I spent another couple of hours exploring a new
wat last Saturday morning and I have to admit I came away slightly disappointed
as I had read that it had some old Angkor remains, as well as the modern temple
… but, no! And it wasn’t just that I didn’t find them, as I asked the two
different monks I talked to and they both said there were no old temples to be
found there.
I tuktuked along to the wat as it looked from the
map to be quite a long way along River Road, though, in the end, it wasn’t as
far as I thought, and it was a pleasant stroll back afterwards.
When I arrived, monks and men were preparing the
pagoda for the following day’s Khmer New Year celebrations, placing flags in
the pole stands on either side of the long tree-shaded driveway. One of the
monks said hello and ‘where are you from?’, the universal greeting here, and
our conversation continued as he gave me a tour of the temple building,
unlocking it for me to see the two huge Buddhas inside, one seated and one
reclining – as well as assorted smaller ones.
The monk’s name was Somurt and he is almost 23.
He has been a monk for 8 years. He told me the temple is 99 years old and the
interior paintings (of the ubiquitous scenes from Buddha’s life) are between 30
and 35 years old. This information may or may not be true but, certainly, the
temple ceiling was showing much water damage, whereas the paintings still
looked quite fresh and vibrant.
Somurt’s English was quite good but he wanted to
practise so we sat a while and chatted. Eventually, he went back to his flags
and I wandered a little further, though didn’t get far before I was waylaid by
another young monk, Sopheap, who invited me to sit with him on a bench amongst
the burial stupas. Our conversation was almost an exact repeat of the previous
one but I was happy to sit and help a little with his pronunciation. Bizarrely,
he had been listening to an Australian sports commentary on his phone radio.
I’m not sure how helpful that was to his English learning and he admitted he
couldn’t understand most of it – ‘too fast and a funny accent’ – his words, not
mine.
I wandered some more, taking photos of stupas and
temple buildings, a beautiful open-sided building full of golden seated Buddhas
and, finally, what looked like an office building – or, perhaps, with offices
downstairs and monk accommodation upstairs, as the building was mostly
unfinished.
In front of its main entrance was an elaborately
carved archway, under which sat another group of Buddhas and a set of glass
boxes for donations for building restoration or monk education or feeding the
monks or just general blessings. An elderly nun sat to one side, giving out
blessings, so I tossed a buck in her basket and knelt to receive her good
wishes for the New Year. She then agreed to be photographed, moving over to sit
elegantly in front of the Buddhas, arranging her clothing to look her best. I
showed her the photos I took and I gather from what she said next (in Khmer)
that she wanted a copy of the pictures, so I’ll get some done and take back to
her next week.
Postscript: I discovered, when I got back to my room, that I had gone to the wrong
wat. My tuktuk driver had been going to drive past the entrance and I stopped
him, thinking he hadn’t understood where I wanted to go. My mistake! There are,
in fact, two wats quite close together and, turns out, their names are also
quite similar: Enkosa and Enkosei. When I checked Google maps again, I
discovered the first was hidden under cloudy skies – at least, that’s my
excuse!
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