(no subject)
We have come down out of the mountains on to the flat plains of eastern Laos, travelling for ten hours in a bus full of bags of rice, loose fruit, truck tyres and what may have been a goat. The seats were clearly designed with glee by Vietnamese manufacturers as a way of exacting revenge on any long-legged falang stupid enough to ride one. Wedged securely into mine, I could only pivot my head and watch the scenery change from forested slopes into wide open fields, flooded paddies with water buffalo stomping around, big fenced farmsteads with black pigs wagging their tails in the shade, abandoned mopeds everywhere, and a smell of hot wood and eucalyptus and dust. The driver played the same two Lao pop albums ad nauseam and beyond, into a kind of resigned admiration.
On the slopes nearby, men are sweeping a Chinese metal-detector slowly downhill, hunting for metal from American bomb casings which they can sell as scrap metal. It's a dangerous way to supplement your income, since a lot of the bomb casings contain bombs, but loads of locals do it anyway. This province saw a lot of fighting. I keep reading more and more ridiculous statistics: the equivalent of one planeload of bombs dropped every 8 minutes, for 9 years; more bombs dropped in Laos than over Germany and Japan combined during the Second World War.....and so on. This frontline area is also the site of the mysterious Plain of Jars -- vast areas of land full of large sandstone jars, left by some former culture which predates the Lao and which seems to be a good 2000 years old.
The jars are amazing, and the more awesome because they're still so poorly understood. The area is a fascinating mix of the old and the new: here a prehistoric jar stands on the edge of a 60s bomb crater; up there are more megalithic structures as yet unstudied because of uncleared ordnance in the ground. Most of the money for clearing the bombs seems to have come from Australia and New Zealand. I guess the US figured they'd spent enough with the 1.2 trillion dollars it cost to put the things here in the first place.
Opium poppies nod wisely in the paddy fields nearby. The government have banned the drug, but it's not enforced if the farmer is old and addicted. They're basically being allowed to stone themselves slowly to death. Peering at the poppy heads, you can see where cuts have been made to extract the salient material. Younger farmers have been "re-educated', and sent back to their fields with a truckload of garlic seeds.
In the end I plump for a coffee and croissant back in town rather than a drug-addled trip. The patisseries are amazing here, just like in Morocco: that's what you get for being under French rule. In fact in a vague way I have come to imagine the French colonial army as a vast horde of bakers, strewing mille-feuilles in their wake.
On the slopes nearby, men are sweeping a Chinese metal-detector slowly downhill, hunting for metal from American bomb casings which they can sell as scrap metal. It's a dangerous way to supplement your income, since a lot of the bomb casings contain bombs, but loads of locals do it anyway. This province saw a lot of fighting. I keep reading more and more ridiculous statistics: the equivalent of one planeload of bombs dropped every 8 minutes, for 9 years; more bombs dropped in Laos than over Germany and Japan combined during the Second World War.....and so on. This frontline area is also the site of the mysterious Plain of Jars -- vast areas of land full of large sandstone jars, left by some former culture which predates the Lao and which seems to be a good 2000 years old.
The jars are amazing, and the more awesome because they're still so poorly understood. The area is a fascinating mix of the old and the new: here a prehistoric jar stands on the edge of a 60s bomb crater; up there are more megalithic structures as yet unstudied because of uncleared ordnance in the ground. Most of the money for clearing the bombs seems to have come from Australia and New Zealand. I guess the US figured they'd spent enough with the 1.2 trillion dollars it cost to put the things here in the first place.
Opium poppies nod wisely in the paddy fields nearby. The government have banned the drug, but it's not enforced if the farmer is old and addicted. They're basically being allowed to stone themselves slowly to death. Peering at the poppy heads, you can see where cuts have been made to extract the salient material. Younger farmers have been "re-educated', and sent back to their fields with a truckload of garlic seeds.
In the end I plump for a coffee and croissant back in town rather than a drug-addled trip. The patisseries are amazing here, just like in Morocco: that's what you get for being under French rule. In fact in a vague way I have come to imagine the French colonial army as a vast horde of bakers, strewing mille-feuilles in their wake.