Beer Lao Beer Lao Beer Lao

Laos is just spectacular....there is no other way to describe it. After much hassle with all the pleasures that come with travelling Thailand, Laos was simply heaven. Louang Phrabang is a beautiful old french colonial town, home to the most prized bhuddha in all of Laos and some of the most nicest sales people you will ever come across in south east asia....no hassle when you walk into a shop and no bother walking down the night market. For once i actually felt very inclined to buy hilltribe handicrafts which are a complete tourist gimmick and I even wouldnt have minded a "same same but different" t-shirt!!!

we spent a good five days here taking in the sights, waterfalls and tigers...yes tigers and the river and trying to get to a museum that was closed on wednesdays, oh and how could i forget watching the world cup with a few Beer Laos in hand....tim's hand that is!

We left the lovely town for Vang Vieng further south where the tourist trap is at the forefront....all you do in this tiny, and i mean tiny place is watch Friends 24/7 at one of the four friends bars and go 'tubing' a recreational sport lets say...where you are placed in a trucks inner tube and float downstream passing bars for beers, jumps and swings and whatever else takes your fancy!

Even though Vang Vieng is a small place it is the most beautiful place to also just hang out and chill to your hearts content....the scenery next to our bangalow says it all!

Moving on to Phonsavan....

We arrived to Phonsavan with one thing on our minds.....what on earth are the Plains of Jars???? Funnily enough when we got there, this is what we found!

These jars are over 2000 years old, and have survived the test of time....including the two million plus bombs that were droppped in the area, of which 127 objects of unexploded ordanance had been removed and destroyed just so that we could see a little of area of the Jars.....Crazy!

No-one has a clear answer as to why the jars are there and what they were used for. Our guide did suggest that in a time of the Giants, these jars were their drinking pots... i think he thought we were foreigners that clearly had a mental age of 7 collectively! Just to give you a scale of these things.....

and the most impressive thing about them is that they are solid stone, and carved out of boulders, making it seemingly impossible to transport from the quarry miles away from the site of the the plains! In all seriousness, the jars are thought to have been used as burial urns, some were found with ashes inside, and many with household/hunting objects placed either underneath the jars or inside them. Nearby is a cave that was used as a cremation site, it also housed the local population in recent times, when the Vietnamese were in hiding bringing the americans and their warfare.

Beer Lao Beer Lao Beer Lao

Luang Prabang, Laos