Lao

Luang Prabang – Phonsavanh. 260 km – 10 hours.

So we had arrived at 5:30am that morning in Luang Prabang, transferred from the northern bus station to the southern bus station and waited for our next bus, that would take us to our next destination: Phonsavanh.

My temperature hadn’t come back and all I had to deal with was a runny noise and a sore throat. Not too bad. But it meant buying a lot of toilet paper 🙂

At 8:30am our bus, with was a minivan, left and we started the next trip. Travelling in a minivan is no fun, when there are as many curves as there are here. So even with all the tricks we usually did, Alina’s stomach didn’t support the trip very well and she made us of a plasic bag three times. And although I had how much rubbish there is here laying along the streets – we throw those filled bags out of the window. Otherwise the whole bus would have to suffer.

When we came closer to our destination the scenery changes. There were fields of crop and people worked on them, not with big machines like we know it, but all done by hand.

We arrived just before 5pm in Phonasavanh, found our guesthouse, checked in and then went for some food.

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Kongkeo – our guesthouse

We came here to see the Plains of jars, but what I hadn’t noticed was that we are in the middle of the area where in the late 60, during the Vietnam war, when Lao was neutral, the Americans dropped more bombs in a given area than anywhere else ever in the world. We found an information center that is helping the survivors of bomb accidents that are still happening today. There are less and less people dying but there are still many undetonated bombs. Families find them when they work in their fields, in the woods, kids find them when playing…