Chittavanh Hotel Phonsavan

... myself and a couple of Americans, Becca and Matt, visited the 3 main jar sites together. It's altogether a rather strange and mysterious experience. You could just about tear your hair out trying to guess what it's all for. Luckily Laos has made me very Zen and not stressed about these things! Some jars are genuinly huge, weighing several tons and several metres tall and wide, others come up to my knees. The theories? Around here it's generally considered that they were used for ...

... were so happy to see us and they all wanted to have their pictures taken, if we'd have known we were going there we would have taken something for the children, they were really poor and black with dirt.<br><br>Marc and i saw the best night sky yet here, filled with stars and we could even see the star dust, it was worth coming here just for that. Two nights here and it was time to board the next bus 6 hours to Veng Veing.

... was used by local people to hide in during the Vietnam war and saw above the entrance a huge bee's nest. 'Not going in there then' I thought.<br>The other two sites on hill tops were interesting, not just for the jars, but the beautiful surrounding countryside in which they inhabited. He took us for lunch and then to see a Russian tank.<br>We returned to Phonsavanh town in time for the documentary film shown every night at the MAG ...

... one of these bombies. <br><br>MAG have an informative office in the town that outlines the work they do and while we were visiting the caves we bumped into another group sponsored by the Japanese government who are doing the same work but there is no way it should take so long to clear these and more importantly there is no way these weapons could have been used without knowing that they would cause suffering for people many years after the war ...

... the cleared paths. Laos is the most bombed country in world with hot spots in the north and around the plain of jars. Many locals are killed each year from stumbling across a bomb or trying to dig them up for scrap. Not all sites of the jars are accessible only3-4 have been cleared out of 40 odd, and being Asia when I say path I mean a piece of stone on the floor every now and then that has been painted.<br>The site of jars were quite odd, the jars are ...

... are talked about a lot in Laos. Think dolmens or Newgrange. Basically they're these stonbe jars that were quarried and crafted on a nearby mountain about 1000 years ago. Nobody knows why they used them or how they got them from the mountain to where they are but they think they were probably used for people's remains and have a religious significance. Around the jars there were more signs of the war. Two very large craters from bombs that were dropped from planes ...

... the fact that the rail never gets more than 6 inches off the ground. So technically it could be either. <br> To the right are booths where you throw darts at balloons, which create a back ground noise to an already unnerving scene that is what Luke quoted from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas "This is what it would be like had the Nazi&#8217;s won the war." Behind us were tents. Several tents back to back hawking anything from girl&#8217;s shirts that say "I was a fat girl" to ...

... reasons why this is the case and it seems that the Laos government has refused help from the USA. Yet the Laos government still accepts USA money to guard the secret base which they coordinated their war efforts from so it remains off-limits. Very interesting.<br>We booked a tour for the following day to see some of the sights in the surrounding area, and Mark came along too.<br>We saw a field full of bomb craters which shockingly had several cluster bombs lying around - live! The ...

... and main hundreds of Lao people each year. To be fair some of the bombs are left over from French, Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese invasions over the past 100 years. One of the reasons this province is so poor is because people cannot farm land that has not been cleared of mines, and the clearing work takes a long time and requires experts. Mostly it's kids who are injured as the cluster bombs that were dropped have left tennis ball shaped ...

... it was not even their war. <br><br>In Phonsavan my guesthouse exposed this to me. I had read in my guidebook that people hid in caves during the Indochina War but I had no idea about this secret war. The first place we stopped off at was a bomb crater field. This was a field that had craters from US bombs. There were between 7-10 craters created from bombs dropped from the US during this &#8220;secret war&#8221;. These bombs were aimed at caves where ...