Avoiding American explosives on the high plains

Temple view

Our last day in Luang Prabang drew out longer than anticipated as we tried to fit in various activities that had slipped through the cracks. After ascending several hundred feet to the temple on the summit of Phou Si, a craggy hill rising from the middle of the old city, and exploring a few more crannies of the city, we returned to the hotel. My bags nearly overflowed with random souvenirs - sticky rice baskets, a bamboo hat and some Hmong textiles is all I can say in the interest of preserving secrecy from Brooke. Consequently, our 3pm departure was further delayed as I navigated the Lao postal system. Interestingly, a 5kg package cost only 15$ more to ship to the US than to Thailand, so I just sent it back to California, though it will likely be in transit two months from now when we return home. Our last task completed, Luang Prabang finally loosened it's grip and we headed thirty kilometers south as night fell.

Slightly sweet coconut based snack drying in the sun

 Our lights ran out of power 5k before our hotel but we arrived without further incident, and celebrated with grilled water buffalo skin, stewed frog, laab, sticky rice and perhaps best of all, Magnum ice cream bars.

Buffalo skin, grilled, scraped free of ash and served warm

The following morning greeted us with the start of two one thousand meter climbs. Unlike Thai road engineers, Lao engineers retained their sanity when grading roads, so despite climbing steadily for almost two hours the ride felt quite comfortable. Mid way up the climb, a riding group from Luang Prabang called us off the road to take pictures with them. Apparently every Saturday they meet a group of young monks at this overlook to give offerings and revive their monastic blessings. We briefly raced the monks up hill before our better gearing allowed us to accelerate away, but a few of them gave it a good effort to keep up.

Small monkey in a sweater jumping between our bikes and the monk's

Smooth downhills and a slightly more painful second thousand meter climb eventually deposited us in the mountain town of Phoukoun. There's not much to speak of apart from the intersection of two minor but paved roads, so we were slightly taken aback to share a Chinese dinner with a recently retired Australian gardener  now bike tourist named Gary who shared our guesthouse. 

                                              A Thai engineer would have cut across this valley

Unfortunately Brooke wasn't feeling great the next morning, so she took the majority of my bags and waited for the daily bus to pass through while I pedalled furiously to Phonsavan. The lack of weight was a relief, but I think both of us were slightly nervous splitting up without internet and unsure if the daily bus actually existed. When I saw Brooke's bike on top of a passing bus 100km into my ride, I enjoyed the high rolling plains surrounding Phonsavan much more.

                                                        Medicinal roots at a market

Successfully reunited at a backpackers hostel we noticed the weather has grown much colder. Luckily Kong Keo guesthouse has the hottest showers in Laos (Kong says the hot water is 98 Celsius and I believe him,) if not in southeast Asia. I'm sure some type of anti-scalding ordinance prohibits things like that in the first world, but we enjoyed warming back up immensely. Sadly, most of the restaurants had open fronts, so despite wearing literally all of our clothes, the brisk wind whisking through town combined with the near freezing temperatures made for a chilly dinner, partially ameliorated by the dish of burning coals placed at our feet by the cook.

A collection of cluster bombs

The next day we leisurely explored town. Phonsavan and the surrounding areas are principally known for two things - mysterious ancient stone jars scattered throughout the area (known as the Plain of Jars), and the cornucopia of high explosive and cluster munitions dropped on the area during the USA's secret war in Laos during the Vietnam war. One of the reasons Phonsavan received so much unwanted attention, is that the plains are the principal channel passing from Vietnam into southern Laos. Consequently, the Hmong, who are abundant in the area and who the CIA recruited to help with a guerilla war in Laos, fought the largest ground battle in the secret war here under the leadership of Vang Pao (who lived in Fresno following the war.)  

Cluster bomb casing turned into a fireplace

While the battle seems to have been mostly forgotten, the war's legacy is still fresh in the minds of Laotians. Deactivated bombs figure prominently in the decoration of the town, for instance our hostel used the metal casing meant to hold hundreds of small anti-personnel bombs to contain the fire that warmed the common area. Not all of the war's memories are that benign. Villagers still die every year while digging new fields, and children are frequently injured looking for scrap metal or when playing with cluster bombs which are about the size of a tennis ball. We stopped in at the office of the MAG (mine advisory group,) an NGO active in the region helping destroy unexploded ordinance. The Hmong man running the office told us about how he played with cluster bombs as a child, and about MAG's educational efforts to prevent kids from doing that. Like many of the Hmong we met in town, he had several cousins living in Fresno.

I even heard MAG destroy two bombs while touring a local silk training facility. The facility, which was awesome in it own right, gives poor villagers from the surrounding area the opportunity to train in the production of silk, a regional handicraft. They wanted to build a dorm adjacent to their existing building so they could house more women. In the process of clearing the land, two bombs were discovered. As I looked around their small gift shop (where I sneakily bought a silk shirt to surprise Brooke on Christmas), an explosion suddenly shook the building. The locals took it in stride, perhaps like we would react to the lights flickering off during a storm.

Silk worms!

Independent of the demolition, the silk facility really was quite interesting. First you see their mulberry tree farm, where leaves to feed the silkworms are harvested. Our guide tried to explain how the buildings were built in a special way to regulate the climate inside, allowing the worms to avoid death and maximize silk production. Unfortunately, he couldn't express how exactly they build the buildings to control the climate, but I did learn that Japanese hybrid silk worms are more finicky, but produce more silk. The Thai hybrid is used here, and is claimed to produce higher quality material.

Pulling threads from cocoon

Take a look at the tiny wheel perched above the cauldron

Regardless, the worms produce their cocoons, which are harvested and stuck in a pot of boiling water, where threads are drawn out over a small wheel. These are later spooled and dyed with various roots, minerals or leaves to produce stunning all natural dyes. Classes are available to learn more about this process, which I would love to do at some point. The finished silk is either sold, or woven on site by people training there.

The next day Brooke was back up to speed, so we joined a tour from our guest house to the Plain of Jars. Scattered over more than fifty sites, the jars are basically just that - groups of several dozen stone cylinders between three and five feet high, whose centers have been hollowed out. For being such an unusual archeological phenomena, it seemed that surprisingly little was known about the jars. It is believed that they served as some type of ceremonial repository for the dead, but exactly the relationship between the body and the jars is still being defined. Only a very loose estimation of their age could be given. Apparently the site is on track to be a world heritage site, after some of these questions are answered and the area is more extensively de-mined.

The back side is open, no climbing inside the jars!

If that is the case, we were fortunate to see it in a relatively raw state. Only at the first, most popular site did we see other tourists - Chinese folks seen only in passing, but who still wanted to take selfies with Brooke and I. At the other two concentrations of jars, our group of eight was completely alone. One Dutch couple seemed to adopt the attitude that one jar site was as good as another, but we were mostly able to take our time, climbing trees above the jars, wandering through the area at our own pace, and wondering about the origin of the jars. 

First cluster of jars, bomb crater in foreground

Most jars are not associated with these"lids," and carvings like these are uncommon

As the sun dropped, temperatures slunk towards freezing so our group piled into the van, made a brief stop at an old Russian tank left in someone's front yard and returned to the hostel. The plain of the Plain of Jars, on which Phonsavan rests, reminds me a lot of Amarillo before large scale farming, or perhaps eastern Colorado. Its rolling hills sit about 3000 feet above sea level, so the dry air feels a little thinner than in the river valley below. There is seemingly a constant wind kicking up dirt and a not unpleasant hint of cow manure that reminded me of driving up to see my dad in Colorado when I lived in Texas. However, this combination of brisk wind and near freezing temperatures kept us from lingering long on the street. We picked up a fairly western meal at one of the few places with a door to shield us from the wind, then huddled together in the bed until we could build enough warmth to fall deeply asleep.

Tank chassis

The largest of the jars

Although there is undoubtedly more to explore, we have only a few days remaining on our visa, so must leave the country (we tried extending the visa, but the immigration office took a very late lunch, so we decided leaving the country would cost us just as much time as completing the visa extension process.) Our plan is to head south off the plateau, and hopefully remain on paved roads until we cross the Mekong back into Thailand.

Where to next?