Not yet a UNESCO site: Phonsavan and the Plain of Jars, Laos

Once upon a time, the Johnson and Nixon Administrations dropped millions of tons of bombs on Laos, to attack the Pathet Lao, disrupt the Ho Chih Minh Trail supplying South Vietnam from the North, and then finally starve the Pathet Lao by destroying the homes and crops of civilians that might support the Pathet Lao.

Some additional bombs (and fuel tanks) were also dropped because planes returning to airbases in Thailand and South Vietnam had failed to find their primary targets in Vietnam, but couldn't land with bombs attached.  So they dropped them off in Laos.

The estimates of the bombings are in the range of 2 million tons of ordinance dropped, more than were dropped on Germany and Japan combined.

This bombing would just be a sad history except that ten to thirty percent of the bombs dropped failed to detonate or explode, and are just waiting on the ground in Laos to be stepped on, hit with a farmer's shovel or hoe, or picked up by children to explode. The threat of UXO also prevents people from expanding their farms or undertaking construction, exacerbating poverty.

Work clearing these unexploded remains is run out of Phonsavan in Xieng Khuoang Province, the site of most of the battles involving the Pathet Lao, royalist forces, and Hmong/Thai mercenaries funded by the CIA in the 1960s-1970s.

We flew over to Phonsavan to pay a visit to the Mines Advisory Group.  The footage was sufficiently shocking and humbling.  Adam abandoned his idea of buying souvenirs made with recycled UXO (unexploded ordinance) for friends as too grotesque.

We also came to visit the Plain of Jars, a plain of large monolithic jars created around 500 BC - 500 AD by a civilization about which very little is known.  The jars most likely contained ashes of the dead, and were carved from solid blocks of granite, sandstone, limestone, and a composite of the previous.

We hired a guide and driver for the day, but only formed a group of two. There are sixty known jars sites in the province, but only five have been safely cleared of any UXO for visitors.  Our itinerary took us to sites one, three, and four, the last of which was only recently opened.  (Site four was mainly a sandstone quarry and only two jars after a 400 meter walk through a village, but we did get to see a live praying mantis, which was neat.)

The Jars are perhaps the least-explained archaeological sites we've ever visited; even Stonehenge seems to be better understood.  Most of our knowledge comes from a French archaeologist who explored the area in the 1930s and found ashes, human teeth, and pottery remains. They sit on hillsides, overgrown with lichens and mosses, and full of stagnant water from the last rains.  One jar in the entire province has a cave art design of a "frog man" carved into the exterior.

The local tourism industry and the local government want to turn the Plain of Jars into a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Though the sites are monolithic and interesting, the infrastructure simply doesn't exist yet to handle many visitors.  We walked through rice paddies and fields after driving off-road for hours to reach sites 3 and 4.  All sites required some physical fitness to traverse.  Building paved access to the sites would change locals' lives in unknown ways, though they'd most likely appreciate the paved roads.

Toward the end of the day, we stopped at a small village where old scrap metal, including that used in the war (and sometimes defused UXO) is melted or reused for home and commercial purposes.  We sat and watched a woman make spoons from old aluminum while her husband drank lao lao (rice whiskey) and chatted with our guide and driver.  He offered us all four rounds of lao lao shots, which didn't go down too horribly.  It's a homebrew of fermented and distilled sticky rice and yeast, unaged and unregulated.  We didn't see any bottles with scorpions or snakes in them (added to give the drinker vigor).  Our host had ginseng root at the bottom of his (a plastic soda bottle) for good health in the new year.

We bought some small souvenirs of reused aluminum, most likely from non-war material.

On our final night in Phosavan, we returned to a small convenience store to buy water, and noticed that the cashier spoke English with a clear American accent and the best English we've encountered this trip.

In our chat with her, we learned that she had spent some time in the US with her aunts and grandmother (who had fled the war), attending high school at Buena High in Ventura, CA, and college at San Diego State. ("Yeah, a party school. But I don't party," she volunteered.)  She owned and managed the convenience store and has plans for a coffee shop on the main street of rapidly growing Phonsavan.

BL adds:
In retrospect, I may not have adequately prepped Adam for the Plain of Jars. I sold him on the idea of Laos based on the fascinating neolithic remains - which are fascinating - but I also knew about the role of the Plains in the Laotian civil war. So, whilst Adam pondered man's inhumanity to man, I was busily snapping photos of re-purposed UXO and massive bomb craters to show in my lectures on civil war. Oh well. He knew about my job before he married me.