Chris and Charly's Passage through SE Asia

Early-ish start for us this morning trying to haggle down a tour as much as possible, but as usual, we didn’t have much luck and the cheapest we could find was about £30 including everything. Too much for stingy backpackers on a budget! So we took a motorbike instead although the weather was not on our side and instead bucketing it down, so armed with a stolen umbrella from the guesthouse and a poncho kindly given to us from Gill our friend we hung out with a few days before, we headed on our way.

The Plain of Jars

Cows and the jars

Luckily, the rain did ease up a little by the time we made it to Site 1 of The Plain of Jars so we could walk over half way round before it started again. It was in fact a really nice and peaceful place with great views and the jars themselves are very bizarre.

Looking at the cave

Me very wet

No one really knows why they are there, many suggest they were for keeping ‘Lao Lao’ in, which is a local whisky, but to me it just reminds me of a huge gravesite and when reading up a little more on them when we came back, there are many theories that agree.

A jar, partly broken from a bomb

Lots of jars

They are estimated to be about 2000-2500 years so no one really has a clue. Nevertheless, it is pretty impressive just to walk around and see them, and even more impressive to see that so many of them survived when Laos was bombed severely in that area.

Cow in the bomb crater

Jars

You cannot even walk everywhere in the site as some of the areas haven’t been cleared and checked for old bombs, but we stayed between the white markers (safe areas), so we were ok. We spent about an hour walking around but made a run for the shelter when the rain got too much where we waited for another hour for it to die down a bit before we went on our way to Hmong village (Bomb village) about 40km away.

House

A tied-up pig

Pig

Kid feeding banboo to Bull

Cute kid

A monkey tied to a bomb

The local children

Another house made out of bombs

This village is famous because the villagers there made the most out of the old American bombs and used the remains to help build their houses!

Collecting water

A monkey???

Hmong Village

The only phone in the village

Hmong Village

Nice family

It was quite clever and very resourceful we thought! It was a really cute village, and we think it they don’t see many tourists there as it had such a nice local feel to it, really basic and yet everyone seemed so happy and smiley although they didn’t seem to speak any English or even Laos, but seemed to have their own local dialect.

An adorable local

A bomb plant pot

A house with bombs making the base

A tired, tied up pig

Our bike

Local house

After the village, we decided we had had enough of riding around and being wet so we took the bike back having ridden over 80km today.

The effect of the war

The effects of bombs...

In the evening we went to the local MAG (Mines Advisory Group) office who show videos about the bomb clearance, it was very sad to see the effect the bombs have on the local Laos people and they weren’t even involved in the war?!