The Quest for Jars, Craters and Highway

I've found a new found love for motor-biking. The last couple days we rented motorbikes and ripped around the Laotian countryside. I'm proud to say I've graduated from the easy automatic scooters to the higher cc semi-manual bikes that are common here, and all of my newly acquired skills have been self taught! I'm eager to actually try a bigger bike, one with a clutch and manual gears. For now, I'll stick to something in my experience bracket. Riding around the Laotian countryside is nothing but amazing. The scenery is beautiful and seems to be ever-changing; parts of it reminded me of the Okanagan Valley back home, then we're cruising down dirt roads and around limestone cliffs. Riding through the local villages is cool too, you get so many friends waves and smiles from the locals.



So far Phonsavan has been incredible. The first night here we went to the Marha Puha festival and mingled with the locals. The festival commemorates a speech given by Buddha to 1250 monks during the full moon this time of year. It started out as a simple affair, we ate some popcorn and shot off some roman candles. As the night went on (and probably as the locals got drunker) things got better and better. People would come out of nowhere and offer us glasses of beer because we were the only Farang (foreigner) there. Then we got to join the locals in hoisting up these bamboo-framed towers (used for shooting fireworks the next day), encouraged by an old, drunk Lao man. Then we marched around in the crowd behind some monks, shot off some more roman candles, and called it a night. It was a great experience, and I'm sure will be one of my best in Laos.

The next day we jumped on the bikes and headed out to see the Plain of Jars Sites one and two. It's basically a field of these giant stone jars that were used to facilitate the major trade routes that ran through this part of the world. The coolest thing about them is that nobody knows where or whenst they came from. The second coolest thing is that during the Vietnam War, the Americans repeatedly pounded those areas with air strikes and managed to destroy only a few of the jars. We also hit up a local waterfall near the jar sites. Unfortunately the water was too dirty to swim in, but it was still an amazing site. Then we headed out to Bomb City, the unoffcial name for the old Lao capital that the Americans did manage to destroy during the war. The sheer amount of craters littering the countryside is amazing, they dot the landscape like chicken pocks, and are even visible on the furthest of peaks.

Today was also a good, lengthy bike trip. We headed out to a cave a ways out of town that has a Buddhist shrine in it. This was easily the coolest cave I've ever seen before, with a huge statue of Buddha inside, plus a ton of artifacts buried in the deep bowels of the cave. We also got into adventure mode and ventured into the deep bowels of the second cave, which was completely undeveloped and required some rock climbing, spelunking and squeezing to get inside the depths of it. Then we headed back to Phonsavan to an old war memorial on a hilltop overlooking the city and watched the sunset.

All in all Phonsavan has greatly exceeded my expectations, and even entered into the mind blowing realm. My planned one day of staying here has turned into three, and tomorrow we head out on the bikes again to see the Crater Plains were a B-52 strike scarred the land years ago and to some more caves and hopefully end the day at a hot spring. And still not able to load up pictures yet, the wifi here sucks.