Land Of Jars

The general MO for our trip has been that I spend some time reading on whatever country we're going to, mark in the guidebook all of the things I want to do (post-it notes being preferred, but now that we've run out of them I dog ear the pages) and then Doug looks it over and picks the subset that he is also interested in. This works out pretty well as Doug saves me from some very idiotic ideas I have about what will be "fun" and on occasion will give in if there is something I really want to do. Unless he REALLY doesn't want to it, in which case he will keep reading about it until he finds a very valid reason for not doing it.

The first time this happened was when I wanted to go to a rather out of the way cave in Vietnam. Due to the constant rain everywhere in Vietnam we skipped over several post-it noted places. But this one cave sounded very cool and I really wanted to go. It was rather far out of our way, but Doug had already vetoed so many other things that he knew he was in a tough position to veto this one. He picked up the lonely planet and started reading on it - then looked up at me with a huge smirk. "Lonely Planet says this is the wettest place in Vietnam" he triumphantly announced! I gave in, it would be silly to go to the wettest place in Vietnam in the middle of unexpected flooding everywhere in the country.

So when I had dogearred the Plain of Jars - Doug found himself in a similar situation. The Plain of Jars is a bunch of huge very old jars that no one knows where they came from or exactly what they were used for and somehow I had gotten it into my head that this was a must-see in Laos.

"What are we going to do at this Land of Jars?" Doug ask me.

"I dunno, see them, everybody does it. This is why people come to Laos. It's very famous!" I tried to explain.

Then I saw the smirk. "This torturous 9 hour bus ride . . ." Doug began to read to me. I immediately relented. There is, as far as I'm concerned, nothing that is worth a 9 hour bus ride. Much less one that Lonely Planet describes as torturous.

Every since then Doug has been somewhat fascinated by the Land of Jars (really Plain of Jars, but he has changed it to Land of Jars). The more we discuss it the more we wonder who does go there? We did meet one Canadian couple who said they were going to go but ran out of time - but other than that the few others I've polled haven't even heard of it.

As far as I can tell there is only one way to get there which is this 9 hour horrid bus ride. Then the only thing to do there is see these huge jars and then you have to take the same 9 hour horrid bus ride back to Vientiane.

Doug has come up with a few songs related to it which he sings frequently - one being L-A-N D-O-F J-Aaaaa-R-S (sung to the tune of the Mickey Mouse song) and another one sung to the Land Down Under Song (It starts with "I come from the land of jars yeah") and the newly coined "99 unsoiled jars in the land, 99 unsoiled jars, take a piss, cross one off the list, 98 unsoiled jars in the land". These nicely replace our previous favorite hits "The Dong Song" (Dong being Vietnam's currency and sung by Doug EVERYTIME we paid for something in Vietnam) and the classic "I Kissed A Snail".