Laos - the North

Firstly - apologies for the delays in updates. This is partly due to meeting up with more friends and embarking on a tour of Laos - with an extremely full itinerary! and party because my laptop has finally decided that bits regularly breaking off it isn't enough and it refuses to turn on.
So the next few collections of stories and photos may appear out of order - or with much delays!

From Luang Prabang we drove up the most impressive range road I have ever been on.
It was like the gillies range on steroids.... then some.
300km of winding up a mountain, then down the other side, then up another mountain and down the other side. I am actually not really sure if at the end of all it we were at the top, or at the bottom. It was a long long 9 hours in a winding van. For the two people in our party who get travel sick this was a particularly hellish trip! But the scenery was stunning!

We were rewarded when we finally arrived in Phonosovan. Land of the Jars. well, Plain of jars. Basically it is full of giant stone jars and unexploded bombs.

 

The Jars are of mysterious and not entirely understood origin. They are carved out of rock and clumped together in sites. Best guess seems to be that they were used to put human remains in, then when the person had completely decomposed the remains were removed and buried nearby. Or possible people were cremated inside, then buried afterwards.

This red sign apparently says - don't go past here. Bombs.
You do just keep getting reminded here!

Locally there are many stories - we heard that after a great battle the victorious army used them to make "Lao Lao" or rice whiskey. Which would have been a lot of effort for some lao lao - these things are
massive! and carved out of solid rock!
We also heard that a giant built them.... but I am not quite clear why the giant man wanted to build them.

Some talk was of a fertility ceremony, complete with claims of people being locked inside until they made a baby (Actually, I can't really remember if we were told about people getting locked inside - or we made that part up)

It was pretty amazing to see the field full of jars. Some of them 2 metres tall, most around 1 or 1.5. Plus the sun came out for us (an improvement on when we arrived the day before in pouring rain and everyone told us the weather would be the same today!). The view around fields and farm was stunning. Bright blue sky, lush green grass, deep red fertile looking soil.
But looking into the farm land did bring back the truth of the area..... bombies.

The night before we spent some time at the Mine Advisory Group (MAG) museum. It was shocking to get the full picture of how ravaged by bombs Laos is. Especially considering that they never engaged in war, and America technically "wasn't dropping bombs". More horrifying is the nature of cluster bombs - which are designed to kill and maim people - not to destroy military building or weapons. Add the fact that about 30% didn't explode on impact (usually on impact with villages and farms that may have been along the route of the Ho Chi Minh trail - or that the Army decided to destroy so that communists couldn't use them for food or supplies. Not that there was any suggestion these villages were providing them with food).

Anyway, about 30% of the 2 million+ tons of bombs didn't explode. Instead they are in farms, or school yards, or stuck halfway up a clump of bamboo just waiting for someone to shake the tree. People are constantly afraid of farming their own land, afraid of their kids playing or even going to school. Whole villages are unable to have a stable source of food because clearing new farm land, or new space for houses is terrifying! In one village the locals were able to identify over 100 bombs that they knew the location of from memory, and this is not the first clearing mission in that village.

The most shocking, disgusting part of this all.... assuming that you have got past the fact that 30 years on children die when they pick up a bright yellow, tennis ball sized object.... is that humans are still using cluster bombs.

MAG marker - basically stay on the white side
because the grey side might blow you up!

I don't really know how normal, regular people can help stop this. But we absolutely need to. War is a terrible horrible thing... but leaving millions of tiny bombs strewn around civilian land forcing people to live in fear, and risk their life just to provide their kids with barely enough to eat is unacceptable and we normal people need to find a way to stop it, because it is obvious that the people with bombs won't stop on their own.