The Plain of Jars, and what happened to it

At a glance

Length

3 days, 2 nights

Group size

2 to 8

Starts

Luang Prabang or Vientiane

Ends

Phonsavan, or back where you started

Effort

Easy - flat walking, one 7 hour drive

From

USD 340 per person

The route

The jars are large stone vessels, some of them three metres tall and ten tonnes, cut from sandstone and granite and left in clusters across the Xieng Khouang plateau. They are around two thousand years old. The best current reading is that they were funerary, part of a mortuary practice involving secondary burial, but nobody has explained the lids, the distribution, or the quarries convincingly. UNESCO listed the sites in 2019.

The second half of the story is that this province sat under the flight path of the American air campaign against the Ho Chi Minh trail and the Pathet Lao between 1964 and 1973. Vast quantities of ordnance were dropped, a significant proportion of it cluster submunitions, and a significant proportion of those did not explode. Fifty years later the clearance work continues, and it is why you walk between white markers at the jar sites rather than wherever you like.

We think the trip is much poorer if you take the jars without the bombing or the bombing without the jars. Both days are built to give you the two together.

Day by day

Day 1

Road to Phonsavan

A long day and the price of admission. From Luang Prabang it is about 260 km and seven hours on Route 13 and Route 7, over the mountains through Phou Khoun, with the road climbing to around 1,500 m and the villages changing as you go. From Vientiane it is 400 km and closer to nine hours, which is why we usually suggest flying one leg if you are coming from the capital.

We stop twice for food and twice more for the views, and reach Phonsavan in the late afternoon. Phonsavan itself is a wide, dusty grid of a town built after the war, with bomb casings used as fence posts and flower planters all over it. Nobody comes here for the town, but it grows on you across two nights.

StaySmall hotel in Phonsavan, heated in winterMealsBreakfast, lunchTravel7 hours from Luang Prabang, 9 from VientianeOn footNothing beyond the stops

Day 2

Sites 1, 2 and 3, and the clearance story

Site 3 in the last hour of light, when the paddy fields go gold and you usually have it to yourselves

We start at the MAG visitor information centre in Phonsavan for 45 minutes, because everything you see afterwards reads differently once you understand what a cluster submunition is and how one is cleared. Then Site 1, the largest, with more than 300 jars on a hillside 15 minutes from town, and the craters that sit among them.

After lunch, Sites 2 and 3, which are smaller, quieter and in many ways better - Site 2 on two wooded hills, Site 3 reached by a walk of about 800 metres across paddy fields and a bamboo bridge. Very few people are at either. We finish at a village where scrap metal from the war is still being recycled, and where the spoons made from it are sold without ceremony.

StaySame hotel in PhonsavanMealsBreakfast, lunchTravel90 minutes total across the dayOn foot3 to 4 km, flat, on marked paths

Day 3

Muang Khoun, then onward

The old provincial capital, 35 km south, was destroyed almost completely. What is left is a standing Buddha with the temple gone from around it and a leaning stupa with a hole bored through it by treasure hunters a century before the bombs. It takes ninety minutes and it is the most affecting thing in the province.

From there you either drive back the way you came, continue east towards Vietnam, or we take you to Xieng Khouang airport for the short flight to Vientiane. The trip ends wherever you need it to.

StayNot includedMealsBreakfastTravel1 hour to Muang Khoun, then as requiredOn foot1 km at the temple sites

Prices

What is included

Pictures

Who this trip does not suit

• Anyone unwilling to spend seven hours in a vehicle to get there. There is no short way in by road, and the flights are limited and change schedule.
• Travellers who want ruins that impress at first glance. The jars are subtle, and the landscape does most of the work. People who read nothing beforehand often leave underwhelmed.
• Anyone who does not want to think about the war. It is not possible to visit this province honestly and avoid it, and we will not pretend the craters are natural.
• Families with young children, unless the children are the kind who like walking across fields. There is nothing here designed for them.
• Visitors in July and August, when the plateau is often in cloud and the dirt access tracks to Sites 2 and 3 turn to mud.