We arrived in Hong Kong at about 10:30 or 11 in the morning. Our plan was to visit the world's biggest bronze, seated in a lotus flower, outdoor Buddha. I wonder where the bigger indoor, standing, non-bronze Buddha is?
The Buddha is at the Po Lin Monastery, on Lantau Island. To give you an idea where it is, Hong Kong's newish airport is built on reclaimed land off the north coast of Lantau Island. Big Buddha is 26 meters high, weighs 220 tonnes, and took ten years to make. It's roughly in the middle of the Island.
To get there from the train station, we got on the subway, made a transfer, and rode to the end of the line. From there, there are usually two ways to get to the Po Lin Monastery. You can take the Nong Ping 360 Cable Car (very similar to the Blackcomb Excalibur gondola, or the one at Mont-Sainte-Anne) or you can take a bus. Lantau Island has a few bus routes, but no subway. We only had one option though, because back in June, one of the gondola cabins on the Nong Ping 360 fell off. Luckily it was after operating hours. Recent reports indicate that children will be invited to participate in trial runs of the repaired gondola system. Hide your children everyone!
The bus ride was about 50 minutes long, and took us through the beautiful Lantau Island countryside. It was a very nice change from downtown Hong Kong. There were beaches, little houses, fewer people, and lots of nature.
We got to Big Buddha, and it was a gong show! There were people everywhere! There were 300 steps leading up to the Big Buddha, and both the up lane and the down lane were packed. It was really hot and hazy that day too, and I began to get a headache. The crowdedness, haziness, and the hotness made me grumpy!
(Remember, if you want to see the original,enlarged version of the picture,click on it and the picture will open in a new window.)
Carol fared better than I, and enjoyed posing with the big guy.
The landscape surrounding the Big Buddha was my favourite part. There were steep hills with a few pagodas emerging through the trees, paths zig-zagging up, down, and across the mountains, and nary a tall building to be seen.
After seeing the Big Buddha we paid for and ate a special vegetarian meal at the Monastery. We thought this meal was a requirement for seeing Big Buddha, but right beside the restaurant there was a cafeteria that served similar looking food for a whole lot cheaper. Oh well...the meal was good. As you can see, I have a deft touch with my chopsticks. If given a bowl of peanuts, I would tuck into it no problem, eating them all with confidence. I'm pretty happy about that.
After we ate, we took a walk along the Wisdom Path, a sidewalk that wound through the woods. It was definitely my favourite part of the day. There were birds in the trees, hikers heading out or coming back from a day in the mountains, people relaxing, and it was great. I even saw a mountain biker walking his bike. It was great...I would have rather walked on a dirt path instead of the concrete swath, but I was happy anyway! I hadn't been in the woods or anything close to nature since the beginning of October. Since then, it's been all classrooms, buses, streets, smog, subways, taxis, and the odd patch of grass you're not allowed to walk on. So this path through the woods was great! It was also very cool in the shade, and my headache went away.
Carol and I explored the path, and after about half an hour decided to head back and take the bus back to the subway line. Even though the excursion had started with me being in a foul mood, it ended with me being relaxed and happy. We got on the subway, and headed back to the city to figure out our lodgings for the night.
Stay tuned for Hong Kong 3.0.
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