Wat Phou Champasak...

Yesterday the sun melted into the clouds above Wat Phou and the sacred mountain, and I raced home on my bicycle to stay ahead of the deep black night. By the time I arrived at Champasak, behind the Kolao pick-up I'd followed closely for half the journey, the dark sky was full of wind and lightning. A short, fierce burst of rain was followed by a  downpour of an hour or so, and afterwards the air was fresh and cool, and my clothes relinquished their clinging grip on my skin.

The majestic mountain-side temple, half-swallowed by the jungle, is a breath-taking, early example of Khmer magnificence, and may have been the model upon which Angkor Wat was conceived. At the top of the steep jumble of steps, above the ancient lakes of the crumbling palace is the Buddha's Sanctuary, where the Hindu sculpture in the lintels mirrors the transformation between major religions that took place in the kingdoms of Angkor, Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, and so many other parts of Southeast Asia.

Above the Sanctuary is a spring, where water trickles from a wooden dragon's mouth into a stone trough. There are rock carvings: elephants, snakes, the Buddha's foot, and a much more ancient lizard, almost certainly carved long before the temple was dedicated to Vishnu, and long before Buddhism became the religion of the region. Wat Phu was built in the century after the Saxon settlement of England, when my ancestors lived in buildings not dissimilar to those occupied by the rural Lao today.

As the cool winds of the rainstorm drew the seething air from inside my room, I lay on the bed and watched  the insects, confused by the sudden lashing rain, as they gethered beneath the hall light. A blue dragonfly buzzed against the tube, while the lizards pounced on the slowest flies like electrified leather.

This morning, shortly after dawn, I cycled back to Wat Phou as the sun climbed above the opposite bank of the Mekong. Phou Kao, the Mountain of the God, was swathed in mists, and the Sanctuary was hidden from view. As the sun began to penetrate the early morning haze, it warmed the stone guardians of the temple to life, and the Buddha's robes began to blaze in the golden light. In the sunlight from the east it was easier to be absorbed in the intricacies of the stone carvings of the Hindu Gods and their mythological familiars. The Buddha seems almost as out of place there as I am.