Phosavan - plains of jars

We arrived to phosavan in the dark and it started to rain. The bus stations are never in the town center and we booked a place 3 k out of town to save money. 

They stored my bag under a seat and made a small tear in my brand new bag. I've been searching for duct tape so the year doesn't get bigger. 

The tuk tuk takes advantage of that situation but it's still cheap. Hotel guy didn't speak English and didn't have our booking. We still got rooms after much confusion over the prices. 

The town is big but totally not set up for independent English speaking travelers. So happy I wasn't alone. It's cool to see a real place without al the tourist amenities but it also puts you off your comfortZone a bit more. Oh and literally it was the first time on this trip I felt cool. Happy cloudy day!!!!

We came to see the plains of jars, which is an unexplainable site of the huge, heavy thick jars in the middle of nowhere. It's believe  theae are urns for prehistoric burial site for an ancient civilization.  And we learned from a map app on our phones that there was a small cave. You can also see craters from The bombs we dropped here when we were fighting Vietnam. 

Actually we learned that Laos and In particular this town was heavily bombed by the US for 9 years. 4 million bombs, one every 8 minutes. People are still get hurting or killed by them as 30% didn't explode.  

 People go for them for scrap metal for extra money and get hurt/killed. Farmers are scared to expand crops in fear of dying. This is keeping be locals in poverty and I felt so terrible for being american today. And we still battle after 40 years from this, lessons not learned.

I'm glad I made this stop which was out of the way as it's easy and I'm headed south.  Pix at https://goo.gl/photos/c7kf8XwDyF9bdDiR7