Phonsavanh: A Study in Dust

We came to the town of Phonsavan as a staging point for our visit to the nearby Plain of Jars. Going there, you wouldn't expect such archaeological wonder to be tucked around the corner. The city itself isn't really a city, either; hardly any buildings are within twenty feet of one another and all the streets are twice as wide as normal to allow for massive freight trucks to drive through from China and Vietnam. The hotels are all Soviet block style with Chinese names and abundant neon, nearly identical down to the cavernous reception areas, awkwardly arranged with masses of heavy, carved, varnished wood furniture; like they expected a whole crowd of businessmen to storm in and have a meeting within sight of the door. At our hotel, we had an entire floor, and a very long hallway, all to ourselves, in an inexplicable corner room with no windows. Just past the lobby, an alarmingly large pile of UXO was inside a closet-sized chain-link cage that didn’t even have a solid roof.

Bomb as planter.

Even communists have gods.

There aren't enough people to fit the outsized streets and buildings of the city, that's what makes it feels so desolate. Not even the restaurants felt inhabited. We were looking for nok aen dawng, fermented swallows, and sought out one hotel restaurant where we'd read that it could be found. The dining room turned out to be tightly packed with the same heavy, shiny teak furniture as every other hotel in Phonsavanh, but it was devoid of people, besides the receptionist. The walls were the kind you find in corporate offices: tinted glass and cheap metal rims. We had missed breakfast; the cook had gone home. Nevertheless, we had a cup of (bitter) coffee and spent some time writing. Hardly any daylight made it from the lobby through to the dining room. The décor was like a strange approximation of an Americana lodge (or diner?), with license plates, animal heads, and the ubiquitous forty-year-old literal bombshells all hung neatly on the walls. We were the only customers for the hour and half we were there.


We were there in the high season, ostensibly when the most people are visiting Laos, but it felt like there was hardly anyone there (Lao, farang, or otherwise). Incongruous fields of rice and cattle divided the northern and southern halves of the town. Next to where we rented our motorbike was a run-down snooker hall with the same tinted glass office walls, packed with boisterous young Lao men drinking beer. When you add the red dust blown up from the unsealed roads, it felt, on the whole, like a Chinese-Western frontier town, the massive faux-marble floors of the all but vacant hotels towering fifteen floors above anything else. It was surreal.

Neon, weird building spacing, and massive Chinese hotel: classic Phonsavanh.

A little Soviet kitsch never hurt anyone, except for the economy.

The eerie hotel hallway.

Fermented swallows at the market.

Unfortunate slogan campaign by Pepsi in a country ravaged by UXO.

Very large house.

Recycling in action.

Donuts at the market, the only place that was ever busy.

How come communist propaganda always looks the same?

We didn't stay here, alas.

Bomb as nursery maid.

It Must Have Been Quite the Party

The Plain of Jars ranks alongside Stonehenge in the annals of how the hell did they do that without cranes? Scattered over the hills and vales of the central Xieng Khouang plateau, the Plain of Jars is something of a misnomer, as there are 90 individual sites. The megalithic jars come in ones and threes and hundreds; upright, sideways, tilted, or with giant holes in the middle. Some have lids, others' lids have fallen off, but remarkably few were blown apart during the US bombing of Laos. Only a handful of sites have been cleared of UXO, though, and these only in 2004 and 2007.

We stayed in Phonsavanh, a provincial capital close to three major jar sites. We rented a 125cc Chinese motorbike and coated our lungs and clothes with red dust to get to the jar sites. The road looked more like a construction zone than anything else most of them time, and sometimes we had to wait for the cows to pass.

The visitors' center at the bottom of Jars Site 1 was only erected in August 2013; it's a shack with vinyl posters of information in English about the history of the sites and ongoing efforts to make them safe for visitors.We visited sites 1, 2, and 3, and each of them was different: 2 was at the top of a hill overlooking swathes of farmland; 3 was in the midst of a forest grove with trees shooting through the cracking jars; and 1 comprised hundreds of jars wrapped around the fields and hillocks surrounding a large cave.

There are simply some places that feel sacred, and this is one.

The World's Most Heavily Bombed Nation

Before we can move from Luang Prabang to our next destination, the Plain of Jars, we need to talk about bombs. During the Vietnam War, the United States dropped over 2 million tons of explosive ordinance over Laos in 580,000 bombing missions, in an attempt to disrupt the North Vietnamese supply train. That's the equivalent of one planeload every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 years. During the war, American bombs killed 30,000 civilians, blew up countless valuable livestock, and left thousands of villages burning. It's estimated that 30% of these bombs failed to detonate, leaving the country littered with unexploded ordinance (UXO). The worst of these are cluster munitions, which contain hundreds of individual bomblets or bombies, which are candy-colored tennis balls of lethal explosive. They look a lot like toys, and there are about 80 million of them littering the Lao countryside. This is what a cluster bomb does when it explodes:



Since the war ended, 20,000 people have been maimed or killed because of UXO explosions. Forty percent of them are children. That's about 300 people every year, almost every day. Nearly a third of the country is contaminated by UXO: all 17 of the country's provinces, a quarter of all villages, 41 of the 47 poorest districts, and a quarter of usable farmland. Subsistence farmers have no choice but to risk their limbs or their lives on their farmland, because the other option is starving. Should something happen, that person's family must somehow survive. Sometimes that means sending children to work instead of to school, furthering a cycle of poverty that has kept Laos among the 20 poorest countries in the world.