My breakfast ‘date’ once again seemed to be waiting for me. Don’t know what it is about timing, but however randomly you try to make something, it never works out. I didn’t mind too much, he was someone to tell what I did the previous day, but sometimes it’s nice to breakfast in relative quiet. Today was going to be spent totally away from the main parts of Hong Kong. I was heading to Lantau Island. This is where the new airport is, but it also has some other attractions as well and my aim was to visit the main ones today.
First stop was Tai O village. This is a small village at the far end of the island that is mainly built on stilts and the residents quite literally step out of their back door and into a boat, or get wet if they parked somewhere else for the night. Venice it definitely isn’t, but it does have an odd charm to it. It’s managed to get itself on the tourist map by having the stilts, but it doesn’t seem to have let that affect it. No-where is there any sign of souvenir shops. In fact I had the feeling that there were only about 5 tourists, including myself, in the area at the time. It may be that it was just the weather, of the off season, but I struggle to see guided tours being successfully taken round the village. I suspect that one of the things that puts people off is the trip there. It looks remarkably simple and quick on the all the maps I had. Of course it was nothing of the sort and the bus journey was the best part of an hour and on the way there I was thinking that this may cause problems with the rest of my plans for the day. There’s a lot of work going on in preparation for the Olympics in the summer, and a lot of that is in the infrastructure. Roads are being improved and modernized all the time, and it seemed to be that Lantau was being done all in one go. Once finished I suspect that the bus journey will be wonderfully fast, probably even have a bypass or express route to get across the island, but at the moment it is far from complete. Add to that the fact that the journey there and back was hindered by a lorry that had lost it on a turn and gone straight over (and stranded itself on) one of the road side boulders. I’ve no idea what the driver was going to say to his boss about the accident, but I suspect that like me, he was looking forward to the new roads being finished.
At the end of the bus journey back the to the MTR I was getting close to being an entire attraction behind time, and was beginning to suspect that it wouldn’t be made up on the next leg. Until recently Lantau Island was probably best known for being the sign of the Big Buddha. Now, this shouldn’t be confused with the Fat or Laughing (and Fat) Buddha. This is a BIG Buddha. It’s totally in the middle of nowhere. In fact for most of the time round the island you can’t see it, even though it’s on top of one of the mountains. I had three choices of how to get there. I could walk, take a bus or take a cable car. This presented a bit of a dilemma. Walking was clearly out of it. Had I chosen that, I’d have been out of it pretty quick as well, possibly still walking back the next day, though a night in the monastery next door might have been interesting. I was now also dubious that the bus would get me there in anything like a reasonable time. That left the cable car. Not a problem normally, but I was aware that it had only been open a month or so after an ‘accident’. What the accident was I have no idea. I’d looked (not hard) beforehand, but not found the details of what happened. However it was the only reliable way to get there so I had to bite the bullet. It’s probably one of the longest cable car rides I’ve been on, and while it’s pretty, it’s also pretty repetitive. Only at the end does the Buddha come into sight, though that is impressive. I was expecting the cable car to take me more or less to the site of the Buddha, but it didn’t. What it took me to was ‘Buddha Village’. That’s not its name, officially at least. However, given that they have turned the whole thing into a massive tourist trap, it may as well be. Think of all the tacky things your friends have ever bought you as presents from their holidays, well they are all on sale here, just with a Buddha or cable car logo on them. Probably not what Buddha was expecting, or the people who constructed the Buddha originally. I’d been given a voucher to spend for taking the cable car return journey. A massive HK$20. Before anyone gets excited, that equates to about £1.30 on a good day, probably less for most. There wasn’t much of a selection. I’d have to think about it on the return leg.
The Buddha itself, as a certain fence treatment company would say, was exactly what is says on the tin. Big. It was clearly a sign of devotion that it had been built, and I assume it was built after the monastery was founded, by monks at the monastery. If it’s the other way around I have to wonder what would possess a group of people to build it so far from the middle of nowhere. A monastery in the middle of nowhere I can understand, with the Buddha following. The other way! Madness! Given that visiting monks to Britain now tend to be famous for their acrobatics rather than their peaceful ways, a vision of bits of the Buddha being put in place my monks doing extremely high somersaults over it came to mind, but I doubt it was done that way. Even having gone as high as I had on the cable car, it was still a long walk up a lot of steps to get to the top. It houses some wonderful views up there, and there’s some statues offering stuff to the Buddha. There’s even a history of Buddhism inside the base and if you’ve paid for it, you can have a meal in the Buddha itself, but that has to be prebooked. I hadn’t because I wasn’t planning on being there at that time. However it was now perfectly clear that I wasn’t going to be completing my visits to Lantau Island today. I therefore had to think of something else to do instead.
It was then I hit on the idea of going to Stanley Market. This wasn’t ideal. It was totally the other side of Hong Kong, and I mean the other side. In terms of the main areas to go, I was going from furthest point to furthest point. However the alternative was to do nothing and try to squeeze it in on another day. Given that I’d be using the MTR for the majority of the trip, I figured I could trust the transport to get me there in good time (probably quicker than it took me to get to Tao O). So, off I headed, to traverse the whole of the Hong Kong area. Of course I still had the problem of what to do with this voucher. I was loathed to just waste it totally, but there was such tat for sale I really didn’t know what to get. In the end, my trip to visit the Big Buddha is remembered fondly now by the shot glass that I got!
It was a close run thing in the end. Not getting to the market before it shut. That was easy. The journey time was probably just a little more than that of the Tao O one, but not by much and I suspect that had I managed to time the connections right, it would have probably been a match. I’m not sure what I was expecting when I got there. Other markets I’d been to had vibrancy to them. I can’t say that this one did. There was also little of interest for me to buy. Maybe I was just becoming an old fart, or maybe I’ve never been one for normal markets. I can do Spanish street markets in seconds, and this sort of reminded me of that, only covered and permanent. The way that it was laid out, and you were going down small alleys, I just felt the place was a little grubby, though not in the dirty sense of the word. I bought what I had to and moved on. I doubted I’d be coming back to that little corner. Hopefully the whole of the southern part of Hong Kong Island wouldn’t be the same. It hadn’t looked it on the bus ride through, and given I was intending to return to the southern part of the island, I was going to be disappointed if it was.
The day was nearly done, but I still had a bit of time before I called it a night. The sun had set and I was intended to revisit the peak. Primarily it was to get some night shots of the harbour all lit up, but also, I wanted to see what the nightly lightshow was like from the peak. The view, as I expected from the posters I’d seen, was great and with my lightweight tripod in the bag, taking some photos was a pleasant an unfrustrating experience. No having to see how long you had to hold the camera still for and realizing that you actually suffer from a bad case of the DTs when you see the result. No balancing or resting it on railings to try to make it steady. Looking back through the tourist book I can see that there is a reason why they mention the views from the peak but not the light show. From the other side, you can’t actually see a thing. Not one laser, not one spotlight. Quite disappointing. Still at least you won’t now make the same mistake I did! I stayed for a bite to eat and then headed back. It had been a long day and though I hadn’t walked everywhere, the feet were telling me they needed rest. The trusty 7-11 provided me with something to drink without having to raid the mini-bar and I soon dozed off. Tomorrow I would have to do some rescheduling!
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