"Equivalent to a planeload of bombs unloaded every eight minutes, 24 hours a day for nine years - nearly seven bombs for every man woman and child living in Laos.  It's more than all the bombs dropped in Europe throughout WWII, leaving Laos, a country approximately the size of Utah with the unfortunate distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in history"  Legacies of War : Land of a Million Bombs

Lee explains the rules, only two really.  Stay on the path and don't pick anything up.  Tony broke both within minutes, fortunately it wasn't live.  To reinforce his message he took us to a spot where a week previously MAG had removed a live 'bombie.  Still lurking there after many many sweeps

 A study of the jars in the mid 1930's by Madelaine Colani concluded they were funerary objects but the traces of human bone and artefacts she gathered to prove this theory have disappeared.  The disks are not lids but were placed 'decorative side down over ritual objects'

Lee having given us a scientific explanation, warmed to his subject and shared another, this  handed down through generations of Lao  

It naturally involves a tyrannical ruler Chao Angkath, and the local boy made good Khun Jeuam a Lao-Thai superhero who swept in from China and liberated his down trodden masses.  Such heroism naturally needed rewarding, so jars were commissioned in which to ferment the very strong local rice wine  'Lao Lao'

The jars were made from a mixture of buffalo skin, sand. water and sugar cane then fired in a local cave which had a natural chimney

It must have been a rave up as they forgot to clear away the 'empties' leaving them scattered around the countryside

Although Lee's version has charm, further investigations by Japanese archaeologists and others from UNESCO are reaching similar conclusions to those of Ms Colani over 80 years ago.  They date the jars to the Iron Age, 500 BC to 400 AD, making them one of the most important prehistoric sites in SEA

When the war ended, tens of thousands of Lao villagers returned from caves, forests and refugee camps to find their homes completely destroyed.   They had to rebuild and cultivate crops with their bare hands on unmarked minefields.  They soon discovered the war had not ended for them.  Unexploded cluster bombs lay buried, hidden in vegetation, or in the branches of trees which were just saplings when the bombies fell

Many victims are farmers tending their fields but 45% of those killed are children often little boys, playing with bombies or just climbing trees

                             Wat Si Phum

Over grown stupa of That Phuan

         A job well done deserves sugarcane