From Ban Falang to ban the bomb via a perfect biking road.
8th January 2006

A few days of eating mulberry leaves
Back to the classroom, but only to assist
we are re-united with a well known biker
A mysterious place with unpleasant pock marks

Down on the farm

We stayed for one night at the mulberrycentric farm and reserved judgement as to whether to stay longer. Yes, we’d arranged to meet Sjaak there but it was a bit expensive for what we got and we were disappointed by the set up. It rapidly became clear that what was really happening was that Mr T (the diminutive non-goldclad version) was not running an organic farm with accommodation but a guest house with a semi-organic farm attached. The food in the restaurant was all supposedly from the farm but there was little sign of many of the plants that arrived on our plates and indeed the perfection of many of those offerings made their organic origin questionable.

There was a nice lad in residence, though, who gave the impression of the perfect VSO volunteer. During his time here, Sam has run English lessons in the community school, designed and built a library with the help of the villagers and overseen a project to collect and nurture old seed stocks around the area. As he seemed pretty well informed about the farm I asked him how come the toilets are not the composting type we have come to expect on eco-farms all around the world. It seems that human poo has taboos attached to it and even ox, cow and pig is only reluctanctantly processed. OK, but I was still a bit surprised at the boss’s response to my asking whether there was a compost heap where I could chuck our banana and pineapple skins. Seemingly there wasn’t. Maybe we were all confused.

The best we could offer, given our short stay, was to show our faces at the English lessons and chat with the students. The farm was so very peaceful that we couldn’t help but get lulled into staying. The option was the hedonistic druggy zone of Vang Vien and though we were surely up for a very quiet New Year’s Eve, it seemed far preferable to stay put. We did our stint at the school and it was quite lovely to meet the charming kids some of who had a pretty impressive command of English already. Whether by arrangement of simply because it chose to hop into the room of its own accord, the lesson was disrupted by a small frog. I was utterly amazed that these children of the countryside could be so excited by a frog. Some of them sprang away in shock or maybe disgust. Only one response from a jack the lad caught my attention as being apposite, “Those make good eating.”

And in the school

The lesson was in part a social incite. The lesson of the day focused on the phrase “Is it far to ?”. Vang Vien was 4km away and was considered “far away”. Distance is clearly counted in walking terms. The range of ability in the class was enormous. There were students near where we were sitting who were struggling to recognise the Roman script on the board and to copy it down. I sympathised, at such a young age to have to learn to completely different script must be confusing. Then there were other quite advanced students who were coming up with different ways to phrase an answer, or the question. Apparently normally the class is divided into two groups where the advanced students are in the library, and the others concentrate on the basics, but with the library in the process of being rehoused, the two groups were combined.

The library is a beautiful little thatched mud building. The finishing is wonderful; glazed windows and tiled floors, white board and nice seating. This really has potential to become a community focus and a hub for the seed-saving and good farming practise projects that are under way already. This is the greatest and perhaps only sign we have seen of anything like communism in action in Laos. Yes, there has been little to show for the country being the ‘Peoples Democratic Republic’ other than a few folk wandering around in Chinese army style uniforms doing who knows what. We were pleased to be able to contribute a little nugget of wisdom acquired in Guyana - that inserting neem leaves between the pages of books kept all manner of paper eating critters at bay. I’m afraid you’ll have to dig out a tropical tree book if you want to know what a neem tree looks like.

There’s a little collection pot at the farm to collect cash for running and maintaining a mini-bus that transports the kids to and from school. The van was donated following years of giving bicycles to families that were not looked after and gradually demised. Given that traffic in Laos has been increasing by approximately 50 percent per year, the danger to the kids will soon become more of an issue and hopefully here too the minibus will be a big help.

Perhaps we have been a little unkind to Mr T. Most of these initiatives seem to spring from his direction. I think perhaps he is one of those great managers who delegates to the best person available so that everything runs like clockwork but appears to do nothing himself and so gets less admiration than perhaps he is due.

In truth he could make more money, if the farangs do not work and just spend money in his restaurant and on accommodation, as well as providing work for his extended family. The only con, I feel, is that he encourages well meaning foreigners to his farm who wish to give up their time to help the farm and the community school, but then there is no work (he cannot be held responsible for the growing seasons!) and the well meaning folk end up obliged to stay. He was also rude to those that did help out by not even having the courtesy to even acknowledge their help. He has been in business a long time, and maybe he has lost patience with farangs wanting to dabble ineffectively in the farming business, and has given up trying to distinguish between those who are genuinely keen to help and those that just want some discounted food and accommodation. I was left with an ambivalent feeling about the guy who was apparently disapproved of locally. Was it that the local business men were jealous of his success or that they genuinely felt they he was abusing farangs goodwill and giving a poor impression of Loa ethics?

Guests at the farm were uniformly mellow, attracted by the lure of organic food, peace and the possibility of doing good works. The location of the place could not have been more idyllic, river front, with swimming potential, surrounded by majestic mountains. With idyllic country spots come creatures. Creatures are generally welcomed by us, but I have to confess that I was rather unnerved by Boris, which I discovered was our roommate. The spider had a 10cm leg span, it’s body and leg furriness suggested the tarantula genus. I took a photo, secured all our baggage and mosquito net against spider entry and returned to Pat in the restaurant. Mr T. claimed that no spiders in Lao were dangerous. Was he just placating us? I took more care of checking our gear from then on.

As we arrived, a group of 4 (+1 charming child) travellers were just planning on moving on. We had an interesting evening with them as they got increasingly soused. (+1 was asleep in their room!) Without meaning it, I’m sure, in their short time together they had gelled so much that they came over as a little exclusive. It’s a long time since I’ve had this feeling of being out on the edge of a clique. I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way and I’m quite sure they didn’t notice but I found it quite pleasant to just sit within earshot and listen to their mad banter. There’s really no need to contribute if conversation is flowing nicely. Rather like watching telly. I’ve never really noticed before. Odd. I, meanwhile, was engaged in conversation with the other newies, all female, a Brit, a Dane and a Northern Irish girl. I thing our conversation was a tad too much on the girly side for Pat.

My smoking of rollies had obviously been well noted, though, as the next day I was inundated by requests for a pinch of snout and a paper. I suppose it’s karmic payback time; I’ve scrounged so many fags off people in the past. Hippy is usually quick to point out how annoying a habit it is and I’ve always felt that I’ve generously recompensed after the event - usually buying a packet of fags to give in replacement for the couple I have smoked. With the smoking of rolled fags there is almost always nothing sensible to pay back with and so the owner of a pouch of Drum has to look on as thick stogies are prepared when he only smokes skinny little ones in order to eke out maximum life from one purchase. Funny how many ‘fresh’ tobacco smokers there are out there who never have any ‘doings’. Be fair Pat, getting rolling tobacco here is pretty hard work, in the land of cheap ciggies. You can get a packet of local gut rot ciggies for 25c and a bag of rolling is over $4 - no self respecting backpacker is going to spend 3 days trying to source a pack of baccy when it costs so much relatively. You may wonder why, a pair of skinflints like us have opted for the expensive option - it was Christmas, and Pat had gone back to smoking with Jan and I hate kissing a cigarette smoker. At least the last major leaf burners contributed a packet of papers when I had run low in Stung Treng. I wonder though if Americans would correctly translate the expression ‘poncing fags’.

Again, I am being unfair as the evening before we had been given generous, unsolicited libations of lao-lao. Now the language in these parts is phonetic and it is possible that the lao in this case my be pronounced differently from the Lao in the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic. I sincerely hope so as lao-lao is rice whisky of uncertain origin, almost certainly distilled in an old diesel drum or the like. The lao in lao-lao must derive from the Thai word for alcohol, lao. This would mean that we’re in the Alcohol Peoples Democratic Republic. Could it be anything other than democratic? Mine’s a pint! It seemed the day after the lao-lao revelry that the management were putting up a wall to prevent entry to their gazebo where the loud talking after curfew had been taking place. In reality, the beautifully situated thatched open sided platform is being extended to encourage those folk that want to go tubing down the river to have a bit of Dutch courage before setting off. Instruction has already been posted for these types - ‘No Pissing around here’ Is this a safety or sanitary message, we wonder.

Sjaak’s back

Talking of Dutch, Sjaak arrived. (Dedicated readers with good memories, may remember that we last met Sjaak in Argentina, almost 3 years ago. He’s the one that first circumnavigated the world on his Fireblade, and now is being sponsored by a number of companies including Yamaha who gave him his R1 which he rides at the moment. For the bike-ignorant an R1, is currently the fastest race road bike in production). We’d begun to worry as his last message to us had indicated he’d been having trouble with Florentina. After 200,000 km over some of the wildest terrain on earth on his streetsports bike, the frame gave up the ghost where the rear suspension attaches. He’d managed to weld it back together in China (bear in mind this is an aluminium frame) but had not been able to jig it properly and so now the mounting seems to be imparting a side load to the suspension unit which has in turn started to leak. He’s decided it is time to take it easy to make it back to Europe in one piece. One man’s easy is ..... Kuwait, Saudi and a host of other countries that Hippy and I considered and gave up on, citing paperwork as an obstacle. Good luck to him.

His problems magnified within hours of arriving at the farm. For some reason his front tyre deflated completely in that time. He knows for sure that when he arrived the tyre was fine ‘cos he’s got a right cunning gadget fitted inside his tyre that constantly monitors the pressure and temperature. A bit of water splashed on the surface revealed a rather pathetic little leak that got a bit more excitable when the tyre was pressed out of shape in its vicinity. Clearly he has worked on his tyres considerably more than I have as he had it off the rim in two shakes of a lamb’s whatnot. A trip to the tyre fixer was called for only because he wanted to scuff up the inside of the tube properly and these guys usually have a handy air tool to do the job. In Lao they do not, in Vang Vien anyway. The completed patch looked good to do the job but failed. It seems that the severe treatment his steel belted tyres get going over rocky roads breaks up the belts which then fray and pierce the carcass. Only solution was to put on the spare that he’s carrying. Sjaak is very philosophical about all this and points out that taking a sports bike around the world like this is fraught with problems but it can be done and not necessarily by throwing huge sums of money at it. He’s pleased to announce that his 160+ mph, 1000 cc sportsbike can turn in between 20 and 25 km to the litre. Berthette struggles to give us 18 on a good day. Over 200,000 km this represents a fair saving.

We’d thought Jan was a bit crazy to be considering taking his girlfriend on his bike when he has so much gear with him. Take a look at Sjaak’s bike if you will and consider where he might carry a passenger. Yes, for a few thousand miles he had his lass sat on top of that box. Now that we’ve been around for a bit, we can confirm that this is a regular kind of arrangement in many parts of the world where a farmer has to get a couple of sacks of grain and his missus back from the market. However I do not believe that any of them would have considered the arrangement for more than say 30 km never mind well over 500 in a day. Apparently she got quite cold. She must love Sjaak very much as she will be joining him for another dose of this treatment on his way back from Egypt to Europe. He is already planning for a large procession to protect him from the various traffic divisions of the EU who will doubtless object to her being perched 6 feet off the floor.

I told Sjaak honestly, that there is no way that I would consent to sitting on that box, for hours on end. My only prerequisite for the bike for this trip, was that it should have a comfortable back seat. It was partly why we had chosen the BMW, in favour of the more reliable Honda Africa Twin. So far he has only travelled with her on top on tar roads, dirt roads will be a whole different story. So high up on a hard seat, with little to hold on to the brace herself against the jarring on bumpy roads, will be an uncomfortable experience. I can see his point, partially, that his living now is to travel the world by motorcycle and he has contracts with several sponsors to complete this task. The deal was made without a pillion in mind and the boxes on the back designed to distribute the weight ideally over the frame. He cannot now with less than a year to go and a fraction of the mileage left redesign the bike to accommodate the comfort of his girlfriend. He truly seemed to care about her and wanted her to be happy and asked so for our advice. In the circumstances, all I could recommend was that he should find out fast what makes her happy, and while she is with him compensate her for lack of comfort and having to go without many of her own clothes, by considering her wants. Whether that be having an online source of good chocolate, or orchestrating suitable picturesque stops on the way. I hope it works out. She is a more dedicated pillion than I.

Any way as for the man himself, he seems in good form. On his trip he hasn’t been back to the Netherlands since March 2001. He has had time off though to take a couple of trips to Venezuela to see his girlfriend. We wondered how he managed to keep himself in the manner accustomed as he’s been in the States for a long time. Although he has many sponsors who provide tyres and the like and a bit of land that he rents out back home, he came up with a cunning way of making more money. He sells sets of postcards and CDs that he has had made of his bike in crazy places. Knocking them out at 8 dollars per set, he only needed to sell a couple on each campsite to pay his way. The amount he was making at bike shows and rallies beggars belief. Good effort. Outside of the US, Canada and Europe there’s not so much need to raise money and less of a market for his memorabilia so it all comes out in the wash. Now didn’t we think of that? Now we know what to do on the next trip. He was right in his assertion that Americans like to spend money and like to take away something with them, when we had done talks we had offered nothing to the punters apart from our time. He also has the advantage of being “well-known” for his crazy trips around the world and his reputation draws in the crowds without him making much of an effort. He has also had the foresight to publish a couple of articles in English prior to his traversing the US. We could learn a lot from Sjaak.

We tend to see Sjaak as the Chelsea of premier league table of world travellers and ourselves sitting in the middle of the first division, if that. We were after all more conservative about the countries we travelled in and the types of road we rode on. Now it seems that Sjaak sensibly is now concerned with getting his bike back to Holland in one piece, and is avoiding any unnecessary dirt roads, like ourselves. He was kind to us and suggested we rather underestimated our achievements, we had after all travelled on some pretty shitty roads, through lack of superior options and to his knowledge we are still the only couple doing it two-up. (There were many he had met two up doing sections of the world, Alaska to Ushuaia, for example. But we are the only two who are trying to circumnavigate the world.) Maybe he is right and we should see ourselves as premiership material, the Sunderland of the biking overland community, in fear of relegation by almost anyone who is slightly adventurous.

We spent Old Years Night/New Years Eve in quiet fashion as we had predicted. As the hour approached and we got somewhat sleepy, we decided to do the Auld Lang Syn bit and turn in, based on the reasoning that somewhere the New Year had already started. The fridge where we’d ensconced our three and a half dollar bottle of Chinese cider (the only thing we could find that looked as though the cork would pop appropriately) had been locked for the night so we just called it a year and went to bed.

We left Sjaak to walk into town (his tyre was not fixed at this point) while we did the Vang Vien grockle thing and went to visit one of the caves. On the way down we passed a village full of girls in traditional dress, quite stunning in its intricacy. As usual, as elsewhere throughout the world, there was no sign of men in their traditional gear. Maybe they were just shy to be seen by the tourists and were hiding in doors. As we pulled over to take photos I could see the worried looks on the faces of the women and children bathing ‘au naturelle’ at the standpipe. I used all the sign language I could to try to convey that we were not relatives of Gary Glitter, and had no intention of invading their privacy and were merely instead fascinated by the glorious outfits of their fellow villagers. I think it worked, after a momentarily anxious grabbing of the sarongs to cover their modesty they resumed bathing. The celebration is, naturally, for the New Year which, the Hmong people, recognise in a week long festival. We thought the caves to be quite a nice effort; bit of park at the bottom of the limestone face, cafe, beautiful clear spring, steep but well maintained steps up to the cave mouth and illumination throughout. What more could one ask for? Perhaps a culture that does not present offerings to Buddha statues in polystyrene boxes. I guess it is a mark of the exotic in the way that the poor folk in Mexico were offering Coca Cola to God. Funny old world. One nice little touch was that we came out and spotted by our bike a bunch of bicycles upside down beside it. It took me a while to suss that this was not group of people with empathetic punctures or a bicycle maintenance club, but something far more mundane. The sun has an unerring habit of moving during the day, so people had the sensible plan of putting their bikes upside down to prevent the seat getting hot in the sun. Brilliant, not so easy with Berthette though.

While we were at the mulberry farm, I learnt a little about silk production. I had always assumed that if you produced the cocoons you also breed the moths, but apparently, others specialise in egg production and the farm buys eggs and feeds up the larvae on mulberry leaves. I also didn’t know that the cocoons naturally come in two colours, yellow and white. There is the potentially of producing red by feeing the little guys on rhubarb leaves. The cocoons are boiled, spun, dyed, washed and woven. I still find it incredible that such beautiful material is essentially maggot shit, and that so much work and maggot shit goes into the tiniest piece of cloth.

One night Sjaak retired early, and we ended up in conversation with Brian from the Bay area of California. Nice guy, who provoked a few thoughts in our minds. America as England is attractive to immigrants. The sensible assumption that America takes is that immigrants come to America because is offers a way of life better than in their original country, and that part of that is that many are attracted to American culture, and want to understand America and feel American. So in San Francisco evening classes are offered in, for instance, ‘preparing a complete Thanksgiving dinner’. The aim is to welcome immigrants and assimilate them into American culture. I cannot really explain why, but the word assimilate, conjures up images of Brave New World and 1984 , fostering sameness and removing differences. But I could tell Brain was seeing the word in totally positive terms, helping immigrants to his country feel at home and part of the American nation. In Britain, Britishness is become akin to nationalism, and instinctively, we are reticent to impose our ways on others. Maybe it is merely a reaction against the wrongs of the colonialist era that we shy away from pride in our nationality.

Anyway the conversation got me thinking. I have heard people whining that immigrants come to Britain to work, and that they make no effort to become “British” retaining their own language and traditions, living in small enclaves of the metropolitan cities. But honestly what does Britain do to actively encourage Britishness? Maybe many newcomers would like to know how to prepare a full roast dinner to offer their new found British friends, know pub etiquette, or lessons in queuing before they commit some social faut-pas. We kind of expect people to land in the UK and by some form of osmosis absorb Britishness. Maybe cultural exchange classes where Brits can learn how to make decent Polish sausage and the Polish immigrants learn how to produce the perfect yorkshire pudding? We learn about good vodka and they learn to savour a single malt?

The organic farm had in most ways one of the most disorganised billing system we have encountered, they were victims of their own apathy and the general easy going-ness of its clientele. In many countries where change is in short supply or they use harder currencies for bigger sums, it is generally easier for a guest house if the guest run up a bill and just pay at the end to reduce the need for use of change. Firstly, the numbers of the rooms were repeated, so for instance there were two Room 4s. Instead of putting all the bills for one room together they were distributed on slips of papers some with several rooms on the same piece and others on different pages of a book. This meant that trying to pay your bill, was something of a trial and tested the patience and tolerance of the guests. It took over an hour for them to calculate the bill, and then after we had paid and were about to leave they discovered another slip of paper for our food from the night before, under the vegetable trimmings or some such. I knew the original bill had seemed light so paid up. I am not sure all customers would be so helpful.

Despite their general, ‘anally expulsive’ attitude to billing, I was impressed by their tally system. Boxes.... 5 - a square with a slash through it, 4 - a square, 3 - an ‘n’, 2 - a backwards 7, and 1 - a 1. Somehow better than the standard 5 bar gate system, where I have seen so many children forget how many to do before they cross the gate. With a square there is no confusion. I’m not sure how the maths examiners would feel if the method was a adopted in the UK.

The Plain of Jars

The Plain of Jars is one of those great mysteries. A huge number of jars fashioned from granite like stone and weighing between 600 kg and 6 tonnes litter a huge area of plain in northeast Lao. As yet the jury is out on what purpose the served - general consensus is funerary rites of some sort. How were they transported? Why were they placed where they are? As I see it, it must have been the Egyptians or maybe aliens. Any way, Hippy and I love this kind of stuff and so we felt the side trip from Route 13 to be justified.

We spent a couple of hours with Sjaak doing a bit of a photo shoot and this rather complicated things. No petrol was available in the Vang Vien area. There was no way of knowing whether there would be any to the north and Sjaak only had enough to do about 40 km anyway. We eventually managed to fill up at hand-pump-and-glass-measure stalls at the side of the road. Sjaak drained the barrel at the first one and we the next. Behind us other unfortunate tourists came to find the barrels dry. They were having to head further and further from town and so needing more and more to get back.

There’s a bugger of a lot more to this modelling malarky than I had imagined. Even when we’d done a few passes and made adjustments to focus, exposure, position, timing and all that we weren’t entirely happy with the results. We reciprocated taking pictures of Sjaak with his rather splendid digital SLR only for Hippy to match or better the shots with our rather tired Fuji. I don’t think I have the patience for all this repetition to get that perfect shoot, after 2 goes of multiple exposures, I felt, if we haven’t got a good shot, it wasn’t meant to be. But then we are not professional travellers like Sjaak. When we get somewhere with decent speed internet we’ll be able to exchange the results. It was fitting somehow to be saying good-bye to Sjaak stood by the side of a road. We may meet again in Bangkok when we’re all likely to be flying over Myanmar/Burma.

Now seriously behind schedule and with quite a long way to go on unknown roads, we were a bit worried about getting there in daylight. OK so Route 13 was pretty tough going in patches where heavy breaking or steering was needed to avoid the potholes but the number 7 was biking heaven. This is one of those roads that combines perfect bends (for our type of bike), even and grippy road surface, varying but constantly beautiful scenery, lack of traffic, friendly folk waving in villages, mild temperatures. This is my favourite road in the world. Oh, how sad I was to think that we would have to go back down it.

Adding to our worries about arriving late (even though the road was great and we were making good time, you never know whether when you get around the corner is the bit they never finished) was the temptation to stop to gawp at the festival going on in each town. In the end we just had to. The Hmong people’s New Year festival was continuing and now manifested itself by two lines of young folk in their bead encrusted traditional dress formed up to toss a ball between them. We learned later that this is a courtship ritual and that couples that are attracted are made to toss the ball between themselves for a month. We couldn’t elicit what the qualifying period of ball tossing is per day - it’s something a bit random to do with when it warms up in the morning and cools down in the evening. I think it is a damn fine idea; spending so much time together doing such a mundane activity is bound to provide an avenue for issues to come to the surface. What chance has a marriage if you can’t even toss a ball to each other. God knows how Hippy and I would fare. With my inability to throw straight, my courtship could end up all very confusing, with me randomly throwing the ball in all directions, I could easily get the reputation of a bit of a tart, giving my ball to all and sundry in the neighbourhood.

I was hugely surprised by the gaff we arrived at. Phonsavan is not the most attractive place on earth and our hostel of choice was located at the end of the airfield. The airfield is pretty much redundant and so tranquility reigns over the little cabins built at the end of it. X engaged us immediately in political discourse. The major topic of conversation was the US involvement in Laos (the Secret war).

I’ll briefly explain this as best as I understand it. Laos, like myriad other countries freed from colonial shackles in the wake of WW2, became something of a breeding ground for communism. There was a civil war between the Royalist/loyalist side and the Pathet Lao, each having various names over the period. In 1962 Geneva Convention decided that a united government should be given a chance and resolved that the US should cease involvement and that the North Vietnamese should butt out, too. Regrettably neither of the sides did as required although they claimed to have done so. A covert operation organised by the CIA and who knows who else (there must have been a bugger of a lot of them) trained and supplied a mercenary army to the extent, we are told, that they gave up farming totally and relied on the manna falling from the sky. Although the Vietnamese presence became huge, there can surely be no excuse for the carpet bombing that the secret ‘Air America’ forces carried out. An average of one air mission every eight minutes for nine years. Worse even than the scale of the bombing (half a ton per citizen of Lao) were the types of weapons used. Napalm, agent orange and cluster bombs. Because this war did not exist, there were no rules of engagement.

The legacy is a huge amount of UXO (unexploded ordnance) the bulk of which seems to be the antipersonnel pineapples and bombies which are armed by spinning a number of times and may have been lying in the ground waiting for that extra half turn for 30 years. In other circumstances, a bombie may have been ploughed in a field many times but still be a few turns short of detonation. Children also find the bombies in the ground and their cricket ball size makes them tempting as play things. They may play safely with one for a couple of days even and then the fatal turn is completed and their play thing transforms into a killer spraying ball bearings at 250kmph. This is certainly the most horrifying concept I have ever had to deal with. As we drive along the road we see people digging in soil that could contain little bombs that can fire their ball bearing projectiles up to a mile. This in a land of people who have given us the brightest smiles, the most vigourous waves and loudest ‘sabaidees’ we’ve encountered anywhere. What kind of terrorist could inflict this horror on these people? Those hideous commy Ruskies? Pol Pot? Adolph Hitler? Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? Err no. But the pilots dropping the bombs, cannot see the people they terrorise, cannot warm to the friendliness of the people. Dropping bombs from the air it is so easy to create negative images of the victims, it may be a good way to target military compounds but also indiscriminate to civilians. What is worse is the deadly litter left behind for people to discover decades later.

The only upside to the bombing, if you can call it that, is that the Lao people are creative in the use of bomb casings and fragments for other purposes; a five foot long half-case from a cluster bomb makes an effective hearth, complete casings are used as props for houses (the traditional house style here stands clear of the ground to keep the floods out and metal in place of timber posts keeps the nasty wood-boring critters at bay), bombies that have split and not exploded can be used for oil lamps or ash trays, the rest of the debris is melted down to make anything and everything.

There’s a group out and about training people to disarm the weapons found. Are they from the US? Err no. We were taught by our parent’s ‘to clean up our mess’ why does this ethic not apply to governments? Actually a British based group, MAG, part funded by New Zealand government and other bodies is the one doing the work. There is an American presence, though. X told us that the helicopter we saw landing on the strip would be an American on a mission to find ‘servicemen’ (can they really be servicemen if they weren’t really there?) missing in action. Apparently the same thing has been going on in ‘Nam for ages and turning over ‘dog tags’ is rewarded. This has spurred a counterfeit ‘dog tag’ industry over there. Cool! I mean I understand about the concept of closure but this is 30 years. Let it lie.

Now I know that X is something of a political animal but his knowledge rung extremely true. He was aware of the ‘Secret City’ about 80 km away. He recommended that we not try to go and see it. We couldn’t fathom, though, how it is that the current government is maintaining the secrecy even now. Clearly there must have been complicity between the Lao government of the time and the US and there is still a lot of covering up being done. X told us that he has been arrested and spent time inside three times and that the walls have ears. Hard to know what has been sexed up in everything we have read and been told but there is something very wrong.

Other than the ‘missing in action’ search helicopter, the only other action on the airfield were various driving tests; trucks, tuk-tuks and, allegedly, motorcycles. The trucks had to perform precision manoeuvres, parking with the wheels tidily between strings that were no more than 9 inches apart. Pretty tricky and probably why we haven’t any complaints about the quality of truck driving in Lao. The tuk-tuk task was to perform a ‘doughnut’ within a set of cones. A pretty tight circle, I thought, and probably why haven’t any complaints about tuk-tuk drivers in Lao. The invisibility of the bike test confirms our thoughts in that department and probably why we have the same complaints about random biking in Lao a everywhere else in SE Asia. In general we are quite happy with the driving here - maybe we’re just getting used to it.

And so to the jar sites. Fascinating, beautiful and predictably pockmarked by bomb craters. 400 metres away is a runway with a few MIG fighters parked up on it. All very strange. Judge for yourselves from the photos, I think for once we have rendered them rather well. Maybe time spent photographing with Sjaak has made us somewhat more composition aware. we waited for sunset with hordes of other folk but it all seemed rather odd. The majority of the others who arrived were little interested in the sunset and the potential this had for enhancing the views (and so their photographs). They must have been promised that the tour would stop at the Plain of Jars but become jaded during the day and just shambled about without enthusiasm taking pictures of each other with a jar.

We learned a little about Lao food before we left Phonsavan. We’ve been steering clear of boiled eggs in the markets, knowing full well that many of them are in fact boiled chicken embryos. We are told that the distinction is that the embryo version is defined by being dyed pink. As I don’t have a burning desire for boiled eggs anyway, I wont be testing the theory. Apparently a previously unknown species of small mammal has been discovered for sale in a Lao market. I can imagine the discoverer asking the vendor what the name of the creature is only to be told “Food, you ignorant fellow,” or something like that.

We left for Luang Prabang in good spirits. We had to ride that road again. We rather hoped that we’d be blessed with beautiful half cloud cover clinging to the crinkly mountains.