Lantau Island

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Today I went to Lantau Island and the Big Buddha (everybody kept talking about Big Buddha so I felt I had to see it.) I took the ferry across from Central and then a bus through Lantau Island to the village where Big Buddha stands. It was a nice, pleasant ride up. The island is beautiful, barely anybody lives there apart from the giant statue of Buddha at the top of it. In fact quite a few of the islands are beautiful and deserted in Hong Kong, yet it seems all residents of Hong Kong and half of China crowd onto Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. I would love to know why.

The ferry ride took an hour and from the port, the bus took half an hour or so and dropped us at a beautiful, alpine-like village with little stalls, shops and a cable car. I climbed up many steps to Big Buddha and Po Lin Monastery where people were offering incense to Buddha.

This evening I met the other girl who is staying in my dorm. She is Chinese, from Beijing but speaks very little English but she can read English very well. She wrote to me to tell me the manager of the hostel had invited me to come to see a horse-race on Wednesday with a group from the hostel. Horse-racing is the national sport in Hong Kong and it is the done-thing to go to the races every week. The girl taught me five basic phrases in Mandarin and also gave me a list of beautiful places to visit if I come back to China.

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