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.

Laos - the land of much templing

Yes, templing is a new word, verb meaning to visit temples. If you go to Laos you might just find that you also need templing in your vocabulary. It seems to be the popular tourist pastime!!

Laos is beautiful! It is the chilled out, calm, slow relaxed version of Cambodia or Vietnam. Only while walking around the tourist centric night markets did we ever here "hello, you buy something" and it was from maybe every 10th stall, not the constant barrage of harassment you get in similar situations in Vietnam or Cambodia.

Some of our highlights -
This temple in southern Laos that is dated at around the 5th century. It was a nice afternoon of wandering around and enjoying the view. We even ran into some other aussies that we met 3 weeks earlier in southern Cambodia!
The view here was stunning - all of Laos had pretty amazing views- unfortunately we couldn't linger too long because our plane from Cambodia was 3 or 4 hours late, and we had a long, long way to drive that afternoon!

The view down to the older temple

Down to the 4000 islands (or, possibly 400 islands seeing as it's wet season and so the river is up). We boated down the mekong and went looking for freshwater dolphins. Weirdly to look for the dolphins you boat to one specific place in the dead centre of the river and wait. Not sure why people seem to expect the dolphins to be only in that one spot..... but they weren't the day we were there!

someone asked the guide what the water wheel was for....
He claimed it was to change the direction of the water and
seemed quite put out when we disagreed and suggested it
is for power generation. Not really sure how it would change the
water direction even if that was the aim.

We spent some time visiting various waterfalls. One included a shrine - which appeared to be a giant tree encased in glass. We never managed to establish why they helicoptered this tree out of the river after it feel over and built a shrine it. I have to assume it was a special tree.

We went into the Danger Zone!

We also found a pretty cool coffee plantation /shop. We didn't have time to do the whole tour, but the guy was very informative informative and when he didn't have enough roasted coffee for us to purchase he showed us how to roast it.

From there we headed up to luang prabang for the real templing to begin. Not to mention some nice shopping in the night markets and sampling some good rice wine. As opposed to sampling Vietnamese rice wine - which can be used as a fuel source, this one was smooth and nice!

Luang Prabang also had this amazing waterfall. It was really a series of waterfalls heading up a hill, which meant we were able to just walk up a little way from the change areas and have a water hole all to ourselves (it was a weekend and this place is obviously very popular with tourists and locals alike). The amazing part is the water, which was crystal clear and a very inviting blue.

I very much enjoyed swimming and sitting in the water. I think I need to spend more time just hanging out in creeks and waterfalls - it always makes me feel perfect and relaxed and grounded.

We couldn't linger too long however as we had a Baci ceremony to get to.


The Baci ceremony was done by ex-monks and nuns. Basically it is a blessing and good luck ceremony. The white strings were tied to our wrists and with each one that was tied on the monk or nun tying it gave a special blessing.

This statue was probably my favorite.
I have no idea why he is lying on what
seems to be the roof of this little house!

We got up extra bright and early and gave alms to the monks. We were told we didn't need any thing special. I specifically asked if we needed a scarf, or if we needed to kneel..... the guide said no and he took us to buy biscuits (which, turned out to be individually wrapped chocolate coated biscuits). When we turned up in the morning with out bag of biscuits the kindly women next door took one look.... then went and got us each a scarf and showed us how to wear it, then they got some cardboard to kneel on.... and gave us their mats! Then they got bowls so that we weren't using plastic bags to hold our offerings. Then as each monk comes past we each put and offering in the bowl. Which made it hard to judge - do I have enough.... do I have too much, should we each give a chocolate to every monk.... or will we run out! Anyway, we were very grateful to the ladies who helped us out!

Vientaine featured plenty more temples. Which we were well done with by this point! but Buddha park does deserve a mention, for being so massive and for being quite creepy. If memory serves there are over 200 statues related in some way to Buddhist stories. Turns out the statues that aren't totally creepy themselves, have creepy back stories.One example being a statue of a man and a woman kneeling down holding out her hands. They looked fairly normal - but turns out he was going around cutting off people's fingers because he thought if he had 1000 fingers he would be immortal, and the woman is his mum whose had that last fingers that he needed.

This little girl and her brother live in a village we
stopped off in. Kari gave her a koala and she immediately
handed it back to her brother. So we gave her another one for
herself. 

I believe this is a frog monster eating the moon