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We’ve never met a Cambodian Buddhist monk - at least not on a first-name basis - and we have no idea how to greet this smiling man in saffron robes, a friend of a friend, but also head monk.īefore we know it we’re out the front of the class and it’s swapped from being a Chinese lesson to an English lesson. Hun is teaching Chinese to a group of school girls. Ascending the terrace, we realise it is surrounded by buildings, none of which we paid any attention to last time we visited. There are monastery and school buildings where Mr Sareth parks and also on the higher terrace which holds the temple. Today, its four temple towers are behind scaffolding. Lolei was the last of the three late 9th-century Roluos Group temples to be built. We look at the murals, and sampeah to Buddha, all within view of the place in which Mr Sareth somehow survived, and countless others died, for no reason and in the deepest horror. We shouldn’t be surprised by what Mr Sareth has told us - the Khmer Rouge turned every public building, including monasteries, into jails.
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The walk across the moat to see Bakong feels desperately sad. There’s that magnificent smile again Mr Sareth shakes his head, taps it sadly and, still smiling, says, ‘Very big problems, in here’. Sarah thanks him for bringing us here, and we ask how he feels being here now. In a flurry of last-minute changes, we’ve inadvertently brought him right to the doorstep of his own deepest trauma. We’d both run this internal calculation on first sight of Mr Sareth: a small, nuggety man, well-muscled with a deep smile, he looks healthy and strong, but his hair is definitely greying.Īlthough it took a couple of days, he’d already told us he was in jail under the Khmer Rouge by the time we pull up to Bakong, although he didn’t say where. There’s a weird calculation that you start to do, usually at some point early on your first trip to Cambodia, where you realise that everyone over a certain age must be a survivor (unless they were out of the country). We already know Mr Sareth lived through the Khmer Rouge. ‘I know, because from 1978-1979, I was in that jail.’ ‘Do you see the big white building there, and the one next to it? Khmer Rouge used them as a jail.’ Mr Sareth pulls the car over near the bridge across the surrounding moat. Sarah is particularly excited to see Bakong again - like most pagodas, the walls of the Bakong pagoda are covered in intricate murals depicting the lives of the Buddha or scenes from the Ramayana, but Bakong is especially beautiful. Both Bakong and Lolei have monasteries attached to them. We manage to run a little early, so he suggests we stop at all three of the Roluos temples, starting with Preah Ko, and then Bakong.
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Mr Sareth, our driver, knows exactly where he’s going.
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If Hun could make time to see us, then we should certainly make time to see him. There’s only one way to do things properly though, and that’s in person. We have to decide what to do - is it worth paying for a day pass to visit Hun on site for an hour on the way to the airport, or should we just chat more on Messenger? We recognised the reddish stone instantly as belonging to the Roluos Group - a collection of three of the oldest temples in the Angkor complex, and among Sarah’s favourites. It was Diana and Hun, with an invitation for us to visit Hun’s school that afternoon.ĭiana included a photo of the pre-Angkorian ruins she said were part of Hun’s monastery site. We were just finishing our packing and preparing for a spot of gift-shopping when Messenger pinged. Hun runs a school alongside the temple, and Diana thought he might be interested in having a choir visit. Our Sydney friend Diana, in Siem Reap to supervise nursing students, had mentioned to us her friend Hun, a monk at Lolei Temple. So we’re still reeling from the day before, when a last-minute alignment of stars saw us go from our hotel to Angkor to the airport. We didn’t expect to visit any temples this trip we hadn’t even bought a temple pass.
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It’s not our usual homecoming we’re the kind of travellers who prefer a final shower and some calm, tying up any loose ends before getting on the plane. It’s 11am on Friday 11 January, and Sarah’s in the shower at our Sydney home, watching red dust from a pre-Angkorian temple site swirl around the chequered tiles and wash away.