Going Tribal 2
- krolesh
- Mar 16, 2024
- 3 min read
Phonsavan
I stayed in this cute little guest house.
Every day I had some variation on this soup, called fer, which is actually the same way you say phớ, the Vietnamese noodle soup that you may be familiar with. Really delicious, even the veg version around here.
Sunset getting close, over the monument to Chet Chuong, revered leader of the Muang Phuan Kingdom.
Old army trucks
Lao fighter jets
The chicks are deliciously fat in this tiny ritzy burb
No, it's not a B52 bomber crashing, just another beautiful sunset.
My guesthouse garden, where Bewdy hangs out at night
The last cyclist who stayed here never left
Improvised brekky. Banana, sweet yoghurt, and a couple of dry digestive biscuits. Beats noodle soup 3 times a day.
Although this doesn't look bad at all, does it. This feast totalled 50,000 Kip ($4 Oz), and also totalled my belly, as the bowl was so large and deep it even filled up my hollow leg-straws.
Plain Of Jars
I went to visit one of the many UNESCO World Heritage sites containing these incredible rock jar megaliths that are dotted around the countryside here. The site was about 10 clicks from town.
Yes, they're jars, chiselled out of granite between 500BC and 500AD, during the Iron Age.
There's hundreds of them. This particular site is a bit of a high point, and was therefore used by Pathet Lao troops during the war. Notice the bomb craters, compliments of the typically bombastic US Air Force.
So far they've removed 127 unexploded bombs in just this little area.
Scientists agree that the jars were used as part of some sort of burial or funeral practice, and there's been burial sites discovered around the jars (but never underneath them).
One theory is that the people who carved them would put their dead bodies in the jars until everything but the bones were completely decomposed (called a primary burial), and then the bones would later be buried in the ground somewhere nearby (secondary burial).
But others disagree.
The local myth is that they were used to brew lao lao, rice liquor, for huge celebrations. But by the number and size of the jars this could only happen if every single villager was a complete pisshead all of the time, which is unlikely.
This is the King's Jar, the largest of the lot. It's taller than me above ground, and is also partly buried.
Trenches dug by soldiers
The lucky trench diggers
The jars aren't all round, but tend to follow the shape of the rock they've been carved out of. This one's more square-ish.
This isn't a lid, but a marker stone for a burial site.
They must've had dogs.
The atmosphere's pretty hazy on and off around here at the moment, partly because of crop and grass burn offs like this one.
I wasn't hot enough in the mid afternoon sun, so I climbed this hill
Nice view over Gundagai, I mean, over Xieng Khouang Plateau.
Lao trooos in the area during the war against the French
Som thum and khao niaw. More fire breathing.
The great chef. Notice the 2 women in the distance in traditional Hmong wedding clothes.
A local guy offered me these fruits, called som. They were pretty disgusting, incredibly sour and pasty, and he insisted I dip them in chilli powder and salt to make them better. I reckon they weren't ripe enough, but Lao people love eating tart fruit, as, it seems, do all Southeast Asians.
I mean, I quite like the green mango, but these were next level tartish, like the Valley in Brissy on a Friday or Saturday night.
Go to Part 3
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