The Plain of Jars and more UXO than you can shake a stick at!

Just one day here on the toursit trail theres not much else to see than the one attraction but its certainly worth the visit.

The biggest jar (at the back) about 7 feet tall

The plain of jars is around 1000 unexplained, hand carved stone jars spread across 54 different fields. The jars vary in size form regular jar size to about 1 or 2 tons. They are anything between 1500 and 3000 years old and nobody really knows what they where for. Some say they are burial urns others day they where for brewing Lao Lao whisky in after a chieftan won a big battle. They are truely remarkable because they are just sort of stuck there in the middle of the field for little apparant reason (stone henge style)

I strolled through the field with a small gorup and also visited and whisky distillery, a little different from the Scottish ones with large barrle sof fementing rice and yeast producing a fierce drink.
The aformentioned secret war was also battled heavily here and the whole province is absolutely covered in UXO (Unexploded ordanance) grenades, mines, and bombs of all sorts of different shapes and sizes are everywhere, Including the plains. On your trip through you have to stay within the marked area as the other parts have yet to be cleared. Theres also a Pathet Lao trench system running through the site and a blown up and subsequently stripped of useful metal russian tank.
More importantly whole areas of villages farmland are unuseable because of bomb craters and UXO in desperation these same villagers have resorted to selling scrap metal instead of farming, the same scrap metal is often UXO and this had caused a large number of deaths and injuries.
The numbers regarding amount of bombs in Lao are frightening. See picture, I hope you can read it, All the bombing in the south was on the roads into/out of vietnam, i'm in the middle of the northern red blob.

Info from the MAG office

Approximately 30% of the tonage of bombs dropped (by the way the US was guilty of dropping a large amount of extra bombs on Laos on its way back from Vietnam just to empty out the planes before landing!) is unexploded and MAG who are clearing Laos along with UXO Laos (the government organisation) have cleared 0.16% of the 30% guestimation since 1994. UXO Laos are thought to have managed the same since 2000 so its going to take about another 500 years at the going rate.

Heres a website with more info and a really good map of the bomb sites www.maginternational.org/laopdrbombingdata

written by

Dan on August 26, 2008 from Phonsavan, Laos

from the travel blog: Been there, Dan that!

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