Why Hello, Mr. UXO

Today was the closest to a bomb I've ever been in my life: roughly two meters. We headed out to the Crater Landscape, a big field of craters from American air strikes. While we were there we asked a local tour guide about where was safe to walk, because obviously anywhere there are bomb craters there's likely ones that didn't explode. He told us the trails were safe, but pointed out a black rock that was there as a warning marker for an unexploded cluster bomb munition. A little background on these things: hundreds of them drop from a larger bomb casing to basically blow the shit out of everything in a huge radius, and about one third of them fail to detonate. They basically have a kill radius of twenty-five meters when on the ground. If you look in the picture below, it's the rusty, tennis ball-looking thing in the middle. The craziest part of that location: the explosion of UXO we heard from far down the valley as we were about to leave...



Then we hit up another couple cave systems in the surrounding area. One of them was the Tham Xang Caves, where revolutionary communist guerillas operated out of. We only got to see one of the caves however, since the other was gated off, we think due to the biggest bee hives I've ever seen, probably about one million bees in total in honeycombs clinging to the cave ceiling. The other cave, Tham Piu Cave, was really cool. It was also used to shelter refugees from the bombing campaign in the countryside, until a single aircraft fired rocket landed straight inside and killed three hundred and seventy four people. Their bones are still buried beneath the rocks. It was a really deep cave, we hiked all the way to the end of the line and extinguished the lights for a few moments of silence, and to experience the pitch black and tranquility of the cave.

And that be it for Phonsavan. Tomorrow we head to Vang Vieng in the morning to do some of the infamous tubing. I loved this town, and would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to experience the Lao countryside or any of the war history.