Plain of Jars by Motorcycle: Riding Laos’ Bombed Country

From the moment Route 7 leaves Phou Khoun and climbs east toward the Xieng Khouang plateau, the riding changes. The dense forest of central Laos thins out, the hairpins straighten, and the road levels onto a high grassland that looks more like Mongolia than mainland Southeast Asia. Then, about four hours after you left Route 13, you start seeing them. Stone jars. The size of bathtubs, some chest-high, in clusters of fifty or a hundred standing upright in the grass like a battlefield that nobody cleared. They have been there for two thousand years. The bombs that fell around them are sixty years old. This is the only motorcycle destination on the planet where the geology, the archaeology, and the most heavily bombed country in human history converge into one three-day side trip, and Laos is finally starting to tell the foreign visitor what actually happened on this plateau.

What the jars actually are, with the science settled

The Plain of Jars is the colloquial name for a UNESCO World Heritage site officially called the Megalithic Jar Sites in Xiengkhuang, inscribed in 2019 as the country’s third World Heritage listing. The site comprises around 2,100 carved stone jars distributed across 85 individual jar fields, ranging in size from one metre to over three metres tall, weighing up to fourteen tonnes each. The carving material is sandstone and limestone from quarries that have been identified within walking distance of the larger jar fields. The Iron Age dating, refined through optically stimulated luminescence on sediment inside the jars, places them between 1240 BCE and 660 BCE for the earliest specimens, with the broader site complex active from approximately 500 BCE to 500 CE.

The funerary interpretation is settled. The French archaeologist Madeleine Colani published her foundational study in 1930 after excavating the central plain, and concluded that the jars served as mortuary vessels in a two-stage burial practice. The bodies of the dead were left in the jars to decompose, then the bones were buried in pit graves nearby, often with grave goods. Recent excavations by joint Lao-Australian and Lao-Japanese teams have supported this with discoveries of human bone fragments, cremation ash, bronze jewellery, glass beads, iron tools, and ceramic burial offerings inside and around the jars. The romantic theories about giant rice-wine vats brewed by mythical kings, or alien astronaut visitations, are entertaining in the Phonsavan guesthouses and entirely unsupported by the archaeology.

What remains genuinely unknown is who the jar-makers were. The Iron Age population of the Xieng Khouang plateau pre-dates the arrival of the Tai-Lao linguistic groups by around a thousand years, and the cultural continuity between the jar civilization and the modern Hmong and Khmu communities that live in the area today is unclear. Carine, a French archaeologist with a CNRS postdoc who joined a 2024 BBT Laos extension as a private guest, spent her three days at the jar sites annotating photographs for what would become a journal article. Riders who travel with someone like that come back understanding the trip differently than riders who don’t.

Why this particular plateau got bombed into ruin

Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing missions. This is more tonnage than was dropped on Germany and Japan combined in the Second World War. Per capita, it makes Laos the most heavily bombed country in human history by a wide margin. The figures come from declassified US Air Force records, cross-checked by Legacies of War, the advocacy organization that has worked since the 2000s to document and clear the consequences. The campaign was conducted in secret, in violation of the 1962 Geneva Accords that declared Lao neutrality, and was authorized by the Johnson and Nixon administrations as part of the broader Indochina conflict.

The Xieng Khouang plateau received a disproportionate share of the ordnance for three reasons. First, it was the political and military stronghold of the Pathet Lao communist insurgency, allied with North Vietnam. Second, the Ho Chi Minh Trail’s northern logistics corridor ran through the eastern edge of the plateau, supplying Vietnamese forces fighting in the south. Third, the terrain — high open grassland with few natural cover features — made the plateau visually easier to bomb than the densely forested mountains to the west. Phonsavan, the modern provincial capital, was so thoroughly destroyed during the campaign that the old town site at Muang Khoun was abandoned and the current Phonsavan rebuilt eight kilometres away on cleared ground in the 1970s.

The specific weapon that defines this landscape is the cluster munition. US forces dropped over 270 million submunitions on Laos, the small grenade-sized bomblets — BLU-26 and BLU-3 types in particular — designed to scatter widely from canister bombs and kill or maim soldiers and damage equipment over a wide area. The technology had a roughly 30 percent failure rate at the time, which means approximately 80 million bomblets did not detonate. They are still in the soil. Children pick them up thinking they are tennis balls. Farmers strike them with hoes. Cattle wander over them. The ongoing casualty rate in Laos has averaged 50 to 100 fatalities and serious injuries per year for the last fifty years, and the cumulative figure since 1973 exceeds 20,000 people, of whom around 40 percent have been children.

The riders most affected by reading this on the bike are usually the ones who had a Vietnam-era family member. Walter, a 71-year-old retired American naval engineer whose father flew B-52s out of U-Tapao in 1971 and 1972, did the Phonsavan extension with a BBT-adjacent group in 2023 and spent his first evening at the COPE Visitor Centre in Vientiane essentially silent. He went on with the trip. He came back changed.

The route from Vientiane or Luang Prabang

There are two practical motorcycle approaches to the Plain of Jars, and both involve Route 13, the national north-south highway that connects Vientiane to Luang Prabang and onward. From Vientiane, the run is around 430 kilometres in total: Route 13 north to Phou Khoun, then Route 7 east to Phonsavan. From Luang Prabang the distance is shorter, around 260 kilometres, but the climb is steeper and the road conditions on the Luang Prabang to Phou Khoun stretch are the most technical part of the Lao network. Most riders break the journey at Vang Vieng or Luang Prabang depending on their direction.

Route 7 itself, the dedicated approach to the Plain of Jars, runs 130 kilometres east from Phou Khoun and climbs from 800 metres to 1,200 metres on the Xieng Khouang plateau. The road is paved, with the surface in generally good condition by Lao standards after the 2018 to 2022 reconstruction. The hairpin density is high enough to keep an experienced rider engaged. The traffic density is low enough that you can ride at your own pace without convoy fatigue. Hmong and Khmu villages line the route at irregular intervals, with woodsmoke and dogs and small children running into the road. The drive time from Phou Khoun to Phonsavan, accounting for two photo stops, is around three hours. Aki, a Helsinki-based aerospace engineer on a Honda CB500X in 2024, called the Route 7 climb “the most enjoyable hour of riding I’ve ever done in Asia,” which is high praise given the rest of his itinerary that month included the Mae Hong Son Loop.

The road condition caveat is that wet season — June through September — brings landslides on the steeper sections between Kasi and Phou Khoun. The road is rarely closed, but it can be reduced to single-lane bypasses around active mudflow zones for a day or two. Riders who plan a Plain of Jars detour in monsoon need to budget a contingency day. November through February, the dry cool season, is the optimal window. March and April are hot but rideable. May is the transitional month when the first storms can arrive without much warning.

The seven sites you can actually visit

Of the 85 jar sites identified across Xieng Khouang and neighbouring provinces, only seven have been demined sufficiently for tourist access: Sites 1, 2, 3, 16, 23, 25, and 72. The others remain too contaminated with unexploded ordnance for casual visitors, and the Lao Ministry of Information, Culture and Tourism has been explicit since the 2019 UNESCO inscription that public access to additional sites depends on completion of clearance work funded by international donors and run by organizations like MAG and Halo Trust.

Site 1 is the largest and most-visited, with around 250 jars in two clusters approximately six kilometres southwest of Phonsavan. The fee is small, around 15,000 kip (under one US dollar) for foreign visitors. Marked walking paths show where MAG has cleared. The painted boulders with white-and-red sides indicate the safe zone — white side facing the path, red side facing the still-uncleared ground beyond. Step off the path and you are in genuinely dangerous territory. The cluster includes the largest single jar at Plain of Jars, sometimes called the Hai Cheaw or “Cheaw’s jar” after a local legend, three metres tall. There is also a B-52 bomb crater inside the cleared zone, kept as a heritage feature, that gives a visceral sense of the scale of munition strike that hit the site.

Site 2 is smaller and quieter, around 25 kilometres south of Phonsavan, with around 90 jars distributed across two hillocks in light forest. Site 3 is further south, in oak forest near the village of Ban Xieng Di, accessible via a 500-metre walking path through rice paddies. The latter is the most photogenic in golden hour, when the low sun strikes the jars at the angle that brings out their carved texture. Sites 16, 23, 25 and 72 are progressively less developed for tourism — fewer information signs, smaller car parks, longer approach walks. Lukas, a Vienna-based forensic accountant on a 2025 Cambodia-Laos combined ride, made the effort to visit Site 25 because he wanted “to be alone with these things for an hour.” He was. Most visitors don’t bother. He preferred it.

The Lao guides who staff the larger sites are often genuinely knowledgeable, and tipping them well at the end is the right move. The site museums at Sites 1 and 2 are modest but include genuine bone fragments, bronze artefacts, and a small UXO display showing the types of bomb that fell on the area. Read the museum content before walking the site. The jars look different once you know what’s underneath them.

The UXO reality, in the honest version

An estimated 80 million live bomblets remain across Laos, distributed unevenly through 17 of the country’s 17 provinces. Xieng Khouang province alone is estimated to hold between five and ten million of those. The cluster munition density per square kilometre on the plateau is amongst the highest in the world. Mines Advisory Group, the British NGO that has run clearance operations in Laos since 1994, has cleared roughly 28 million square metres of land in Xieng Khouang as of 2024 — a fraction of the total contaminated area. At current clearance rates and funding levels, complete removal will take another 100 to 200 years. The official Lao government figure for clearance completion is “well into the twenty-second century.”

For a motorcycle visitor, the practical implications are simple and absolute. Stay on marked paths at the jar sites. Do not walk into adjoining fields or forest patches. Do not pick up metal objects you find by the side of the road, no matter how innocuous they look. Do not let other riders in your group do these things either. The visible markers — white-and-red painted boulders at the jar sites, red triangular signs along rural roads — are reliable. Areas without markers are not necessarily safe, but areas with red markers are absolutely not safe. Margarethe, a Stockholm-based ophthalmologist on her first Asian motorcycle trip in 2024, made the rookie mistake of walking ten metres into a tall-grass field at Site 2 to photograph a jar from a different angle. The MAG site guide retrieved her with quiet professionalism and zero drama. She did not do it again.

The COPE Visitor Centre in Vientiane — Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise — is the place to visit at the start of any Laos motorcycle trip that includes Phonsavan. It is not a heavy-handed war museum. It is a working prosthetic clinic that fits artificial limbs for UXO survivors and dignifies them by showing their lives, their work, and what was done to their bodies. The visit is free. Stay an hour minimum. The riders who skip COPE arrive at the Plain of Jars as tourists. The riders who don’t, arrive as something else.

Phonsavan as a town, not just a basecamp

Phonsavan is the capital of Xieng Khouang province and the natural overnight base for Plain of Jars visits. Population is around 40,000. The town itself is, by Lao standards, neither beautiful nor distinguished — a grid of dusty streets, two parallel commercial avenues, a noodle market in the centre, and several decent mid-range guesthouses. The Maly Hotel and Anoulack Khen Lao Hotel are the standard foreign-rider accommodations, both around 35 to 55 US dollars a night, both comfortable and clean without being memorable.

What makes Phonsavan interesting is what’s on the periphery. The municipal Hmong market, busiest on Sunday mornings, draws Hmong villagers from the surrounding hills in their distinctive embroidered jackets and silver jewellery. Hmong cuisine — bitter greens, blood sausage, a peppery fish stew called or lam — is genuinely different from lowland Lao food and worth trying. The Mulberries Organic Silk Farm on the edge of town is a small social enterprise that employs former UXO casualties as silk weavers and sells the output to foreign visitors. Mei Lin, a Hong Kong-based fashion designer on a 2024 BBT Laos extension, bought enough Mulberries scarves to fill a pannier and then mailed them home from the Vientiane post office two weeks later.

The other Phonsavan landmark is the old capital, Muang Khoun, 36 kilometres southeast. This is what’s left of the pre-1969 provincial capital, which was destroyed by the US bombing campaign and was never rebuilt. The ruins include That Foun, a 16th-century Lao Buddhist stupa partly collapsed by bomb damage, and the remnants of a French colonial-era church. The drive out to Muang Khoun is the shortest of the day trips from Phonsavan and probably the most emotionally weighted. Pedro, a Lisbon-based pediatrician on a 2023 ride, said afterward that the trip became real for him at Muang Khoun in a way that the jar sites alone hadn’t done. The site museum is a single small concrete building with a few photographs. Bring water. Stay an hour.

Side trips that extend the trip’s meaning

The Plain of Jars itself can be visited in two days from Phonsavan, including the longer drive to Site 3 and the round-trip to Muang Khoun. Riders with more time can extend in two directions, both of which deepen the historical context.

Vieng Xai, 200 kilometres northeast of Phonsavan via Route 6, was the wartime headquarters of the Pathet Lao communist insurgency from 1964 to 1973. It is also one of the most extraordinary cave-cities in the world. Around 480 limestone caves housed an estimated 23,000 people during the bombing campaign, including a complete government infrastructure with hospitals, schools, theatres, and a printing press. The caves are open to public tours, accessible from the small town of Vieng Xai, and the four-hour ride from Phonsavan via Sam Neua is one of the most scenic in northern Laos. The road is paved, narrow, mountainous, and almost empty of traffic. Plan an overnight in Vieng Xai itself; the cave tours take half a day minimum.

The other side trip is Tham Piu, a cave memorial 26 kilometres northeast of Phonsavan that commemorates an air-strike massacre. On 24 November 1968, a US T-28 fighter-bomber fired a missile into the cave, killing approximately 374 villagers who had taken shelter inside. The cave is open to visitors as a sombre memorial. The walk in from the road takes 20 minutes. The memorial stupa at the entrance is unadorned. Most riders find that 30 minutes is sufficient. Some stay longer. Annika, an Oslo-based human rights lawyer on a 2024 BBT Laos extension, sat in the cave for two hours alone and afterward declined dinner. She was not the first.

When to ride this, and what bike fits

The Phonsavan window aligns with the broader northern Laos riding season: November through February for cool dry days; March and April for hot dry days; May for transition risk; June through September for monsoon. The optimal extended window is mid-November through end of January, when the daytime temperature on the plateau sits at a perfect 22 to 26 Celsius and the rice harvest is being brought in by the Hmong farmers. Photographers prefer this window because the low winter sun strikes the jars from the southeast and brings out the carved texture better than the summer overhead light.

For bike choice, the Plain of Jars detour does not change the broader Laos answer. Any midsize street or dual-sport bike works on Route 13 and Route 7. The Honda CB500X and the CRF300L Rally are the workhorses of the Vientiane and Luang Prabang rental fleets. The Royal Enfield Himalayan 450, recently introduced into BBT’s Laos fleet, has the right combination of seat height, weight, and torque for the climbs. The Honda Africa Twin works but is heavier than needed for the destinations themselves. Riders concerned about luggage capacity should know that the Lao rental fleets generally come with hard panniers as standard for the longer 6-to-10 day rentals.

The total Plain of Jars side trip, including approach from Luang Prabang or Vientiane and return, adds three to four riding days to a standard northern Laos itinerary. Most BBT clients who choose this extension do it as part of a 10-day or 14-day combined Thailand-Laos trip, with two nights in Phonsavan, one of which goes to Muang Khoun and one to the jars themselves. The longer Vieng Xai add-on extends the trip by two further days.

Ride the country that history is still trying to clear

The Plain of Jars by motorcycle is the kind of detour that turns a Laos trip from a riding holiday into something that stays with you. The jars are 2,500 years old. The bombs are 60. The clearance will take another 200 years. You will ride between them, look at both, and leave with a sense of what this country has actually been through. Big Bike Tours runs the 10-day Thailand and Laos motorcycle tour as the foundation Laos itinerary, and the Plain of Jars and Phonsavan extension can be added as a three-to-four-day loop organized through our Vientiane partners, with permits, accommodation, and English-speaking jar-site guides handled. Get in touch via our contact page and let’s plan a Laos itinerary that includes the part of the country most riders miss.