PHONSAVAN, Laos -- It should be hard to go missing on the Plain of Jars. But hundreds have.
Flying into this rural region in northern Laos, one sees lushly blanketed mountains and valleys give way abruptly to an arid expanse of pockmarked browns and yellows. It looks a bit like an oversize golf course in the Australian Outback. This is Xieng Khuang Province, which is known outside Laos mainly to archaeologists fascinated by the great Asian mystery to be found there: Thong Hai Hin, or the Plain of Jars, a plain strewn with hundreds of giant stone jars of uncertain origin.
A lesser-known fact is the province's status as the most heavily bombed place on Earth.