Dining with Bombs in Phonsavan

After making the trip from Vang Vieng to Phonsavan, quite tired after the hectic tubing, arriving in Phonsavan at the minivan station after all this was like someone turned the volume down. The first thing I noticed about the town was how quiet the place was.

If you’re not familiar with what happened in Phonsavan and the surrounding area, it was bombed constantly for nine years during the Vietnam war with over half a million missions dropping millions of bombs here. I read some articles about it, and from what I made of it, there wasn’t actually much to bomb here in terms of direct targets, the US Army thought they were hindering Ho Chi Minh by bombing this area of the ‘Ho Chi Minh trail’, where some Vietnam forces were heading out from north Vietnam and into Laos.

All this makes Laos the most bombed country in the history of mankind. So many bombs were dropped in this area, the locals actually use the metals that are scattered around the land to make things. If you pick up a spoon in a local restaurant and it feels really light and the surface is rough, that spoon is probably made from unexploded ordinance.

As most of the main backpacker and touristic areas in Laos are now, local transport is very expensive compared to neighboring Cambodia and even Vietnam. All the drivers must have agreed together to never go below a certain price for foreigners. Finding fairly priced transport to go and see the Plain of Jars was a pain, and seeing those jars was our main reason for staying in Phonsavan.

There’s a restaurant on the main Phonsavan street called ‘Craters’, feeling hungry we headed in for something to eat, the restaurant is featured in Lonely Planet’s Southeast Asia on a Shoestring, which means that prices will have been jacked up, but we were hungry so we went in.

The first thing you notice about Craters restaurant is that it’s decorated on the outside with bomb shells, inside there is also what looks like a small missile and some other unexploded ordinance. This is the first place we went to in Phonsavan, and it gave me this eerie feeling inside, sat surrounded by bombs eating my food. Just down the street from Craters is a barbecue, which is made from half a bomb, quite creative if you ask me.

The food wasn’t all that great in the end, after lunch we went to find a guest house, we found one which looked newly built, but the owner didn’t speak any English, all negotiations were done with sign language, her laughing at me waving my passport and some money at her.

We didn’t do much else that day, the town isn’t exactly teeming with activities for foreigners, or locals it seemed. We found a better place to eat called Phonekeo Restaurant, just down the street from Craters which was half the price with better food (I recommend the noodle soup!). Every time we ate, at Craters or any other place, we were faced with this same gang of begging children, asking for food, drinks & money.

When it came time to sleep, it was so quiet, not just quiet, but complete silence, I actually found it hard to get to sleep in this muted environment, usually there’s at least SOME noise! This added more eeriness to the whole situation.

Our second night in Phonsavan, it thundered and lightened right on top of the town, and after eating, one of the larger gang of street kids followed us for a while in the dark after eating. I’m sure many people would argue with me, saying Phonsavan was a delightful town just like Luang Prabang, but if you add all these experiences together, it made for quite a spooky stay for me.

After you get past the Plain of Jars and the fact that this place makes it’s cutlery from unexploded bombs, Phonsavan is a hard town to describe, it’s quiet, small and probably one of those places where everybody knows each other. Being that there is things of historical interest to see around this area, it makes me wonder what the first tourists or backpackers who came here after the war thought of the place.