The Elastic Watch

It turns out we all felt pretty sick at one point or another for the next 4 or 5 days. The 6 hour bus ride to Phonsavanh took us through a mountain range and onto a large plateau via the one wildly twisty road. Feeling like crud the whole time really made the experience special. Phonsavanh is considered a "colder climate" due to its altitude. I bet it was 75+ degrees during the day, but many locals still wore beanies and big puffy winter jackets. The surrounding countryside has been mostly stripped of its native pine trees and replaced with farms of some sort. We found a nice guesthouse and spent the day recuperating. In the evening we watched a documentary about America's bombing campaign in Laos during the Vietnam War. I find it interesting that we never learned about this in history class, but then again, it's pretty embarrassing subject for the U.S. In an effort to stop supplies from reaching Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh trail, the U.S. Carpet bombed a huge portion of Laos using a type of bomb called a "cluster bomb." The bomb was designed to blow apart before it reached the ground and disperse about 150 smaller bombs (called bombies by the locals) over the surrounding ground. The bombies would then explode, shooting up to three hundred ball bearings everywhere, killing anyone in the vicinity. At the time these bombs caused massive fatalities, mostly to innocent villagers who had nothing to do with the war. Even worse, there have been estimates that as much as 30 percent of the bombies never went off, and therefore just laid on the ground, ready to explode if they were messed with. Today the bombies still maim and kill several hundred locals every year as they are tilling their rice paddies. Some are killed trying to open the bombies to use the gun powder or sell the scraps to the scrap metal foundry. Many kids are killed by simply finding them and playing with them, as they are usually bright yellow and shaped like a ball. Its a truly sad thing to see. The area around Phonsavanh was one of the most heavily bombed regions in Laos, and is therefore the headquarters for several European organizations who work to help villages clear their land of bombies. Apparently these things have been found in trees, burried under well traveled walkways, and even in school playgrounds! Aid from the U.S. appears to be non-existent, but apparently the Laos government doesn't trust the U.S. and has denied aid several times.

On a more positive note we rented mopeds the next day and ventured off to see the mysterious jars that Phonsavanh is famous for. Only three of the 50-odd jar sites have been cleared of bombies, as the clearing process takes a tremendous amount of time and labor. The fees they tack on to get into the sites add up so we only visited one of the sites, but it was really cool to see 200+ giant stone jars spread randomly throughout a hillside. Some of the jars are about as small as a five gallon bucket, while others are as large as a small car. Little is known about where the jars came from, but there are suggestions that they were used to collect water, or maybe as some sort of way to bury the dead. In any case, they were a sight to see for sure.

We booked bus tickets to Paksan in the evening. The plan is to head to Kong Lo cave, which is a 7.5km cave that has a navigable river running its entire length. Sounds like an adventure to me!

Garrett