Phonsovan to Savannakhet

Howdy folks...

Well I am now in southern Laos in Savannakhet and it's well toasty weather so am hiding in the air con internet cafe for a while!

 Fil and I left Luang Prabang and had a real Laos style journey from there to Phonsovan...a true bouncy bus the only saving grace was that it wasn't packed to the rafters with people goats and chickens ...The highway is yet to be finished all the way to Phonsovan so it gets really rather interesting about 60km away as we found out!! From Luang Prabang to Phonsovan you spend your entire time being thrown in one direction and then the other as the bus swings precariously around the mountain roads, however the best is yet to come....( as we found out).

The bus pulled up at the start of what was basically a mud track along the hillside, red thick gloopy mud, great puddles caused by the JCB's and diggers that were cutting a path in the hillside for the road to be built, we were ordered off the bus....We were told in Laos that we were now going to get in these huge trucks that kind of resemble something that was left behind after the war or by the Russians before they left! Anyway we were told to wait and looked at the trucks and wondered why we weren't getting into one and going anywhere...we sort of understood that we would be going "soon".......an hour later.....still sitting in the middle of nowhere (the workmen who had a TV and VCD player in their "shack" put on Raw Deal for us to watch!) it was time for the Holy Planet to come into action and find out just exactly what was going on and it turned out we were going to have to sit on the roadside for two and half hours and wait for another bus to turn up before we could go....meanwhile the trucks and their drivers just hang around....eventually we were loaded on to a truck that consisted of three wooden benches down the length of the truck, bags just thrown on top and about 30 people crammed in for the ride....needless to say it was really a rather interesting ride and also absolutely freezing once the sun went down and for the first time in I can't remember how long my fingers were completely numb from the cold!!!!

Phonsovan is at an altitude of around 1200m so it was even cold when we got off the truck... I have to say though Phonsovan turned out to be one of the highlights of Laos even with the cold.... The area and the province was one of the most heavily bombed areas during the war and you notice bomb craters from B52's all around. A large proportion of the land is still fraught with danger as a result of unexploded land mines and bombs (UXO). There are still regular stories of cattle of farmers being blown up after stepping on hidden mines. While we were touring the Plain of Jars we noticed teams on the roadsides digging and checking for mines so it is still a very real threat here. This is such a shame not only for the people who work the land but Laos is so stunningly beautiful it would be incredible to hike but sadly it is just not safe in many areas. You have to be careful where you walk and only follow the paths and while at one of the sites at the Plain of Jars a tour guide told us not to go to the top of the hill as it was used by the Vietnamese and still believed to have some mines left and besides there were only a few of the Jars up there!!! Glad he was around!

After a stinking hot shower we headed off to find some food with Roland, a guy from New York we met on the bus and we stopped into this place that was packed with locals - always a good sign! It was in here that we met Phet who is a truly amazing guy and speaks superb English, he told us stories of the area during the war and also he told us his story which is a real tear jerker. Every once in a while you just find the most incredibly fascinating people who have amazing stories to tell and he was just incredible....his family lived in the south on the border with Cambodia and were very heavily bombed one evening and the family fled but in the mayhem of it all Phet and his mother were separated from his father and other siblings....they went to various camps in the region to try and reunite their family but found no one and no one had seen them so they feared that they had all been killed and there was only him and his mother who had survived....following the attacks they were too scared to go home and they ended up spending the next six years of their lives living in a cave with some other families and surviving on very little food... Can you even imagine spending 6 years of your life living in a cave?? As the war came to a close the family were finally reunited but they discovered that one son was missing and he had been separated from both parents on the night of the attacks...They eventually rebuilt their lives until one day around 5 years ago an American guy turned up at Phet's parents house with a photograph of an American family and showed it to Phet's parents who recognized no one. Phet is the only one who speaks English so he read the back of the card and noticed it had their family name on. He was really worried that someone was trying to trick the family and so was careful what he said. The American visitor left and took some photos of Phet's family and then a while afterwards letters started arriving at the house and the story began to unravel that one of the people in the photograph thought he knew Phet's family....Over a period of time it was revealed that he thought he was their son and Phet's brother but he wanted to come over and meet them again. Phet was still being very protective of the family as he didn't want his parents to suffer more pain. The guy sent money to Phet's family for them all to fly to Vientiane and meet him off a flight and when the guy arrived and walked through the customs hall Phet's mother recognized him immediately and it was her son who had been lost all those years earlier during a bomb attack. The family were reunited for the first time in decades and their son is now a doctor in Minnesota. He was smuggled out of Laos and into Thailand to a refugee camp where he was eventually adopted by an American family as he believed all his family were dead as he could not find them after the attacks....So at last the family is reunited. Sadly Phet's father passed away a couple of years ago but at least he got to see his son again. In December the brother is visiting again and this time bringing his wife and children over too.........How amazing is that story.....

He also told us some amazing stories about the local Hmong villagers and courtship which is fascinating.....Every November the girls of the village dress up in their finery and line up in their village waiting for the boys of other villages to pass by. If a girl sees a boy she rather fancies then she has to start singing to attract his attention and if he is interested then he will line up opposite or near to her and then she has to throw a ball to him to show her interest. They then can only communicate by singing so they ask questions of each other while throwing the ball and singing to each other. They are not allowed to speak or touch and the courtship goes on like this until they may move to one side to continue singing to each other more privately.....If they really like each other then arrangements are made in secret between them to elope back to the boys village and get married. They set a date, unknown to either set of parents and in the middle of the dark the boy comes to the house and steals the girl away and takes her back to his village (with a dose of hanky panky going on in between!). Once she has left the house with this boy and slept with him then she must marry him and can never go back to her parents house ever again other than to visit or it is believed that she will bring bad spirits to the home...The boy has to go back to the parents house a few days later and explain to her parents that he has married their daughter and that they have a new son in law which can sometimes go down like a lead balloon as one can imagine! To appease the father from shooting the boy it is customary for the boy to take silver to the father... Sometimes the boy still gets shot!!! The stories Phet told about Laos were totally fascinating and I could have listened to him for hours on end talking about life. He is an English teacher and is also studying environmental issues so a really switched on guy who is working really hard to help his country.... Shame I didn't have the time to observe one of his lessons!

In between chatting to Phet who should have a book written about his life it's so incredible, we visited the Plain of Jars. These are massive pots made out of a stone and sand type of old concrete and various explanations have been offered as to where they came from but no-one is really sure or how old they are. They are scattered around on the hills in many sites but we were only able to visit three sites as they are the only ones considered relatively safe from UXO.... One theory is that they were originally used to store rice wine water and food in many years ago for celebrations when the local people won an important battle. A French archaeologist has suggested that they are actually some sort of graveyard as smaller jars were found buried beneath and she suggested they were large gravestones and used to store food for the deceased to take with them into their next life.....The locals and the archaeologists agree to disagree but until the UXO is cleared from the remaining 50 or so other sites no further investigation can be done...

We were driven around the site by one of Phet's friends in his beaten up old Russian car! Quite a hoot really! He also took us to a village where the locals used shells of cluster bombs to secure the foundations of their stilt like houses. Everywhere you look there are remnants of UXO, bomb cases used as flower planters, foundations for buildings, walls.....just incredible....

We stayed at a really great guest house run by Lae who was a really great host. His brother owned the guest house and there's another story.... His brother who is for one reason or another called King Kong! (We met him and he certainly isn't more of a bean pole Che Guevara look-a-like really!) Anyway King Kong used to catch and collect butterflies and moths and he also learned English so when some Japanese tourists came along he could talk to them and just happened to show them his bug collection...Now the Japanese are ferocious bug collectors it's kind of a status thing and the Japanese guy who saw KK's bug collection couldn't believe his luck and offered to buy 2 butterflies (big uns) for $500. Anyhow Japanese guy goes back and tells his buddies at the hotel what he's discovered and not to be outdone by their buddy they all go back to KK's place and start out biding each other for these two butterflies... the bidding finally finishes and KingKong is $10000 richer and builds himself a guesthouse, a home for his parents and is sorted for the rest of his life!!!!

We hooked up with two Brit girls Belinda, Zoe and Olwen (Welsh) and Lae and his mates took us to the local club after a fair amount of Lao Lao the local hellfire moonshine...this club turned out to be a Karaoke bar in a sort of small shed on the edge of town...on the way in Lae told me that there would hardly be any girls in there as all the good girls would be at home in bed by now! Hmmmmm! What does that say about us then??? Anyway we strolled in, sat down had a few beers and then murdered "When You Say Nothing at All" on the Karoake. Zoe and I both got propositioned by some strange Laos chap who's chat up line was "Excuse me my name....such and such (forgotten it I was a bit wrecked!) then none of this where are you from? or anything he just goes straight for the "Excuseme, you want to sleep with me tonight"........erm...let me think about that.. well....No..... (apart from the fact it's illegal for westerners to have unauthorized relationships with Laos people) and I was convinced I was probably old enough to be his mother!!!!! However it was a cracking night out in the local club, we would have never known about it without Lae and had an amazing night...

Sadly next morning was an early start for the bus back to Vientiane and I'm pleased to say that Lae and his mates did actually look a whole lot worse than some of us who had managed to sober up in the night.......Back across the terribly bouncy road again and 13 hours later.... Vientiane...where we chilled for a day and relished in Marlboro Light heaven.......shopped in the market and stopped in at our local, stocked up on cash and then yesterday morning we were stuffed onto a bus again, packed to the rafters with people in the aisles and everywhere and to Phonsovan where we now are!

These smaller less touristy places are just the best as you get to see some real Laos life and meet some great people....We are only staying here for a day and we leave tomorrow for Pakse but we wanted to break up the tripsouth.....There seems to be a fun fair every night, this consists of a Ferris wheel and a couple of carousels, but it's right on the Mekong the other side is Thailand and it's kind of city...... other than that there is just about bugger all else to do here...

We have discovered the Lao -Paris cafe though that does REALLY strong coffee and last night we blew about a week's food money on demolishing three bottles of French white wine (or VIte Vine to you Baggage!) Man it was soooooo good! Today we've been to the market and tonight, well the owner of the Lao Paris cafe knows to have some more vino on ice!!!!

Anyway tomorrow we go to Pakse and then stop off in the Bolaven Plateau where they grow the Laos coffee and apparently it is some of the most expensive coffee in the world? (Apparently the French buy most of it!) Then down to Champasak and Four Thousand Islands and then into Cambodia.....But before then we've got Olwen's birthday on Sunday and surprisingly we just happen to be in the home of the best Lao Lao in the country if there is such a thing, which I doubt as it is kinda like drinking a cocktail of petrol and cough medicine!

Anyway I'm gonna trot off so take care you's lot .......

Loadsa love

Lisa/Lillie

xxxxx