One of the weirdest places I’ve visited is the Plain of Jars, a windy eight-hour bus ride from Luang Prabang. Scattered in the countryside around the town of Phonsavanh are several dozen sites containing hundreds of huge stone jars. Some of them come up to about knee-height; others are way above my head. I visited the first three sites, each one more rural and harder to reach than the one before. The second one was down a long dirt track, and the third required walking across a field of cattle after another a long dirt track. After 60kms driving on this dirt track (less dirt, more jagged rocks and relentless juddering) it became my arch nemesis and object of many insults, due to the pain it was inflicting on some sensitive areas :(
These jars are about a thousand years old, but no one is really sure what they’re for. The most popular theory is that they were funerary urns, since they’ve found relics of charcoal, bones and teeth inside, and bodies buried around the jars as well. Another theory is that they were used to store rice, and the local legend is that a king had them built to brew Lao Lao whisky after a victory.
I think here a tree has grown through the middle of a jar
not many are carved, but here is a lid/marker that is
I actually found the sites quite eerie, the air full of the sounds of insects chirping and cow bells ringing as I wander around ancient burial grounds. This area of Laos was also one of the most heavily bombed by the US during the war (yeah they were supposed to be fighting the Vietnamese but dropped 90 million bombs here anyway...) and so all around the jars are bomb craters, and signs reminding visitors not to wander off the paths, because there’s still UXO (Unexploded Ordnance) all throughout the country. I'm here to see the jars, but I can’t help my mind focusing on the fact that all around me are fucking live munitions, designed to kill innocent civilians, farmers and children, and still doing so 40 years later . Perhaps I won’t rant on here, not today anyway, but what happened here during the war was excessively, incomprehensibly sick and inhuman.
a marker to show where the UXO has been cleared – stay on the white side o_O
my view as I write this – two bomb casings propped against a fence
