Luang Prabang and a side trip

The road from Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang winds around hairpin bends for almost all of its 5 hour journey. Now, I'm fine with minibuses for shorter trips but for anythings over 3 hours I prefer a big bus. But sometimes the best laid plans... find you in a maxi bus (bigger than a mini bus, smaller than a coach) rattling your way up and down mountains feeling every bump and pothole. All because "the big bus is broken" but hey, same same, this is South East Asia after all! So arrive at the bus station, touts, tuk tuk. Find a guesthouse. Go to Utopia and have a beer by the river.

 

I love Luang Prabang as much as last time I was here. Its so chilled, so easy. With great food. My morning soup from the lovely lady in the morning market. A new food discovery - "yellow pancake" an omlette stuffed with greens and pork with a peanut sauce from a tiny roadside stall - its only offering. And my beloved Lao coffee with condensed milk almost everywhere.

 

I really haven't seen many sights. I've just been content to wander. Until a chance meeting found me with a travel companion and a plan to see Ponsavan and the Plain of Jars and Muang Ngoi Neua. So I've just come back from a 3 day round trip to Ponsavan. It pretty much takes a whole day to get there on the afore mentioned windy roads and a day of touring the sites. Ponsavan is known mainly for two things. The Plain of Jars and being the most bombed area of Laos during the Secret War 1964 - 73. The Plain of Jars are a series of megolithic sites scattered across the Ponsavan area.

 

No one is 100% sure what they were for. The locals believed they were where the gods made their rice wiskey. Archaeologists think they they are probably graves or grave markers (though the bodies were cremated). Either way they are one of those curiousities that are quite a sight. These things are up to 2 meters tall and carved out of granite in quarries at least a kilometer from their final resting place. And up on hills no less (apparently the dead like a view). But many were destroyed during America's secret bombing campaign that saw a bomb dropped every 8 minutes for 5 years due to its proximity to the Ho Chi Minh trail and the situation that had been created by the CIA of arming the Lao army against the communist Pathet Lao even though officially Laos was a neutral country during the Vietnam War. Thousands of innocent people died and plunged the region into poverty, a situation that still exists. Not to mention the scores of people a year who die or are maimed by unexploded ordinance. Things are improving on this front as more areas are being cleared but it is slow, painstaking and dangerous work.

Next stop Muang Ngoi Neua.