The northeast - The Rough Guide to Laos - page 224

Simmaly Opposite the Mines Advisory Group on Route 7 030 572 7430. There's no finery,
but this Chinese-run restaurant is always full of a good mix of locals and tourists. Portions
are large and prices cheap, with great spicy soups and fried rice dishes going for 10,000K.
Daily 7am-10pm.
LONE BUFFALO FOUNDATION
The LoneBuffaloFoundation ( facebook.com/lonebuffalo ) gives kids in Xieng Khuang
Province access to free English lessons. The organization was set up following the death of
a respected local English teacher called Manophet (Lone Buffalo), and aims to empower
local children (eighty percent of the students are ethnic Hmong) by teaching them a new
language, developing their social skills and helping them to get involved with new sports
and activities. You can visit the foundation's English Development Centre , located just
east of the tourist office, to find out more about the group's work and help students practise
their newly acquired language skills. The centre is open Monday-Friday 4.15-8pm.
The Plain of Jars
Many visitors mistake the Jar sites for the PLAIN OF JARS and vice versa. The latter is a
broad rolling plain covering an area roughly 15km across at the centre of the Xieng Khuang
Plateau, which sits high above the Mekong and the Vientiane Plain. The ancient Jar sites
scattered around the perimeter of the plain led the French to name the region the Plaine
de Jars - the PDJ to the American pilots who flew over it. Topographically, the plain is
something like the hole in a doughnut with concentric rings of increasingly high mountain
peaks around it. Although the jars are the main tourist attraction of Xieng Khuang Province,
there's much more to see here. The Plain itself offers beautiful scenery, which most visitors,
obsessed with seeing the jars, completely overlook. Away from the main highway there are
countless backroads to explore as well as friendly PhuanandHmongvillages , where it may
feel like you're the first foreigner the children have seen.
The presence of the jars attests to the fact that Xieng Khuang, with its access to key regional
trade routes, its wide, flat spaces and temperate climate, has been considered prime real estate
in mainland Southeast Asia for centuries, but the story of the plain as a transit route for an-
cient man has yet to be told. As a natural corridor between the coasts of southern China and
the vast plains of Korat beyond the Mekong, the Plain of Jars has certainly seen the passage
of many tribes and races, perhaps even groups of Homo erectus , who ranged from northern
China to Java between one million and 250,000 years ago.