Quite a few laps around the sun ago, we went on a brief, “explore the hot spots” kind of holiday in Laos. It was tacked onto jaunts to Cambodia and Thailand and was intended as a “taster” for a future vacay. Some of my recollections are sketchy (those, I may creatively embellish), others are burned into my retinas and stored unconsciously in my olfactory lobe forebrain.
A popular tourist town in Laos around two hours by bus from Vientiane, Vang Vieng is famous for its Karst topography, limestone mountains, and river tubing on the Nam Song. Back in the day (yep, we were there in the day), it was backpacker party central, with an open-air drug market and an abundance of tubing bars. But after 37 tourists died drunk-tubing in a short space of time, the Lao government closed most of the riverside rave bars, banned river swings and slides, and implemented strict controls for the tubing culture.
Bookended by a couple of rickety, highly photogenic bamboo bridges, the Elephant Crossing Hotel was our choice of accom. Picked for its vantage point on the banks of the Nam Song, amazing views of the limestone mountains, and on a hopeful whim that the name reflected an action (nope, no elephants were seen crossing the river).
It was Lonely Planet days, phones were just phones, and domestic air travel in Laos was dodgy and expensive. Once I read about the Plain of Jars, it was an urgent need. We asked the locals, phoned the airline, but nothing fit into our schedule of wanting to leave tomorrow. What to do? We saw an Irish Bar, slipped in for a Beerlao, played pool, and contemplated our options. When is a barmaid, not a barmaid? When she has a cousin who has a friend who will take us to the Plain of Jars, then onto Luang Prabang for an extortionate amount of money, tomorrow. I’m in!
So, with little (read: no) research on how long it would take, road conditions, and route, we departed the next morning after a delicious baguette breakfast, a Laotian adaptation of a French cultural icon. Our transport was a minivan, so plenty of room for the four of us (me, the big dude, the little dude, and our dude friend Dave) to spread out.
To say it was the most winding road I had ever been on in my life was an understatement. While the vistas either side of the road were spectacular, much time was spent trying to find a horizon and batting down nausea. Just as we pulled off the road for a photo op, Dave hurriedly wound down his window, stuck his head out, and evacuated his breakfast, entirely undigested. I heard my son say under his breath, “I will never be able to eat a baguette again,” lol.
A bazillion hours later, after passing locals on the side of the road, plucking hair from what we thought was a dead pig but realized was a dead dog (note to self: vegetarian day today in Phonsavan) we arrived at the World Heritage listed, Plain of Jars. More than 2,100 tubular-shaped, megalithic, massive stone jars, used for death rites in the Iron Age, give the Plain of Jars its name. They required technological skill to produce and move from quarry locations to funerary sites – respect!
Resultant of the “secret” war waged on Laos behind the scenes of the Vietnam War, whereby US military dropped an estimated 270 million bombs on Laos, up to 80 million remain undetonated (unexploded ordinance, UXO) throughout Phonsavan, and consequently, only three sites are open to the public. We visited Site 1, the largest and most accessible, which has over 300 jars, relatively close-packed on a pair of hilly, bomb-crater-pocked slopes. The biggest jar, Hai Jeuam, weighs around 25 tonnes, and stands more than 2.5m high.
It was a fascinating walk (on the white side of the markers, peeps – you want to leave with all your bits), and we could have spent hours there, however on arrival, the heavens opened and dumped a truckload of rain on us, ending when we got in the van to go.
We had to traverse much of the same road to Luang Prabang as we did from Vang Vieng to Phonsavan, and by then, we were hardwired to puke. Upside is that it was dark for a lot of the journey, and with no street lighting, we were unable to see the road, and blessedly, the treacherous drops into oblivion should our driver not corner carefully.
Fourteen hours after our daytrip started in Vang Vieng, we arrived at Luang Prabang, and I would do it all again in a heartbeat (except the bit where Dave barfed!).