Advertisement
Published: February 9th 2014
Sometime in October we had an e-mail from our friend Dave in the UK who had managed to co-ordinate his holiday time with one of our trips to Hong Kong in mid-November. Unfortunately, we would only have one day and one night before Dave and his friend, Rob were due to fly to Cambodia so we jumped at the chance to meet up.
As regular visitors to Hong Kong we were racking our brains for a new thing we could do while we were on this visit. We have already been up Victoria Peak more times than we’d like to admit and we knew that Dave and Rob wouldn’t want to shop all day 😉. So we decided on an action plan - visit the Big Buddha on Lantau island, afternoon cocktails and then a nice meal.
First we had to find their hotel…that was more difficult than we first thought as it was in the arse end of nowhere! If there was an award for the hotel with the most bling we have ever seen, this hotel would be the winner. The lift we got to the reception had tiny, shiny, sparkly gold and
US Navy ship
Getting ready for typhoon reliefglass mosaic tiles and a chandelier…yes, you read that right – there was a CHANDELIER in the lift! The lifts were tiny and puzzling as to what floors they went to and considering we had 2 PhD’s, an Msc and 3 degrees between us we were baffled!
The Big Buddha, or to give it it’s proper name, Tan Tien Buddha is located at Ngong Ping village on Lantau Peak (which is the second highest peak in Hong Kong). To get there was super-easy, everything is super-easy in Hong Kong – MTR (underground) to Tung Chung station and then bus number 23 to Ngong Ping village. Getting off the bus we were immediately blown away by the wind…we were experiencing the outer edges of typhoon Haiyan and it was grey, cold and windy that day. We had a quick wander around Ngong Ping village, now this is one thing that really bugs us, why build a new village and try and make it look old. It really annoyed us in mainland China and it annoyed us a little bit here as well. Of course there were the usual tourist souvenir tat shops, a 7-11, a Starbucks and weird
cable car carriages dotted around.
We have to say that the Big Buddha is very impressive and probably would have been even more so without the wind and with the sun shining! With the help of the wonderful t’interweb, it is named Tian Tan Buddha because its base is a model of the Altar of Heaven or Earthly Mount of Tian Tan, the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. It is one of five large Buddha statues in China. The actual Buddha statue sits on a lotus throne on top of a three-platform altar and is surrounded by six smaller bronze statues known as "The Offering of the Six Devas". These 6 Deva’s are posed offering flowers, incense, lamp, ointment, fruit, and music to the Buddha which symbolise charity, morality, patience, zeal, meditation, and wisdom, all of which are necessary to enter into nirvana.
We headed up to the Buddha, climbing the 268 stairs (so says t’interweb again, we didn’t count them) and it was nice to see so many Buddhists making offerings and murmuring their devotions. What wasn’t so nice to witness was several loud mouthed mainland Chinese tourists who were completely disrespectful, oblivious
and yelling and shouting around people. Ok, you may not practice Buddhism, but this was clearly a special place for some of the people here, so don’t go spoiling it by yelling and shouting all over the place! After having a wander and taking pics, we decided it was a bit too breezy to hang around and headed back down the stairs to the Po Lin monastery. Just our luck the majority of it was closed for renovation and there was scaffolding all over the front. Well actually we decided it was Dave who was the bad luck as exactly the same thing happened a few years ago when we went to the Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur with him!
Being the daredevils we are, we opted for the cable car ride on the way down…reasoning if the wind was too high they would shut it down. Erm…nope! It was a white knuckle ride back down to Tung Chung station – see Dave’s face in some of the photos – and every now and again the cable car would just stop and hang there swinging in the wind. We weren’t sure if it was for safety reasons,
if it was completely normal or if the cable car operators just wanted to freak people out. The freakiest thing for Neil was the draft blowing up his bum from somewhere in the cable car but he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from!
Cocktails were deserved after that windy experience, so after collecting our chocolate goodies from Dave’s hotel, we headed to our favourite bar for cocktails. This place has the most amazing cocktails but unfortunately had to shut down two weeks after our visit 😞…we gave it a good send off with Japanese mules, mojitos, various types of martinis consumed for the rest of the afternoon with lots of gossiping and catching up. We managed to stagger back to the Kowloon side, scoffed a pizza and a salad (so we were less unhealthy!) and then headed to another bar for ales from North Yorkshire and Belgium beer.
We get messages from people asking why we aren’t blogging as much as we used to and asking if we are still travelling. The simple answer is, yes we are still travelling to places but just aren’t publishing blogs about places we have already
been to.
Back in September it was the 7th year anniversary of us leaving the UK…we are supposed to be writing a summary blog of the last 7 years but between one thing and another, we haven’t quite got around to it yet! We will get around to it eventually.
For now, 2014 has started well and in 3 weeks time we will be meeting Donna’s parents in Thailand for their annual holiday. We aren’t sure what the rest of the year has in store travelling, we have some ideas floating around for destinations, so watch this space…
Advertisement
Tot: 0.087s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0519s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Finding new things to do in a familiar city
The company is the journey not the location. After white knuckle ride looks like the only solution is plenty of Black Sheep Ale...good decision. We are among your fans that long for more blogs. We will patiently wait.