Everyone made it down.
Our next stop was the small Buddhist temple of Wat Khunaram.
One of its most revered monks was Luang Pho Daeng, who after raising a family returned to the monastery in his fifties and remained a monk for thirty years, until his death in 1972.
Buddhists are usually cremated, but Luang Pho Daeng stipulated that his body be kept on display in a seated position after his death (which apparently he also predicted). And lo! and behold, his body has somehow been mummified and has remained un-decomposed in that glass case for going on for half a century.
He didn’t die in sunglasses; they’re there to stop people being perturbed by the empty eye sockets.
After that, time for lunch.
We turn north and ascend into Samui’s central highlands. Afterwards, it’s around the corner to another Buddhist site, Tarnim Magic Garden.
The local who owned the site decided, out of religious duty, to fill it with little pixie-ish Buddhas and weird tiny temples.
Delightful place, Tarnim Magic Garden. Not to be confused with Puff the Magic Dragon…
…which I heard a local Chaweng group give a decent rendition of in a restaurant on Wednesday.
It’s now time to come down from the highlands…
…but that means nearly an hour of driving on steep, twisty track, mostly no tarmac and sometimes deeply rutted, making for one hell of a ride!
On the way we pass a small rubber plantation.
Rubber dries quickly in the tropical heat, so the family that farm here have to do their tapping before the sun rises. In fact they start at 3am, each morning.
Sobering.
On we go now, down and down until we get back on the main roads and onto our final site, the Big Buddha.
Phuket also has its Big Buddha, so maybe it’s a thing on big tourist destination islands here. But Samui’s big statue seems to have been built in a temple with a grave site dedicated to the remains of small children.
It may be a sad way to end what was a really fun day out, but I like to think that this shiny Buddha is there to cheer the poor little blighters up.
As I hope this blog is doing for you.
Organised by Mr Ung’s Magical Safari Tours, for which I receive no commission.
orwellianTwo 