The Plain of Jars

We got up in the morning and I felt much better. The rest of the evening before had helped for me to really recover. We checked out and went for some Indian food for breakfast at a place Arno had discovered the day before. Then, we went to look at the Plain of Jars, an accumulation of sites with huge ancient stone jars of unknown origin.


We actually only went to site number 1. The jars were nice, but we decided, they were not worth the long drive. The area of the Plain of Jars has been cleared in part of ammunition of the many wars the area has seen. A couple of bomb craters were almost as impressive as the jars itself. It was also strongly advised to keep to marked and beaten tracks. The chance of finding more ammunition was no so slim.


We went around the site number 1 and then tried the dirt road towards the south. It would lead back to the route 13 after passing through a new province of Laos, formerly a special zone regularly attacked by some guerillas. It wasn't that what made us turn around, but the road was beating our truck quite hard and I had recently discovered a nut slowly unscrewing from the wheel suspension that I wasn't too happy with. On the rough road it seemed to progress even faster.


We went back to town to buy a wrench and fix the problem as I had actually done so before with the brother of A Nong's in Luang Prabang. Then, we decided to take the paved road back to route 13 and continue south to Vang Vieng. The roads were all in reasonable conditions and so we got there by late afternoon without too much hassle.