accompanying an Austrian man in his 4WD trip around Lao. I met the Austrian, and after we laughed about there not being any Kangaroos in Austria, he asked if I wanted to join them on their afternoon trip out to a Hmong Village. ‘I’d love to,’ I replied, before remembering the bike sitting in the carpark, ‘but I can’t because I have to ride my bike back to town.’ But that was no obstacle. They simply put the bike in the back of the UTE and off we went.

First we went to the Lao lady’s home, where her mother had made a veritable feast, comprised of two different types of laap, fish soup, beans and pork, sticky rice, and noodle soup. As well as something I didn’t recognise but sure was tasty. We ate and chatted, and I felt like I was a part of their family. The two young men, Vong, the guide from Ponsavan, and Lin, the Lao friend from Vientiane, both talked about their experiences being novices when they were younger. It was my belief that young Lao children become novices or monks because it was too expensive for their families to feed them, so they give the responsibility to the monasteries, but it turns out that that isn’t the case at all. Most of the time young boys enter monasteries for spiritual reasons. For example, when a member of the family dies, they need to make good karma in order to get into heaven, so a boy from the family has to enter the monastery and become a novice for a time. Both of the men spent time as a monk for that reason.

After lunch we went off to a small village about 50km from Ponsavan (I would never have made it there by bike!). It was a Hmong tribal village, and the main point of interest was the fact that there had incorporated bombs, dropped by the US in the ‘secret war’ in Laos, into their homes. They used the metal bomb casings as fence posts, as columns in their rice storage (apparently rats can’t get up them) in their gardens, all over the place. There used to be many more bombs in the village, but they have sold them for scrap metal in order to make a little extra cash. The children were smiling and lovely, and the village appeared to be extremely traditional. While we were there, there were no other tourists in the village, and it was nice to see a tourist site without running into foreigners everywhere.

Since arriving in Phonsavan I became fascinated by the secret war, and have started to learn more about the bombings here. Apparently this is the most intensely bombed region on earth. There was the equivalent of one planeload of bombs dropped every eight minutes for nine years throughout the ‘secret war’. More bombs were dropped here than in Japan and Germany combined throughout the entire World War II. I’m not exactly sure what the secret war was, something to do with stopping the spread of Communism, and the fact that Viet Kong were hiding in caves and mountains in Laos I believe, but I had never heard about it before arriving in this town.

I feel exactly as I felt when learning for the first time about the Nanjing Massacre….. I can’t believe this isn’t more widely known… How has it been kept from our history books? How is it that I have never even heard of it before? These days the consequences of that secret war are still devastating… UXO (Unexploded Ordinance) is basically bombs that were dropped that never exploded, so are still in tact and full of explosives. Anyway, a huge amount of UXO is found throughout Laos, and the highest concentration of which is in the area around Phonsavan. It’s dangerous and results in numerous deaths and injuries every year. Farmers are plowing fields to plant rice and strike UXO, people try to collect it to sell the explosives or scrap metal…