Last Day in China Sucked!

We've made it to Thailand and are here for just a few more hours until we hop on a one hour flight over to Phnom Penh, Cambodia to begin our jungle-centric adventures through Southeast Asia.

I just thought I'd share a bit of info about our last day in Hong Kong and The Worst Half Hour of Our Lives. If it's not atually the worst half hour of our lives, it certainly is a contender.

Anyway, like I mentioned before, there is a large Buddha up on a mountain near Neil's house that we thought we'd go see before heading to the airport. To reach the top of the mountain you have to take a really long cable car/gondola thing over lakes, high mountain peaks, valleys, etc. The views looked to be incredible and it was a clear, sunny day. However, the only way you ever get clear weather in a city as full of smog as Hong Kong is if the wind is incredibly strong and gusty...which it was. Have I mentioned my recent near freak out/panic attack on the cable car we took when we went to Mty. Fuji/Hakone last month? It sucked....anyway, I was a tad worried about going on this very long and very high cable car but thought I'd be okay and I did want to see the Buddha, so we decided to go.

We had a private car to ourselves, which seemed great at first, but about 20 seconds into the ride I was suddenly overcome with massive and instense anxiety and panic. We pulled through what looked like another terminal about 2 minutes into the ride and I decided I had to get out ride away and waved the employee at the station over to open the door, but she just shook her head and said we couldn't get off. This is when things started to get bad. Basically the next section went up the side of a mountain and dangled at times as high as 500 feet above the ground. I freaked out a bit and had to start reading a newspaper about Chinese religious persecution with my head low so as to avoid seeing the views to remain at all calm. But was surprising is that then Alicen, who normally loves these kind of things, went into a full-on panic attack, which I've never seen before. So for the half hour...yes, it was a half hour goddamn ride of hell, I sat reading, paralyzed with fear, while Alicen sobbed, shook, and let out very gutteral and strangely animalistic moans of fear next to me. I was too freaked out to be able to do anything to try to comfort her, so we both just sat there in abject terror, praying that we survivied...very weird experience since we knew that it was safe, but some sort of very non-rational fear hit us both.

you may be laughing right now. if you are, you are mean. it was lame.

if any of you have ever had a panic attack, let alone had one while your spouse is experiencing one simultaneously, all while trapped in a dangling steel box of death, you probably can empathize a bit.

anyway, the buddha wasn't that impressive...at least not compared to the ones we've seen in Japan. and even though we bought a round trip cable car ticket, we tracked down a bus that would take us back to the same place. though the driver of this bus was flying down steep mountain hills, which made this part of the journey nearly as terrifying as the start (not really, only about 5% of the fear, which was, by any other measurement, really scary).
then we had a beer, and that helped.

the good thing is that the flight from hong kong to bangkok was great and smooth and when we arrived, we were so wiped from our crazy day we decided to track down a hotel rather than sleeping in the airport and were able to find a really cheap place nearby.


so we're better now.

off to Cambodia now and no more cable cars for the rest of my life, thanks.

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