Sorry for the Group Email

The bus from Luang Prabang to Phonsavan took eight hours. In a way, this is everything you need to know. Eight hours on a train is easy. Train tracks have to be pretty smooth to avoid killing people, and the deep suspension of the carriage sways gently, lulling you into a deep snooze within an hour. A bus, simply by virtue of the fact that it is driven on a road, will never be as comfortable. Of course, it didn’t help that our bus lacked air-conditioning and anywhere to put luggage; everything was hauled onto the roof, covered with blue tarpaulin and tied down. Each time we went around a sharp bend I listened carefully for the sound of our things crashing over the edge of a cliff, but happily, everything was in the same place when we arrived in Phonsavan.

There’s little attraction in Phonsavan itself, a collection of unlovely buildings and dusty roads, complete with a scattering of guesthouses and a few restaurants. The reason to go there is that it’s close to the home of the plain of jars.

As far as names go, you have to hand it to Phonsavan for not messing around. The plain of jars is exactly that: a wide area scattered with large earth jars, some of them thousands of years old. The sites – there are sixty of them – are incredible monuments. Some of the jars are five feet high; easily enough to accommodate a full-grown man and, for thousands of years, they sat undisturbed, an archaeological marvel.

Phonsavan is also remarkable for the fact that during the Vietnam war, it was bombed with such enthusiasm, that Laos became the most heavily-bombed country in the history of war.

The statistics and comparisons for the scale of the bombing are myriad. Did you know, for instance, that the bombs dropped on Laos were the equivalent of one ton per person? Or that the severity of the bombing was equal to one planeload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years?

The destruction was – and is – stunning.

The goal was to bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail, a concealed pathway through north-east Laos. The trail was used by the Viet Cong after northern Vietnam became impassable after bombing. Unfortunately, and physics fans will be with me on this one, the problem with dropping huge, unguided iron cases packed with explosive from 30,000 feet, of course, is that it’s hard to hit a footpath. As a result, bombs fell everywhere, obliterating villages, rice-fields and, in the case of the plain of jars, thousands’ of years worth of historical monument. The fields are still pocked with simply huge craters. You could park cars in them, or host a reunion of the entire Jimmy Saville fan club.

The worst thing about the bombing (apart, I suppose, from actually being there at the time), was its ineffectiveness. Not just its ineffectiveness at stopping the Vietcong, but literally, the ineffectiveness of the bombs themselves.

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that you make television sets. In a week, you make a hundred. Of those, thirty don’t work. The same thing happens week after week, month after month. How long would you keep your job?

Of the bombs dropped on Laos during the Vietnam war, thirty per cent failed to explode. Thirty per cent of the equivalent of one ton per person for every person in the country. That’s a lot of unexploded ordinance, or in local parlance, UXO. The problem with bombs is that just because they don’t go off when they hit the ground, it doesn’t make them safe. They just sit there until someone sets them off, either in a controlled explosion, or by simply heaving them out of the way. Scrap metal is valuable in Laos, and the result is hospitals full of amputations and deaths every year as a result of people finding promising-looking chunks of iron which explode when moved.

Of those sixty jar sites in Laos, just three are officially safe to visit. The rest still have bombs sitting on them, or buried just under the surface. Organisations (such as MAG) spend their time searching the countryside for bombs and detonating them – while we were on the plain of jars we heard several being exploded, booms rolling across the hills. Only some of the jars are still complete – the rest are jagged shards sticking out of the ground across the hills.

We were silent while we were there. We were welcome in Laos (it helps when you’re spending money, I suppose), but it’s impossible to tell what people really think. Some of the people we saw and spoke to must have been alive during the bombing. Everyone we saw must have people in their immediate family who can remember it. In Neither Here Nor There, Bill Bryson notes that, for some of French, the worst thing about the end of the war was watching German tourists wandering around towns that had been destroyed a few years earlier. I wondered if it was the same for the people we met.

Dave is finished being sober about things. Although Vietnam’s next, so it’s difficult to be certain. More pictures, incidentally, in the Flickr set.

Honesty box

This post has been changed to correct a pretty absurd quirk of language. The first draft seemed to suggest that surviving a bombing would be a bad thing. I think surviving a bombing would actually be pretty good, compared to the alternatives.