The night before we visited the Plain of Jars in northern Laos I slept in
three layers of clothing with a pashmina wrapped round my head, like a
shepherd in a nativity play. It was 9C (48F) in our room and colder outside.
Pity I’d left my jacket in Bangkok.
No one, not even the usually reliable Lonely Planet, had warned us about the
January cold, but then no one had told us much about Laos, described by the
guidebook as “Southeast Asia’s best-kept secret”. Some say it’s the Thailand
of 30 years ago. But unlike Thailand, which boasts of never having been
colonised, the “secret” of Laos is in its suffering. While Cambodia urges us
to visit its Killing Fields and Vietnam invites US veterans back to explore
Saigon’s famed Cu Chi tunnels, Laos refuses to shout about being the most
heavily bombed country in the history of the world.
In the 1960s the US launched a nine-year air war over Laos in a futile attempt
to destroy part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A chilling statistic is that they
dropped one tonne of ordnance for every man, woman and child. Nowhere is
this more obvious than at the Plain of Jars, described by Unesco as “one of
the most intriguing and enduring puzzles of Southeast Asian prehistory”.
Ironically it was the bombing that uncovered more of the stone jars, now
listed at almost 2,000, scattered across hills in the Laos highlands. No one
knows for certain what the huge 5,000-year-old jars were for, or where they
came from.
To get there we had to travel six hours by minibus from Luang Prabang, leaving
behind 30C as we climbed into cooler temperatures and swirling mists.
Somlit, our soft-spoken guide, in his late twenties and soon to be married,
became more subdued as we left the comforts of Luang Prabang.
As we approached Phonsovan, he suggested a detour to Tham Phra cave, open to
tourists since 1998. Travel weary, I feigned an interest in yet another
Buddha. This, he explained, was where hundreds of villagers hid during the
Vietnam War. His grandfather was killed in the bombing. “In these villages,”
he said, “people have long memories and American trekkers are not safe.” He
took us to another grim cavern used as a secret field hospital. The floor
was still littered with ampoules filled with a colourless liquid. Morphine?
The next morning we stopped in Phonsovan, a grey concrete grid of a town. The
Lao see the tourist dollar as their saviour and hope to attract thousands to
the jar sites. Somlit claims that eight hotels are planned, but we saw no
signs of construction. Outside the market, women from the neighbouring Hmong
villages were warming their hands on minute kindling fires. We declined a
breakfast of buffalo sausage and fish head on a stick and tried not to gag
at the body parts in the butchery section. Pointing to piles of
butter-yellow pork fat, Somlit said every Lao celebration ended with a
fat-eating contest.
Driving the nine miles out of town to Jar Site 1 it was hard to imagine
tourists flocking to Phonsovan’s dreary, dusty streets. Pulling up with just
a handful of other minibuses, carrying mainly French backpackers, we met our
first UXO (unexploded ordnance) warning. Today almost half of the 60
recorded annual deaths from unexploded bombs and mines are children.
Tourists are reminded to stick to the paths. Luckily it’s a well-worn tramp
round the 334 jars initially documented by French archaeologist Madeleine
Col-ani during the 1930s. Most are between two and three metres high and
some weigh as much as six tonnes. Her theory, still current, is that they
were used in mortuary rituals, housing bodies before cremation. Sceptics say
they were simply used for fermenting rice whisky, which remains a Lao
passion. The mystery is how they got here, why the jar makers vanished and
how long ago? The mystery was compounded by the swirling mists, the glimpse
of a military camp between the trees and the huge bomb craters that litter
the site.
Moving on to Site 2, we entered a surreal red landscape. As we climbed up
through the pines, the sky cleared for the first time to show another 18
jars strewn amid the trees. Only one had a lid, carved with what looked like
a torso.
As the sun burst through it was a peaceful scene, but I still felt the chill
and sensed Somlit wanted to go. It reminded me of visiting Auschwitz one
summer’s day. A gas chamber remains menacing, even when backlit by a
hyacinth-blue sky.
The Plain of Jars doesn’t rank up there with those must-see sites before you
die, but the more I thought about it, the more it moved me. The Lao have a
national psyche defined by Theravada Buddhism, which emphasises the cooling
of the human passions. Voices are never raised and children are never
smacked.
How does this relate to the jars? It’s hard to explain, but I felt that by
visiting their ancestors and their recent battlegrounds I’d been given a
privileged insight into this quiet country. I’m not the first person to feel
humbled by the Lao. In her book One Foot in Laos, written in the late 1990s,
the inveterate Irish traveller Dervla Murphy says in the final paragraph: “I
was sad to be leaving the most loveable and in many ways the most civilised
people I have ever travelled among.”
We’d become very fond of Somlit’s shy toothy smile and his eager enthusiasm
for new English words. He would have been embarrassed by a tearful farewell,
so all we could do was wish him a long, healthy, and, above all, peaceful
life.
Need to know
Jill Hartley travelled to Laos with Kuoni Travel (01306 747008, www.kuoni.co.uk),
which offers tailor-made trips to Indo-China and the Far East. An 11-night
itinerary, including two nights in Bangkok, costs from £1,565pp, including
flights with Thai Airways.
The plain of Jar was made by the Hmong people long ago when they come from china.
If you check your history...it would say that...
But, let me tell you those tour guides they don't know much or if they do they did not want to tell you the truth about those jars.
PA, MILWAUKEE,