Tanks for the memories

Making my way from Luang Prabang to Vientiane, I took a detour to Phonsavan to have a squiz at the Plain of Jars, Laos’ answer to Stonehenge. Hundreds of very large, two thousand year old jars are strewn across a bleak, high plain. They look like stone but they are actually made of some sort of cement mixed from ground animal skins and sugarcane and sand. No one is quite sure what they are doing there or how they got there: the locals are adamant that the plain houses a large collection of ancient whiskey jars and the archaeologists are equally insistent that they are sarcophagi. It’s a very odd place, not in any way spectacular but certainly disconcerting.



The Plain of Jars is situated in Xieng Khuang Province in the east of Laos, an area which was clusterbombed beyond oblivion during the war years. There are craters all over the hillsides and unexploded ordnance still being slowly swept out. A roaring trade in post-military scrap metal supplements the incomes of subsistence farmers, and old artillery shells get recycled as troughs for animals, as flowerpots and as decorations to impress naïve young ladies. This is a fragment of the munitions collection at my guesthouse, apparently all gathered in the area.

Whilst the philistine Americans were pouring bombs out of the sky, splitting the venerable whiskey pots and spilling the remains of the venerables into the fields, the Rooshians were doing their bit for the Laotians and adding to the artillery jetsam. Plenty of the war detritus collected is marked by the Cyrillic alphabet but nothing is as impressive or as large as the Russian tank lodged in a hillside near one of the Plain of Jars sites.

Many years ago, my father was, allegedly, in a position to buy a retired Leopard tank (large, WWII vintage) from a military museum not far from Albury. He was extremely eager to take up this opportunity, as I recollect and based his case on the fun my sisters and I would have playing in and around a backyard tank. I note that the Pike hermanas were not consulted as to the fun prospects of a tank. My mother sensibly vetoed the purchase, perhaps taking the very large dimensions of a Leopard tank into account and that was that, I grew up without a tank in the backyard.

When I got up close to the Russian tank, I could see Dad’s point a bit better. Hours of fun for the inquisitive and imaginative child here!

In fact, I felt compelled to shake off the weirdness of the Plain of Jars by means of a little tank clambering. Et voilà: fun!