The sloping river banks and colonial French
architecture of Luang Prabang were tugging at our hearts as we bumped out of
the city in the direction of the Phonsavan. Our expectation of the next
destination looked a lot less appealing than where we had been reclining for
the last week and even the name sounded leaden in comparison to the chirruping ‘Luang
Prabang’. We had been told vehemently however that Phonsavan and the ancient
stone ‘jars’ spread across the Xieng Khourang plateau were a ‘must-see’. Also,
considering that our destination after that was to be Vang Vieng - the river
side town saturated with hostels, booze and cushioned bars supporting drowsy
backpackers watching Family Guy and
eating chicken burgers – we felt we ought to get some culture out the way
first.
Smoking languidly at an empty bus stop past
the scheduled departure time, we would have missed our coach if it hadn’t been
for the frantic cry we heard behind us: 'Phonsavan! That one there!' We turned
to see three girls, red-faced and strapped to backpacks, racing across the station.
We grabbed our bags and joined their rush towards a coach with the words
Phonsavan scrawled faintly on a lined-piece of A4 stuck to the windscreen.
We found seats at the back of the coach next
to a French couple and their child, all with loose cotton clothing covering
rich, mahogany skin. The woman had thick blonde hair that hung free over her
shoulders, as did her daughter, who was laying, wriggling across their laps
with her legs splayed. The man had a large nose, that looked - in the French
fashion - more noble than grotesque, below sparkling black eyes and a mat of
charcoal hair speckled with grey which descended down his cheeks into a four
day beard. As the woman produced a small wicker pouch of sticky rice and began
wrapping balls of it up into dried seaweed, the man launched his nose into the
face of his daughter, repeatedly intoning in an alarming rumble: ‘Hallo Baby!
Hallo Baby!’
One of us followed the example of the
red-faced girls in front, pulling the curtain to and trying to fall asleep,
while us other two craned our necks passed the feasting French too look at the
landscape beyond. Our coach was soon ascending into the mountain range. The
road we were taking was known to be particularly stomach-churning but the world
outside was worth any sickness. Great clefts of mountain rose up around us
draped in the thick, green forest: awesome towers of foliage clumped together
in a range that peaked and loomed all about us, our broken road clinging to the
edge. We were heading South East to the province of Xieng Khouang; an eight
hour journey to Phonsavan, the capital of the region. A few hours into the
journey we were granted a better view of the swooping valleys bellow us. We
stopped at the Lao answer to services: a few huts selling stale biscuits and miniatures
of the national flag. Stepping stiff-legged off the coach amongst this
ramshackle little hamlet, I wondered whether the trucks laying tarmac and
globalisation had arrived unwelcome, thundering through what had been a quiet
and content little village. Or whether alternatively, the arrival of the trucks
had been celebrated, the freshly lain tarmac offering an easier way of life for
industrious mountain dwellers.
By chance we found ourselves sitting next to
our French neighbours on a log looking over the valley. We had bought some
biscuits that didn’t crumble when bitten so much as dissolve as soon as they
made contact with your tongue. The little French girl, sucking on the remains of
a slice of papaya, looked up at our snacks with covetous eyes: we in turn
looked morosely at our cookies and enviously at the remains of her fruit.
As we came down from the pine tree mountains
and entered Xieng Khouang, a landscape of bare fields stretched out from the
coach. The province is dominated by cattle rearing, and the Hmong cowboys in
their flamboyant purple hats are supposedly a common site racing across the
meadows, and as dusk rose we scanned the horizon avidly hoping to catch sight
of one.
Darkness came before a sighting however, and
when we arrived at what we thought was a second round of services our shrunken
and cheery conductor informed us that we were in Phonsavan. We were last out of
the coach and by the time we had retrieved our bags all of our fellow travellers
had dispersed into the night. The town was quiet and looked empty. The main
strip extended far into the distant darkness at both ends, lined by balconied
buildings with advertisement signs protruding from them. The conductor pointed
us down a perpendicular road from this central strip and soon we saw a yellow signed
emblazoned with the words GUEST HOUSE. Out of this little building light streamed
onto two white plastic tables with chairs about them, upon two of which two
Laoation women sat: one young, one old.
‘Sabeidi’ we chorused and the young one sprung
up and took us into the building, smiling her brilliant Laoation smile that
balled her cheeks and squidged her eyes into little slits. She presented us to
our room: about the size of a double bed, and taken up almost entirely by a
queen sized mattress which was stained and a little damp to the touch. The room
cost a dollar a night however and the novelty of this inspired a certain thrill
and eagerness within all of us to stay there. While two of us struggled with
mosquito nets a third went off to find the toilet, and returned, slightly
ashened faced, and told us he could hold it.
Leaving the nets in a tangled mass on the bed,
to stretch our legs we wandered further down the dry road we had come up on.
There were less and less buildings as we went on and soon we were standing
between two expanses of darkness, which we imagined must be fields in the
daylight. With the glare of a phone one of us rolled a joint and sitting in the
ditch we smoked this, remarking a few times how quiet it was. We then returned
to the hostel and had a supper of Beer Lao (a wonderful beer, disappointingly
locally brewed by Carlsberg) and Orios. We had a few course of this, tripling our
trifling bill, and eventually went to bed merry and content.
After a mug of thick Laoasian coffee for
breakfast we headed to where we were to catch out mini bus out to the Plain of
Jars. This is an area of the Xieng Khourang plateau peppered with hundreds of
cylinder shaped rocks with their middle carved out, estimated to be dated back
to the Iron Age (500 BC – AD 500.) The jars vary in size, ranging from 1 to 3
meters; different types of stone has been used, and all but one are utterly
without markings. The Jars are situated in almost 100 clusters, some of these
with as many as 400 jars, others with just one solitary jar.
During the Vietnam War, between 1964 and 1973,
Laos - and in particular the Xieng Khourang plateau - was subjected to intense
bombing from US planes subsequently referred to as the Secret War; an attempt
to break the suspected the traffic of arms heading towards Vietnam along the Ho
Chi Minh Trail. Over 9 years the US dropped more than two million tons of
ordnance, thus when visiting the jars you are also visiting the most bombed
part of the planet per capita in the history of the world. The land is plagued
with craters carved out of the land like the work of a vicious, giant ice cream
scooper. An estimated 80 million of the American bombs failed to explode and
therefore UXOs (unexploded objects) have remained a mortal threat to the people
of the region ever since. When visiting the plain you often have to walk along
narrow fenced paths to keep you off un-cleared land.
The Vietnam War – referred to as the American
War in Vietnam – left a deadly and lingering hangover in Laos, long since the
protestors packed up the placards in Washington Square and returned home. There
are tens of casualties every year, almost exclusively locals, and a large
amount of children. The U.S. Government spent nearly 17 million dollars every
single day to bomb Laos. Since the end of the bombing, it has paid on average
2.7 million a year to purge the place of its deficient yet deadly arsenal,
snuggly embedded in Laoasian soil.
As one might look at the lumpy, muddy ground
of the plain, and feel the thrill of imagining the slumbering potential carnage
that lies under it - like Sartre and his rickety bridge across the canyon,
walking alongside the paths I habitually felt the tugging urge to leap over the
fence and run hysterically across the mine field; naturally, I didn’t - so when
inspecting the jars, the only real interest we felt was in finding out what the
hell they were. The clusters we wandered about weren’t particularly impressive
themselves. Queerly placed prehistoric rocks, do not a Stone Henge make.
Objectively, they are neither beautiful nor remarkable. Some intact, some bent,
some full and proud, some large, some small. Some you can sit in like a throne.
The amount of them is impressive to think about, but they don’t provoke any
reaction in your gut. What is interesting, is thinking about who went to the
effort of arranging them there in the first place, and why.
And no one really knows.
Research in the 1930s found that the jars
related the stones to prehistoric burial practices, this theory was later
supported by the discovery of human remains, burials good and various ceramics
around the jars. Archaeological data collected during UXO clearance in
2004–2005 and again in 2007 claims that the stone jars initially may have been
used to distil the dead bodies, following in the form of traditional south-east
Asian royal mortuary practices. In contemporary funerary practices connected to
Thai, Cambodian and Laotian aristocracy, during the early stages of the funeral
rites the corpse is placed into an urn, marking the transformation of the
deceased from an earthly to a spiritual state. The idea is that those from the
higher tiers of society are cremated so to release their soul on its journey to
heaven, while the souls of the poor are condemned to remain on earth.
A yet more exciting explanation has been provided
by some of the locals, who tell of a great battle that was once waged on the
plain by two rival clans of giants. The jars were arranged for the subsequent
feast of the victorious King Khun Cheung, to be used as glasses for the
celebratory drinking of lua hai,
Laotion rice wine.
These innately dull jars, like the bomb crater
that could be mistaken for bunkers on an out of use golf course, are imbued
with mystery from the context and uncertainty that surround them. Giants on the
plains and planes in the sky have given this largely unimpressive stretch of
land an interest and significance to tourists; foreign wars and improbable
myths. While backpackers and groups of Japanese tourists take pictures and use
some of the more humble looking jars and rubbish bins, geo-political battles
continue to rage, as mining companies from China and the States clammer to scour
the Lao earth once more.
We thought little of this all as we ate our
supper of fried pork and noodles that night. When we had finished we wandered
down the main strip of the town. With the detached buildings and stretching
flat landscape beyond, the centre of Phonsavon feels like the setting for a
shoot-out in a Western. The road seemed to go on forever as the houses got
smaller, and less like houses, and the space between each one grew. We walked,
further and further, passed empty department stores with grinning clownish
mannequins, gas stations, receiving less friendly and more quizzical looking
locals, cigarettes in mouths, dirty and hot, working, sitting, chatting. Dogs
barked at us in barns, and if we had continued to walk we would have come to
the plains, the bomb sites, and eventually the mountains.
But we turned back. The next day we would be
in Vang Vieng, and as we strolled back to the hostel for more Beer Lao and
Orios, we weren’t sorry to leave Phonsavan, but enthused about rubber tubes,
zip-wires and getting shit-faced on buckets of iced whiskey.
Bertie Digby Alexander
Berlin 2014
