Stubby in a Jar, Plain of Jars, Laos

.

Next, it was off to what is known as the 'Plain of Jars' - huge bizarre jars that were unearthed by the French 80-odd years ago. Although our six hour bus journey was hot and sticky, it was through very picturesque countryside, and was very interesting as we stopped every so often to pick up villagers with huge bags of rice, or to ship huge long planks of timber that were loaded on the roof! We, of course, as foreignors, created a big stir at the villages that we stopped at as everyone would come out to look at us! The following day we actually visited the Jars. We visited 3 sites of Jars, one of the sites actually had about 300 Jars on it and the others had plenty too. No one really knows that much about them - what they were for or how old they are, but they think they were used for burial purposes - burying people's remains either inside the jars or beneath them. Experts speculate that they originate from an ancient nomadic people - these large jars have been found in Indonesia and Malaysia too. To get to one of the sites we had to walk about 30 minutes through farmers' rice paddies on teeny, raised paths that separated them. It was fun. As you can see from the photos it was quite a wet day, and our shoes became absolutely caked in bright red, clay-like mud! That bit was pretty disgusting, but we really enjoyed seeing the Jars scattered across the Laos landscape... It was pretty cool. * Mush